The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

Continuum Literary Studies Series Also available in the series: Active Reading by Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman British Fiction in the Sixties by Sebastian Groes Canonizing Hypertext by Astrid Ensslin Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton Contemporary Fiction and Christianity by Andrew Tate Ecstasy and Understanding edited by Adrian Grafe English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley Joyce and Company by David Pierce London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker Milton, Evil and Literary History by Claire Colebrook Modernism and the Post-colonial by Peter Childs Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel Recalling London by Alex Murray Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy by Simon Swift Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust by J. M. van der Laan Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Jeremy Hawthorn Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin by Richard Palmer The Palimpsest by Sarah Dillon The Measureless Past of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida by Ruben Borg Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips

The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

Annette U. Flynn

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Annette U. Flynn 2009 Annette U. Flynn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6053-2 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Preface Introduction Part One: Preludes to Mysticism 1. 1922–1925: The Nothingness of Self and God 2. 1928–1934: Time, Paradox and Heresy 3. 1936–1953: Entries into Spirituality

viii ix 1

37 61 83

Part Two: From Essay to Ficción 4. Writing and New Direction 5. Beyond the Mirror of Self

105 125

Part Three: The Long Quest 6. Bridging the Divide: Self and Divinity 7. Towards Relationship

149 162

Conclusion

173

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

174 188 198 209

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank The Jorge Luis Borges Estate for kindly granting permission to reproduce the following poems from Jorge Luis Borges’ Obras Completas (Emecé Editores, Grupo Planeta: 1996). Volumes 2 & 3 © 1995 Maria Kodama: ‘Lucas, XXIII’; ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’; ‘El Golem’; ‘Juan, I, 14’; ‘Milonga de dos hermanos’; ‘Juan, I, 14’; ‘Para una versión del I King’; ‘No eres los otros’; ‘Milonga del forastero’; ‘El espejo’; ‘Eclesiastés, I, 9’; ‘Cristo en la cruz’; ‘La larga busca’ and ‘Juan López y John Ward’. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to Stephen N. Williams for graciously allowing me to use the as yet unpublished translation of his article ‘Ynglyˆn â Borges’ (‘Concerning Borges’).

Preface

Few readers, or critics for that matter, would associate Borges’ writing with a serious spiritual quest. Yet this is what this book is concerned with: it argues that the quest for God was a major and enduring preoccupation for Borges. My enquiry in this book is with regard to the question of religion, or spirituality, not in an institutional sense, but in the context of a writer’s searching for spiritual truth as borne out by his work. I am not making a case as to whether Borges was a believer. What I do declare is that there is evidence of a deep, though anguished and complicated search which endured for his lifetime; where it led him in the ultimate instance, I cannot know. We may never know whether Borges entered into a committed belief system, but we do have strong indications that he kept searching until the last. The fact that there is no obvious ‘success’ to the quest he embarks on in his essays, stories and poems is less a sign of failure on his part than a hallmark of the stark authenticity of his search. Looking at his work chronologically and across the genres, however, it becomes apparent that in the long run Borges did gravitate more and more towards a model of lived spirituality. In this sense, he was perhaps closer to what he sought than what he or anyone else would have realized. This struggle, which lasted a lifetime, is all the more authentic because of its persistence in the face of an apparent lack of resolution. While I acknowledge the various and much-quoted statements he made as to his own scepticism, I propose to read these in the light of his own writing, which reveals an intense preoccupation with spiritual matters. I also propose to read these declarations in the light of his conviction as to the autobiographical and deeply personal nature of his own, and indeed of all writing. The aim, however, is not to link biographical data with literary analysis, but to be open to what Borges may be communicating indirectly in and through his writing. He was convinced that what matters in literature is what is said through the author, what is left unspoken, and what is said

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despite what the author intends to say. In its obliqueness, his own literature speaks compellingly. This book discusses the various philosophies and world spiritualities which underlie Borges’ writing in his search for conclusive answers to fundamental, metaphysical questions, and in particular, his concerns with notions of selfhood and temporality as expressions of the quest for plenitude. The Eastern, Islamic and Judaeic mysticisms which he engages with can be read in the light of the Christian spirituality equally present in his work, which draws ever nearer to exploring the core of faith. In his essays, the emphasis is on philosophical–theological explorations. The stories, in turn, are narrative articulations of the essayistic concerns. His search is most manifest, as it is no longer obscured, in the poetry of his middle and late years. This reveals that his engagement is an active and evolving process which allows the reader to trace his thinking, his textual preoccupations and his searching for an absolute from the earliest essays of the 1920s to the late poems of the 1970s and 1980s. This trajectory spans different periods of Borges’ life, and different literary genres. It attests to a maturing, evolving, and life-long quest which confirms that the spiritual component in his writing is more than decorative. It can be shown to drive both the text and its author. Critics often struggle to reconcile the notion of a life lived to the full with what is held to be the cerebral Borges. This struggle perhaps mirrors Borges’ own quest which itself oscillates between the intellectual-analytical on the one hand, and the spiritual–experiential on the other. His life, as attested to in his work, is one of intense intellectual and also emotional passion. This book is an invitation to enter into the dynamic of a fundamental facet of his work: his searching for the reconciliation of certain dualities and strictures as it establishes the relationship between Borges’ philosophical and theological outlook, his personal searching, and the literary manifestations this quest takes.

Introduction

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most complex, intriguing and enduring writers to emerge from Latin America. He is commonly understood in the context of being an enigmatic and compelling icon of literature, poetry, intellectual and cultural heritage and exploration. But Borges was no mere cerebral monolith. He was deeply and passionately involved not only in his country’s affairs, but also in the affairs and heritage of Western civilization from antiquity to modernity. He was also a man and writer uniquely of the twentieth century with its intellectual bias towards secularism, its crisis of faith, and cult of the individual. His openness to other cultures (both Eastern and Western), to languages, ideas, world doctrines, philosophies and literatures attests to the contrary of the purely intellectual and anaemic being that he is often made out to be. His work is dynamic, passionate, both intellectually and emotionally so. It reflects and expresses life itself, lived and experienced both on an actual as well as on a vicarious level; life suffered, enjoyed, and at times perhaps imagined, dreamed, or yearned for. Borges is also a writer of universal and inexhaustible readings, so dynamic that to apprehend all facets of any given work would be an impossible task. Reading Borges could be called a personal and a universal experience alike: it is personal because there is a voice speaking from within the selfconcealing construct of what are highly crafted and highly enjoyable stories and intellectually stimulating essays; it is a universal experience because of the readings which are always new, fresh, relevant, and provoking. They are also universal because his work is not easy to grasp, impossible to classify and categorize in the last instance. Renewed readings of his work may offer the reader a more enlightened understanding, or, like a will-o’-the-wisp, may prove more puzzling than before, opening up more questions than providing answers. Borges’ texts, inconclusive as the endings to his stories or the conclusions of his essays may be, are entirely left open in an invitation for dialogue with the reader’s own questions, probing, doubts. This has created a unique kind of literature, an active literary experience which is

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alive as there is an implicit invitation to readers to not only journey with the author, but to stretch their own intellect and imagination, often beyond comfort able parameters. The voice that is discernible in his texts, oblique and covert as it may be, is that of Borges. It is at times self-concealing as in his stories, and at times sublime and self-revealing as in the poetry of his middle and late years which in many instances deals with the intangibles of life itself. The stories speak of fantastic or outlandish situations and events, of mental and physical universes beyond ordinary experience, of philosophical experiments translated with deceptive ease into fiction. They are also master pieces of composition, tension and timing. Many of his essays are treatises in themselves, on the craft of writing, on literature and literatures, on philosophies and doctrines. They are examples of extraordinary engagement and erudition. Borges’ exceptionally enquiring mind is never static, but in constant and dynamic movement. These essayistic speculations, explorations, probing and almost always transformation of philosophical and theological thought reveal a discernible development. His poems, in turn, are intensely condensed, distilled versions of his ideas and concerns, deceptively simple but with a depth of layers which allows for multiple readings. These later poems are among his most personal and spiritually intimate, yet never selfproclamatory works. They are self-revealing, and as such mark an opening, away from the self-concealing voice which Borges had adopted in his essays, and in the stories of Ficciones and El Aleph. It is small wonder then that readers have been captivated by the sheer intellectual and aesthetic stimulus both underlying and emanating from Borges’ work. Of his vast essayistic, poetic and fictional output, it is the latter, notably the stories of Ficciones and El Aleph, which have held the greatest sway over readers and critics alike. The seeming ease with which Borges delineates a mental and physical universe of the as if 1; his controlled story lines and carefully, minimalistically drawn characters, and the calculated coolheadedness which pervades so much of his work are elements which seduce the reader into a deliberately constructed world of parallel lives, deaths and pasts; of fragmented characters and multiple destinies; of a reality in constant flux; and of a text which, as the reader engages with, seems to both multiply and disintegrate. This simultaneous multiplicity and fragmentation is mirrored in the impossibility of apprehending the answer to life’s fundamental questions. But in spite of their brevity and succinctness, the stories raise complex questions which belie their carefully controlled playfulness and their confident grace. It is thus tempting – and this may be not entirely unintentional

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on the part of Borges – to marvel at the intellectual artistry, the audaciousness, the elegance employed to covertly convey the complexity and unanswerability of fundamental questions: the nature of reality; the unfathomable yet inescapable nature of time; the concept of absolute truth; notions of identity. Many of these fictions can be seen as organic explorations of the essayistic themes, among those questions of personal and textual identity, the problem of evil, mystical traditions from the major world religions, notions of godhood, concepts of salvation, etc. Unlike the essay, the story medium offers Borges the added freedom of the imagination and fewer constraints of reality and rationality. Borges, in his unique way, uses the story medium as a creative plane to enact the as if. What I mean by this is that he postulates certain assumptions as to the rules along which his fictional universes ‘operate’. He subsequently builds a story and its consequences onto these rules and possibilities as if they were operational in the world as we know it. In ‘Las ruinas circulares’, for example, it is assumed, or taken as a given since stated as a fact, that a man may dream up another and transpose him from the dream world onto reality. The story then unfolds on the basis of that premise. These mental and fictional universes are more than points of arrival; they are points of departure for the reader’s own exploration of a series of queries and dilemmas which, although Borges is careful not to name these himself, express universal questions challenging us all. His texts reveal concerns which are at once personal and universal; they are pertinent to men and women of intellectual as well as emotional curiosity: the nature of reality, whose fluidity Borges both proposes and tries to stem at the same time; the question of absolute truth, of a fixed identity. More so, Borges’ texts are points of departure for a close analysis of his own underlying motives, at once compelling and vexing. Together, the essays and the fictions form a continuum of Borgesian thought. The abiding themes of time and identity, which Borges explores, and which he battles with throughout all of his creative life, are an expression of his desire to find a release from these problematic concepts. The quest for the divine in his stories, the unfulfilled spiritual quest of his characters, is not accidental. It is also a metaphor which points to a need to heal a fragile sense of personal self. This is evidenced in one of his very early essays of 1923, ‘La nadería de la personalidad’, where he recounts a personal experience of parting from a friend for good. Borges is prompted, he tells us, by a deep, emotional desire to reveal his soul, his innermost self, to his friend. But this gives way to a vehement, intellectual denial of that very essence of the self. This violent shift from yearning to intellectual denial

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

points to a sense of self which is, in its essence, wounded. This oscillation between affirmation and denial is to be played out again and again. His captivating and intellectually stimulating texts also reveal a lesser known aspect: his struggle to attain a faith reality as expressed in the anguished search for spiritual plenitude. His texts and his characters do speak, openly in some cases, obliquely in others, of a search, a yearning, if not always explicitly for faith itself or God, then for a spiritual experience of some kind or another. The consequences of this difficult search are the emergence of a fragile sense of self, fragmented and caught in a stricture between affirmation and denial. Borges’ fragile sense of self has implications for his notion of time, and vice versa. Both are linked to his spiritual searching. His poetry is both emotive and intellectual. It reveals that Borges cannot abandon the concerns which he explored earlier through his essays and ficciones. After 1952, when he abandons story writing in favour of writing poetry again after a gap of several decades, there reappear the themes of time, selfhood and the absolute. More openly than any of the other genres, it acknowledges a spiritual quest. Many of these later poems bear titles based on the Gospels, and Borges relates these passages to his own life in an affinity, and at times also with a sense of personal failure. They also attest to a growing search for a personal encounter with God. The journey of tracing Borges’ search over time takes the reader from the early essays of the 1920s and 30s to the famed ficciones of the 1940s and lastly to the poetry of the 1950s through to the 1980s. This trajectory moves like a wave from the at times clinical, albeit intellectually passionate analysis of the essays to the more creatively expressive medium of the story, before arriving at the beauty and the intuitive freedom of poetry, where words and evocations are able to unlock and to offer a glimpse of something deeper than the surface meaning. In this transition from essay to fiction to poem, there is one constant: the pursuit of a higher reality, an ultimate core to existence. Borges’ artistry moves from structure to life, from the academic investigation and analysis of the essays to the narrative exploration of the ficciones, and from there to his most personal poetry, where the discourse on the divine is at its most pronounced. Weaving across the genres, there emerges a tension which is both problematic and creative: Borges’ intensely intellectual approach, governed by an astoundingly active and enquiring mind, meets with his intuited understanding of the existence of an ultimate reality. He oscillates between disavowal of God, and desire for verification of a divine existence. On the one hand he at times intellectualizes God and seems to be dismissing his existence on rational grounds; on the other, he continuously searches for

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something bigger than himself or the intellect. Does Borges get far enough in terms of a lived faith experience to overcome the doubts and uncertainties which his intellectual probing uncovered? On textual evidence at any rate, this seems to be denied him, but his writing also confirms that some kind of living experience of faith is what he moved towards as his life progressed. The tension lies in the balance which Borges struggles to strike between his enquiring intellect and a faith reality. It is not so much an expression of resignation or failure, as it is a sign of continuous, albeit complex and perhaps complicated growth meeting constant challenge. In fact, even where one has attained an experience of faith, there remains a constant seeking, and at times struggling for the relationship with God. This relationship is not a once-and-for-all panacea but a dynamic process which requires continuous interaction. Borges’ particular kind of quest may appear an incomplete or unaccomplished enterprise, especially if one is to take at face value his much-quoted declarations as to the purely inspirational and narratorial impact of philosophies and doctrines; it is also a quest which may appear unsuccessful or fraught with difficulty and adversity if one is to take his texts, and especially the stories, at their face value. But Borges communicates to his reader not only in what there is, but more so, in what there is not, in what he leaves out, and this gives us the real clues as to what he was searching for. Two years before his death, Borges expressed his belief that ‘What the writer wants to say is the least important thing; the most important is said through him or in spite of him’ (my emphasis).2 It is his work, every bit as much as his life, that gives us the key to one particular, fundamental facet: his search for what is missing. In a recent article, Williams (2007, 8) suggests that ‘it may be that it is behind rather than on the surface of Borges’ literature, in the mind, rather than the work of his hand, that the outlines of [his concerns] are most clearly discernible.’ Borges of course cannot be reduced to one aspect alone, and I do not wish to relate his work exclusively to his spiritual quest. It may be one small part only of his work, but it is, without doubt, a significant one. There are too many texts which attest to an enduring search for a faith reality to be ignored. The many recent biographies and memoirs (at least a dozen in the English and the Spanish speaking world since 1994) indicate the lasting, indeed ever-growing fascination with Borges.3 That many critics and biographers should continue to venture the question as to Borges’ belief system or otherwise, is indicative of the growing importance placed on a fundamental aspect of one of the most significant writers of our time. Edwin Williamson’s

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biography, an authoritative, exhaustive and sensitive work both on account of its biographical as well as its literary analyses,4 highlights a strong and earnest spiritual component to Borges’ latter life. This offers a fascinating and privileged insight into a highly personal aspect of a man’s life. That critics recently should venture not only to ask the question, but in some cases encourage a spiritually inclusive reading of Borges’ work, attests not so much to a less aggressively secular Western academic and civil society, as to the increasingly pressing nature of the question itself.5 The most compelling answer is to be found in Borges’ work. Through it Borges shows us just how much he grappled with fundamental questions; it is in his work that he communicates to the reader something substantial about his search.

The Quest for Experience In several of his stories, take for example ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ and ‘El Aleph’, there is evidence of a supreme design, prompting a quest for ultimate experience which would serve to cement the tenuous traces left by a hitherto elusive or unconfirmed creator. Borges seeks an authentic, allconfirming experience in order to be able to take the next step: to believe in or affirm God. While some of his stories do speak of some kind of union with a divine (e.g. ‘El Aleph’, ‘La escritura del Dios’), the union or experience is rather a visualization or humanization of a divine attribute. It falls short of what is at the heart of faith: a lived experience of relationship with God. The declaration Borges made that he was unable to believe in a personal God may serve to explain this objectification. But divine attributes are sacred by their very nature and as such belong to God. Borges intuits this and explores what happens when humans exercise or seek to attain these attributes: it leads to conflict and frustration. In some of his most famous texts, the objectification of the divine and the appropriation of divine attributes has delusional and damaging effects for the characters, because it is experienced (and in a flawed way) by humans: having partaken in the total vision of the universe conferred by the allencompassing sphere of the aleph is, despite its godlike quality, strangely unsatisfying in the experiential context of the central character, who is also called Borges. The experience of divine vision is ultimately inconsequential. Tzinacán, the high priest of ‘La escritura del Dios’, cannot exercise the total power which the apprehension of the divine formula would confer to him were he to utter it. Instead, he faces oblivion as to his sense of selfworth and has lost the meaning of his own being.

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Funes (‘Funes el memorioso’), whose memory and mind are superhuman in that every moment and every instant is present simultaneously and forever imprinted, is crippled by the side-effect: he cannot process nor analyse these all-encompassing images and incessant instances of perfect perception. The consequences of total recall and perception for Funes are ruinous in both mental and emotional terms. His gift is a curse. He lives, or rather suffers an attribute of the divine, to catastrophic effect. If the vision of ‘Borges’ in ‘El Aleph’ is fragmented and unsatisfying; if Funes’ abilities are crippling and suffocating; and if Tzinacán’s knowledge in ‘La escritura del Dios’ is numbing, it is because to try and apprehend God is to try and become God. Another example is the famous library of Babel: the seeming totality of ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ is maddening not because it is confounding or because the search for el libro, which equals God, cannot ever actually be accomplished. It is maddening and futile because the library, like language, promises a compendium of wisdom which ultimately does not give easy answers. It is true that the story is, on one level, an analogy of an institutional belief system which does not meet the seekers’ expectation. But this is not because of its nature, but because of the way it is approached and the expectations projected onto it. Only in God can these attributes be complete. Borges bears this out through his writing by exploring, over and over, the consequences of his characters’ fraught approaches. As anyone does with an object in order to comprehend its concept, Borges attempts to grasp and ‘materialises’ an experience which is in its essence transcendental. This is because he can somehow imagine or sense a God, but it is one who does not interact with his creation. The only way then for the seeker to interact is to try and apprehend this statis, embodied in Borges’ stories by the object. This makes his static, objectified God plausible, characterized by the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, etc., but who is devoid of love, compassion and interaction. The pilgrim, in contrast, who constantly seeks and discovers God in an active relationship, mirrors the divine who is dynamic in the transactional giving and receiving of love and of life, which, in its essence, is trinitarian.

Pointers to His Approach If Borges in these stories explores a search in the objectification of the divine, and in human apprehension of divine attributes which ultimately lead to frustration, etc., then he not only postulates a fraught concept of

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what it is to find spiritual reality, but he also, and this is significant, points us to the stumbling blocks in his own approach. These are pointers to what Borges leaves out, consciously or otherwise: that the divine cannot be apprehended like an object, however sacred that object, and knowledge does not necessarily bring fulfilment. In the stark picture of his characters’ unsuccessful quest, Borges implicitly leads us to the first biblical story of appropriation. Adam and Eve, striving for divine knowledge, and in seeking it break their relationship with God. They find that eating the fruit does not lead to fulfilment, but to a painful awareness of their damaged relationship with God and the loss of innocence and grace. Instead of participating fully in a relationship with God, which is ‘heaven on earth’ and includes a dynamic of life, knowledge on its own is portrayed in both the Gospels and Borges’ stories as a poisoned chalice or a dead end. The paradox lies in a fulfilled attribute which is ultimately unfulfilling. The attainment of Funes, albeit unbidden, and the Borges character in ‘El Aleph’ are ultimately sterile, that is, not dynamic because they are purely result oriented, and the ability attained is useless, because it is out of context. On knowledge, Williams (2007, 87) makes an interesting point when he suggests reading some of Borges’ fictions in the light of a Gospel passage from Ecclesiastes and draws an analogy to Schopenhauer: One might profitably read [Borges’ texts] in light of Ecclesiastes 1.18: ‘. . . The more knowledge, the more grief’. Schopenhauer believed that the content of our knowing is ‘sad and depressing, but the state of knowing, the acquisition of insight, the penetration of truth, are thoroughly pleasurable – and [. . .] add a mixture of sweetness to my bitterness’.6 I would add to this that in the case of Borges, Schopenhauer’s assertion is reversed: for Borges, the content of knowing is not so much depressing as unfulfilling, and the state of knowing is not sweet but brings about a hunger for more. Through the result-driven, unfulfilled quests of some of his most memorable characters, Borges points the reader to this: despite having attained a desired result, we are ultimately unfulfilled, because we have not made the investment of self, time, struggle and lack the courage to journey towards any worthwhile ideal, which is, for some, the very essence of our humanity. Mystics themselves, such as the Sufi mystic Attar, caution against the pursuit of enlightenment or union with God as an ultimate goal in itself. They argue that searchers must leave behind the goal-oriented approach and also the indulgence in ecstatic experiences because these make them live

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out of touch with human life and, misleadingly, make them focus more on the gift, rather than the giver. Only with the disposition towards the absolute can the orientation towards the goal be transformed. There is a fundamental question here: why does Borges miss out on this? It almost seems as if he yearns for the ‘fringe benefits’ of faith, to call it rather flippantly: enlightenment, a sense of plenitude, oneness of the self in a greater whole, salvation, peace and the end of searching. This focus on result, coupled with a static God image, may be what ultimately accounts for the objectification of the divine in his stories, particularly the quasi-magical status of the objects which embody it. Through his stories, Borges, by communicating this very model, seems to be showing us his struggle to grasp another model towards attaining fulfilment. In his characters’ attempts at apprehending God through attributes of knowledge or vision, Borges points us to the incomplete nature of this approach, not in an attempt to highlight failure, but as a signpost to another way, one which he does not overtly engage in, but which, in its marked absence, speaks forcefully: a living relationship with God.

The Labyrinth This accounts for a very particular Borgesian labyrinth. The labyrinth as a theme in Borges’ work has been much commented upon. Little explored, however, is the multi-layered depth of his particular labyrinth, which goes beyond the oft stated, familiar metaphor for personal disorientation. Borges’ labyrinth is, in its essence, twofold. It is self-constructed and also autonomous, and this results in a certain stricture: as a self-construct, it is controlled and determined by the author; as an autonomous construct, it takes on a dynamic of its own which as such eludes authorial control. Because he allows his intellect to sabotage his intuitive curiosity and perhaps the need to believe, Borges is barred from admitting to himself (and therefore to the reader) that God exists, not so much as a concept, but more importantly, for him as a reality. It is as if he, the path layer of his own maze, designs and plans failure from the start, in order to make the leap of faith impossible. But, by implicitly designing his stories and arguments in this way, he also points us to the fact that this is what he is doing, and perhaps why he is doing it. In a sense, Borges is therefore also the pathfinder, inserting the pointers to the heart of the maze, which is, ultimately, the way out of the labyrinth. The poems of his middle years are evidence that Borges is finally leaving the labyrinth.

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Duels and Redemption As a result of the tension between intellect and intuition, there is a preoccupation which Borges displayed throughout his career: that of the shifting personal identity, or duality of being. As one expression of his dual self-image, his stories expose different ways of blurring the characters’ personal identities, which is another Borgesian paradigm: to change or hide a shameful past, or history, or one’s own death in an attempt to redeem a sin, a guilt, a failure, a life ill or incompletely lived. This kaleidoscope of roles and assignations is a manifestation of fragmented identities, both personal and textual, especially when we think of stories such as ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’, ‘La otra muerte’, ‘El Sur’ and several more. Another Borgesian paradigm is the assertion of self either through identification with the other (the enemy), or the obliteration of the other (the enemy, the brother) in the story ‘El fin’, for example, or the two poems ‘Milonga del forastero’, and ‘Milonga de dos hermanos’ (in: Para las seis cuerdas, 1965). The latter are lyrics of fights or fatal duels set to milongas. These are relationships of sorts, which are inverted however, because they undo or destroy, rather than build. The result of this ethics of conflict and conquest are entries into manhood which are not authentic, but are culturally and psychologically determined models and rituals of masculinity, honour, coming of age, etc. Additionally, in Borges’ fictional universes, redemption is made difficult because it remains on the purely human level. The guilt-ridden protagonist in ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’, John Vincent Moon, is unable to surrender to a higher force, or at least to human mercy, as the framework that he himself has chosen does not allow for anything more than confession to a stranger. But, we may ask, to what effect?, as Moon has already passed judgement on himself. He does not consider the other’s (the confessorcharacter Borges’) compassion, nor does he allow forgiveness, mercy or healing to enter the equation. This is what Borges obliquely communicates to his reader: that this kind of self-sufficiency ultimately isolates the self, both from the other, from God or any other saving force. The question is, does Borges sense that there can be an actual relationship with God, and that this might be the key to his journeying and to a continuing revelation that hasn’t been discovered, or is this an intuition that remains forever outside the realm of his experience? We cannot answer this question definitively, but we can see that he keeps searching. In this sense, the apparent objectification of the divine (the book of books in the

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library, the aleph, etc.) points to a tendency to externalize God rather than encounter and allow the self to participate with God. Christian mystics like St John of the Cross advocate a dialogue with the Trinity, not only about it; that is, a life which echoes its reciprocity with God and with others. What many of Borges’ characters attempt is to penetrate objects and acquire attributes without a sense of active participation.

Time and Identity Borges engages in a constant dialogue with the themes of time and identity, moving between and within his own genres, whose boundaries are at times famously stretched and blurred. For him, notions of temporality and selfhood lead to fragmentation of self, text and author. Time and identity, in a crucial link themselves, feature at one end of the spectrum for Borges, while the divine ranges on the other. Borges understands time and the abhorred notion of infinity (which he perceives as one particular aspect of time and which he holds to be a manifestation of the illusory construct we deem to be reality) as being in irreconcilable opposition to the notion of eternity. Only very gradually does he make the distinction between time and eternity as an attribute of the divine. Similarly, his debate around the concept of identity shows how the notion of an individuated self is juxtaposed to – and more so, is irreconcilable with – the notion of the union of the self with the absolute. The concepts of time, identity, and of a divine order underlying our everyday existence both fascinated and troubled Borges. Due to the variegations which he, in unending postulations and refutations, imposes onto them, these concepts elude exact definition and also finality. In the turmoil of such oscillating argumentations, however, there is one constant, a pained tension, rooted within Borges’ very intellect: his rational, intellectual mind concludes that time and identity are null and void; yet the limitations of the mind itself, and most significantly, a struggle to apprehend a spiritual dimension, bar him from experiencing the release from time and individuation. As such, Borges displays a disjunction between an intellectual desire to explore and understand the nature of existence and of reality on the one hand, and his intuitive conviction as to the futility of any such attempt on the other. It seems to me that, although he concludes intellectually that time is illusory, and self-will may be abandoned in the knowledge of a greater union in a timeless sphere, he nonetheless remains a prisoner to a consciousness which postulates the very tenets to its own existence, and

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

which, in the absence of an experienced faith reality, it can therefore not logically question nor overcome or transcend.

Spiritualities and Doctrines Certain much-quoted declarations by Borges – which do deserve closer attention – as to the purely aesthetic, intellectual, narratorial and inspirational value of philosophical and theological doctrines, may have to be reconsidered, and the role of the divine assigned a more prominent place than accorded by the majority canon of critics,7 and not least, as is often held, by Borges himself. His remarks, typically understated and subtle, as to the significance of theologies and philosophies have been taken as categorical dismissals of these influences, or as admitting to an agnostic outlook. This is a view which is highly contestable. Far from solely driving the story or supplying intriguing, inspirational or outlandish backdrops to the events narrated, the desire for a union with the absolute, a divine, higher order is not only what underlies and drives the story, it also compels Borges. As an expression of this striving, Borges recourses to the writings of many of the major world religions, but in each one there is an element which leaves his search incomplete and his questions unanswered. Pantheism, which puts forward the inherent divinity in all creation, the oneness of self and divine, was attractive to Borges because it does not postulate the concept of a personal God, which he found problematic at the time of his closest interest in this doctrine (late 1920s to the 1940s). Sufism is given a pantheistic slant when he brackets out the central, transcendental nature of God in favour of a pantheistic, total identity of the divine and creature. Buddhism, which he writes about the most, is problematic for him because of the negation of the self and the concept of nothingness. Shintoism, as Williamson points out, made a profound impression on Borges as a lifeaffirming religion, but it eschews the question of death, and of life after death which Borges was concerned with at the time he encountered Shintoism in Japan in the late 1970s and early 80s.8 Christianity he struggles with the most, partly, in my view, because it is not until later in his life that he moves from a static, intellectual position which cannot satisfy, to one which addresses the central issue of a personal relationship with God. Spiritually bereft of a certain kind of experience of divine love or state of plenitude, Borges’ intellectual recourse is to the concept of God and to the ultimate writing experience: vicarious salvation. Though struggling to attain

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a faith reality, he nonetheless wishes for the state of faith and for its consequences. It demonstrates his yearning for fulfilment as a fundamental need.

Intellect and Intuition Borges’ quest for an absolute is linked to his particular notion of personal self. Although his intellect denies the notion of selfhood, that very same intellect affirms to him that he cannot escape it. This traps him in an oscillation between denial and resignation. The textual evidence points to a further tension. On the one hand there is the desire to affirm the self in its individuated state, which results in either plurality or fragmentation; on the other hand there is evidence of a desire for the individual self to be absorbed, contained within a higher self, a reality of plenitude and oneness all at once. These tensions are further indications of a wounded sense of personal self. Borges’ quest is for God and for healing. I would add that his concerns with notions of selfhood display a particularly involved and idiosyncratically Borgesian perspective. This in itself points to an intense, spiritual searching. The trajectory of this search takes us back to essays which Borges wrote when he was in his early twenties. One in particular, entitled ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ is significant. Apart from being a youthfully confident, philosophical exposition, it chronicles an experience that seems to have impacted on him in a particular way. In a painful moment of parting from a friend for good, he tells the reader that he was impelled by a deep desire to reveal his innermost being to his friend. At this moment of almost self-revealing, Borges, so he tells us, concludes intellectually that there was nothing to his self, his thesis confirmed. On the cusp of revelation, of entering into a soul-relationship, his intuitive desire to show his self to his parting friend is suppressed by a philosophically argued dismissal of that very self. He retreats into massive doubt, which manifests itself in vehement, categorical rejection. On the brink of entering into relationship per se, Borges withdraws into denial. It is as if a switch was being flicked from emotional or intuitive understanding, to analysis. His constant attempts, however, at finding or apprehending an essence, a divine, both within himself and without, is evidence of the sincerity of his quest. Rather than entering into the relationship, he tries to apprehend it intellectually, which leads to denial.

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

The God Figure Borges’ notion of the divine is ambivalent. Although God frequently appears in his stories, he is a very problematic figure in most instances and, more often than not, treated as a theme or a sterile character who remains on the outside of human experience. Although present as a name – Las Escrituras, Dios, Allah, el Korán, – this presence remains a name, a reference. The God figure that Borges does delineate is a God who is cruel, arbitrary and elusive, or who is an intellectual impossibility altogether. He is a punishing monolith of vengefulness, in contrast to the Christ figure of Borges’ poetry, where there is a burgeoning search for relationship. In other instances, God is, always fatally so contained, and thus identical with, a material object (a coin, the aleph, a labyrinth, etc.). This identity of the divine with the immanent is at the heart of Borges’ tendency to give a pantheistic slant to mystical texts. In this, he displays a fraught concept of the immanence of the divine; in his rendering, immanence is more akin to magic. The objects seem to possess a totemic value or power which additionally seems to have the possibility of granting the possessor wisdom or entry into a sort of divine zone. In those texts where there is a higher or divine force, such as in the story ‘El inmortal’, or the poem ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’, God is in the first instance forgetful of his creation and in the second, he is an angry God, castigating the poet for his shortcomings. In either case, the God figure does not only allow for an entry into relationship, but is depicted as incomplete, devoid of his very nature which is unconditional love and compassion and continuous interaction with creation. The absences of Borges’ initially unresolved speculations are being projected onto his characters. Many of his stories attest to the aspiration of the characters to a union with a higher being. And yet, they do not, or only partially, succeed in their quest for transcendence in what Bossart (2003, 146) calls ‘failed enlightenment’. In those stories where there is a union of the self with a divine source, such as in ‘La escritura del Dios’, the union is flawed or temporary. And lastly, the stories which neither display nor aspire to a higher, underlying reality, are characterized by one constant – nullification: nullification of the text, of the author/narrator, and lastly, nullification of the self. In the absence of a higher or divine order, chaos ensues in the form of fragmentation where identity proliferates, multiplies or disintegrates. In Borges’ fictions, the actual spiritual dimension itself, that is, the spiritual meaning and, more so, its reality, are not fully attained. But what is the

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actual spiritual dimension? It is the living relationship between man and the divine. The nature of that union of self and divine is the realisation that there is the possibility of entering into a relationship with God, possibly day by day, by making a continuing choice of openness and discovery, as opposed to a once-and-for-all resolution or panacea. Borges’ suffering lies in that his intuition and understanding, however valid, remain conjecture and are only very gradually able to penetrate the dynamic of relationship. His work shows us that he intuits a reality which language, intellect and enquiry cannot fully express, an intuition which is most overtly evident in some of the later poetry. The search for a relationship with God, more specifically with the crucified Christ, is precisely what Borges gravitates towards in his poetry. One of the poems in his last collection published before his death is ‘Cristo en la cruz’: the poet stands in front of the three crosses, looking for Christ, and although he cannot see him, he promises to keep looking for his face until the end of his days. This is one of the closest and most moving approximations towards an actual encounter with God. With ‘Cristo en la cruz’, we will see how Borges is to seek an answer to the meaning of suffering as he relates his own to that of the crucified Christ.

Chronology The essays The period between 1922 and 1925 is marked by the denial of time and of self. Whereas in these early years Borges flatly and forcefully denies notions of time and of selfhood, he does, in the course of the subsequent decades, develop a more differentiated approach. While he still arrives at a fundamental denial, this is done through a more mature process of arguing, debating, postulating and refuting, whose evolution and progression can be traced chronologically. This tension – between the refutation of time and identity in the early 1920s on the one hand, and resignation in the 1940s as to their inescapability on the other – is only ever relieved in a few privileged, almost mystical moments of transcendence when Borges records a personal experience of timelessness and the release from individuation, an experience he calls ‘eternity’ in a crucial text of 1928, entitled ‘Sentirse en muerte’. The epiphany came about through an intense sense of past and present not only fusing into one, but of the present being the past. While a year later he arrives back at the conclusion of the non-existence of God and

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

time, the three years between 1928 and 1931 see him explore, instead of simply deny, the concept of time in the light of the notion of infinity, before arriving in 1934 at the vexing explorations of the notion of cyclical time. ‘La duración del infierno’ and ‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’, both of 1929, introduce the themes of the paradox and of infinity. I believe that there is a link in his writing between the loss of personal identity and the notion of infinity, which in itself is a manifestation of the abyss of time. It seems to me worth noting that at this stage Borges does not yet differentiate between infinity and eternity. His very attempts at finding order, universal design or answers reveal to him the fissures through which he must perceive the futility of any system claiming to answer the problem of chaos and uncertainty. It is the counterintuitive logic of the paradox, which reveals to us the disjunctions in our carefully constructed reality so that the artifice of time, space and identity is exposed for what it is: forever artifice, forever mirage. Borges, ‘torn between the splendour and the despair afforded by the paradox’ (Sarlo 1993, 58) returns, time and time again, to probe the consequences of the concept of infinity – the regressus ad infinitum, or what Sarlo calls ‘structure en abîme’ (1993, 56) – which threatens causality, teleology, order, motion and therefore time. Thus juxtaposed, yet inextricably linked to the notion of eternity is his concern with the paradox. The paradox, itself a perpetrator of infinity is, on a deeper level still, a metaphor for the perpetual, unrelieved tension between Borges’ sense of the nothingness of self, and the desire to be contained in an absolute. This tension is what I propose to term ‘woundedness’. In other words, infinity – that which the paradox is concerned with, that which it perpetrates, and also that which is its crux – is a pointer to Borges’ metaphor. In the early 1930s Borges explores Judaic mystical notions in ‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’. He also turns to Gnosticism as a heretical system of ultimate knowledge and salvation in ‘Una vindicación del falso Basílides’, which is where he introduces the themes of knowledge and enlightenment, salvation, faith and concepts of God. This interest in the early 1930s in Gnosticism and the Cabbala attests to a growing interest in spiritual wisdom and notions of heresy, an interest which continues to be manifest through the 1940s to the 50s, 70s and 80s (see for example the following essays: ‘La flor de Coleridge’ of 1945, ‘Del culto de los libros’ of 1951, the essay and poem ‘El Golem’ of 1957 and 1958 respectively, ‘La cábala’ of 1980, ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ of 1982). So we see that in the course of more than five decades, Borges continues to explore concerns which he first raised in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In these early essays, his emphasis is on

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the nature of God. Linked to the nature of the divine is the theme of knowledge of the supreme God, and of salvation through the spiritual enlightenment of the elect. The theme of the elect runs in Borges’ work, even though neither he himself (as evidenced through his essays) nor his characters (in his stories) seem to be among them. The adaptation of, and variance from, Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same in ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ of 1934, together with his application of the Leibnizean Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (which I will expand on in the following chapter), lead Borges to re-affirm his conclusion, expressed in the early 1920s, that the concepts of time and self are null and void. This logic, furnished and supported by his intellectual mind, is, however, in constant conflict with the limitations of the very intellect that gives rise to the refutation of time and self, and which does not allow for actually experiencing the very claims as to the non-existence of time and identity which it puts forward. In other words, for Borges, the notions of reality, time and self, albeit illusory, are nonetheless inescapable in that they constitute, and are necessary for our apprehension of this world of experience and of representation. What he is therefore left with is a sense of teleological futility and of nothingness. ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ of 1934 is a prelude to his own alternative to infinite cycles, put forward, nearly a decade later, with ‘El tiempo circular’ of 1943. Around 1936, Borges seems to have reached an impasse, and in the face of the perceived limitations of his essayistic explorations, he turns to writing fictions. The stories are therefore part of a continuum of that wealth of essays where he explored questions of identity, the problem of evil, the trinitarian mystery, notions of God, concepts of salvation and redemption. From the mid-1930s onwards, he moves away from the circularity of his philosophical speculations and theological probings, which characterize the essayistic work and whose intellectual explorations had become ever more complex, passionate and anguished with time. In the absence of any lasting aesthetic or mystical transcendence in the realm of the textual Borges (the implied author-character-narrator of the stories, who in many instances is a Borges character of sorts, either by name or by obvious analogies to the author), he turns to writing fictions in an attempt to emulate, or reflect these absences in his characters’ experiences. It is also in his stories that Borges both reworks and anticipates the teleological barrenness which characterizes the essays. In his stories the nullification of identity in infinite, perpetual time finds another expression. It is also in the stories that the presence of a flawed God, or the marked absence of God (or at any rate of an absolute reality) suggests the yearning not just for the transcendence of

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

time and individuation, but of a transcendence into a higher, spiritual reality, a divine being. ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ is a case in point. It marks this move towards a more intimate, albeit discreet exploration of doctrinal concerns. In this move from essay to ficción, Borges’ explorations into notions of godhood, and his characters’ unfulfilled spiritual quest for a union with the divine are more than accessories to plot. They are also metaphors which indicate the need to heal a damaged sense of personal self. From the mid-1930s onwards, the focus on eternity as an attribute of the absolute becomes more apparent. It is a theme which Borges is to rework in many different guises and variations. It is in one of his most significant essays of 1936, ‘Historia de la eternidad’, that he introduces the notion of eternity. This makes it possible to establish a link between time and individuation on the one hand, and between eternity and union with an absolute on the other. In the mid- to late 1930s Borges seeks new ways of satisfying his yearning for transcending the limitations of the mind, and, along with the mind, the abhorred yet inescapable notions of time and identity. At this particular time of writing, Borges does not make these links explicitly, and the dualities and therefore tensions remain irreconciled between time and eternity, and also between the individuated self and the self which is in communion with a higher self. These tensions could be resolved by a mystical union which he does not experience, a longing for which he does, however, express both intellectually and emotionally. Borges has a personal, intuitive certainty of the existence of timelessness, which goes beyond the rational, and which transcends the absence of this experience not lived. The texts of this period in his life, notably ‘Historia de la eternidad’ and ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’, reveal an intuition of, an empathy with the divine, though not experienced nor explicitly acknowledged. These texts speak of his longing to transcend time, of his desire for spiritual fulfilment, and the frustration at the lack of it. The 1940s can be seen as a period of great tension for Borges between mysticism and pantheism, between faith and resignation. It is also the time when he branches out towards the notion of eternity as an alternative to the nothingness of time and individuated identity. In 1943, he picks up his discussion of cyclical time and the Eternal Return, which he had first embarked on almost a decade earlier with ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’. In ‘El tiempo circular’, he now formulates his own, preferred version of the Eternal Return: perpetual recurrence not of the same but of the similar. This accounts for the Borgesian theme of the version – textual versions, but also versions of personal destinies, lives, pasts and deaths – which pervades so much of his work.

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At this stage, Borges also introduces the German mystics Angelus Silesius and Daniel von Czepko, a point at which the interplay, but also the tensions between immanence and transcendence, between pantheism and mysticism are at their most pronounced. This is a tension between the immanent and the transcendent union with the whole: a tension between an impersonal deity on the one hand, and a personal, transcendental God on the other. It accounts for the continuing duality of time and eternity, and for the duality also between the notions of an accidental, unstable sense of self, as opposed to an essential, enduring self. These dualities in his texts remain, on the face of it, largely irreconciled. The challenge for and the invitation to the reader is to enter into the dynamic of Borges’ searching for reconciliation. In 1944/46, with ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, versions A and B respectively (in Borges, 1952), he formulates what appears to be a confluence of the Eternal Return and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. In ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, B’ of 1946, Borges brings together those philosophers who had shaped his understanding of notions of time and of selfhood, from whom he, however, also departed the most radically. He has an intimation of transcendence, only to resign himself to forever being a prisoner of his own consciousness, of time, and most poignantly, of his own self: And yet, and yet . . . Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. [. . .] El tiempo es la substancia de que estoy hecho. [. . .] El mundo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges. (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, B’) It is after this desperate resignation to the inescapability of his own being, which concludes the essay, that Borges, six years later in a new ‘Nota al prólogo’ to the re-edition of the text in 1952, introduces the Buddhist tale of King Milinda (also known as Menandro). Again, he makes an almost desperate, intellectual attempt at offering himself alternatives to the nothingness, and at the same time the inescapability, of his own being. And finally, in the 1953 prologue to a re-edition of ‘Historia de la eternidad’, first published in 1936, Borges comes to embrace Platonic Forms, a view which marks a radical change of attitude from that displayed at the time of originally writing the essay. His statement of 1953 can be seen as a tentative conclusion to his ongoing postulation and refutation of time, selfhood, and to his quest for a union of the self with the divine. The early 1950s are therefore a time when Borges critically revisits some of the major claims of previous decades.

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

In the early essays of the 1920s, Borges argues and engages with the issues of reality, time and identity rather one-dimensionally; he argues solely for their denial, whereby the non-existence (or unattainability) of these concepts seem to be pre-established for him. After their initial publication, these texts were, following Borges’ own instructions, not to be re-published. Re-publication only occurred after his death (as Textos recobrados: 1919–1929, Borges 1997). Although disavowed by Borges, these early essays are crucial for this analysis as they establish concerns which can be shown to remain with Borges despite his later discarding of certain youthful approaches. In the later essays he is to differentiate between the various aspects of these concepts. Thus, in the texts of the 1930s – a time which can be seen as a crux in his life, whereupon his vision on time changes – he reintroduces the concept of time by way of discussing it as infinite, cyclical or eternal. In the 1940s he finally seems to come full circle as he arrives back at his initial denial. And yet, denial now bears the tone of regret, as opposed to the youthful sense of rebellion of the early essays. The introduction of mystical texts from the various spiritual traditions in the mid-1940s to early 1950s are evidence of a progression in his searching. In this move which spans three decades of his writing, his refutations, postulations and variations of any one philosopher’s concepts can be seen as a coming together of ideas, never fixed, never final, always fluid and always susceptible to further alterations.9 On the one hand, Borges does move ever more towards an apprehension of, or longing for eternity, which can be equated with the divine and which is, on a deeper level still, an expression of his desire to make complete, to heal his fragmented, unstable sense of self. Eternity thus stands for plenitude, and also for a complete sense of self, healed of its singularity. It has therefore the potential to offer a mystical release from individuation and temporality. But Borges equates eternity with purely linear perpetuity, and this has far-reaching consequences for both his characters’ and his own quest. The stories Whereas the notion of the divine can be traced chronologically in Borges’ essayistic writing, his fictional work can be seen to develop in a less obviously chronological way. These texts are torn between fragmentation and unity; between the absence of and the desire for an underlying, absolute reality; between a union with a divine and the failure to find a spiritual reality; between the

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absence of an underlying Godhead, and the union of the self with God; between the nullification of the self and its affirmation in the absolute as soul; between time and its abhorred aspect of infinity on the one hand, and eternity on the other. The fictions are not about character, nor are they about motif, cause or effect. They are about an event, a miracle, a desire for an experience leading towards a higher, spiritual dimension. This might manifest itself as a higher plane of existence; it may be called God, ultimate reality or the absolute, lending stability and continuity of identity, creating cohesion between everyday existence and some more enduring, spiritual existence. Whether that dimension is attained remains unresolved, especially if we think of ‘La escritura del Dios’ or ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’.10 And where there is such a spiritual dimension, the nature of it remains inconclusive at best, or elusive at worst. The notion of a higher order is linked to the notions of eternity and of the divine. What lies at the heart of his characters’ failures in the stories of both Ficciones and El Aleph is the omission, or exclusion of God and/or the exclusion of a relationship with God (despite the many citations of his name), coupled with the particularly Borgesian fusion of monotheistic mysticism (with its emphasis on transcendence) on the one hand, and pantheism (with its emphasis on immanence) on the other. Furthermore, we can see from the essays that this is a stricture which is also at the heart of Borges’ own striving.

The God figure of his poetry In his poetry from the 1950s onwards, the God figure is one of a God obscured (‘No eres los otros’, 1976). A sinister God lies in wait in the fissures of life which Borges likens to the floor of a prison cell (‘Para una version del I King’, 1976). It is a God who inspires the poet with fear at the thought of revealing to him his true face (‘El espejo’, 1976). The tragedy is that Borges does not understand the transcendental nature of God as not only all-seeing and all-knowing, but also as always active and loving. His vision is of a menacing and wrathful God, often associated with the Old Testament. In his later poetry, therefore, there reoccurs a God figure which – albeit less threatening and intense – we had already encountered in the much earlier ficciones : an indifferent, elusive, objectified God, an annihilating gnostic vision of a deity subject to another, higher force; a hierarchical structure, akin to Greek mythology of ever-decreasing deities.

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

The Christ figure and the Trinity The difference in Borges’ portrayal of the God figure as opposed to the Christ figure is striking. In the essays of the 1940s and 50s, the Christ figure appears mainly in his discussions of the Trinity, even though we note that his notion of the Trinity is painfully removed from the perichoresis (or mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity) of Christian spirituality: The notion of mutual accountability lies at the heart of Christian revelation. Mutual accountability is one way of expressing the interdependence of all human persons with one another. From a deeper theological perspective one could draw on the concept of the perichoresis [. . .] of the persons of the Holy Trinity.11 For Borges, especially in his more youthful texts, the Trinity is akin to a horrendous, self-referential triad. It is a very personal, distressing concept, a nightmarish monstrosity which he calls espejos contrarios (‘Historia de la eternidad’). But why does he call the Trinity ‘opposing mirrors’? The effect of these ever-spiralling mirrors is a multiplying yet simultaneously fragmenting image, forever duplicated and broken down at the same time, reflecting one another and therefore empty. Could it be that there is a purely intellectual and distorted visualization, rather than an understanding of its nature as defined by Christianity as a dynamic, ongoing relationship of reciprocity between Father and Son, of unconditional, mutual, self-giving, which gives continuous birth to the Spirit, that is, Love? Thirty years later, there reappears the Christ figure, but no longer in the guise of one part of a horrendous whole, but rather as a poetic voice. This voice speaks of or as Christ in first person; it does not quite speak with him in dialogue, but edges closer to the second person, the ‘you’ uttered to Christ and therefore closer to a personal contact with the divine. The poetic voice is often one that can be associated with Christ’s humanity and his suffering; it appears in many of the poems bearing Gospel or Scripture titles, such as ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’, ‘Lucas, XXIII’, ‘Juan, I, 14’.

The debt to philosophies and doctrines Much stated, not least by Borges himself, is his debt to philosophical ideas (idealism, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Bradley, etc) and to theological doctrines (Christian and Judaic, Islamic and Buddhist), and Borges takes extraordinary liberty in his creative appropriation, and mostly

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always, his transformation of ideas. These transformations of, or Borgesian angles on philosophies and spiritualities are indicative of a close and passionate engagement in an attempt to intellectually approximate the concept of God. In view of the textual evidence, however, some of the much-quoted declarations by Borges regarding the seemingly ‘purely’ aesthetic, intellectual, narratorial and inspirational value of the philosophical and theological have to be reconsidered. His transformation of ideas and the engagement with doctrines point to a deep engagement not only with the ideas and debates themselves, but also with the underlying metaphysical and existential questions. It is a passionate and persistent engagement which is pertinent to contemporary culture. From the earliest, impetuous formulations of the early 1920s through to the mature and astute articulations displayed in the essays of the 1940s, a trajectory of critical thought is revealed, whereby Borges consistently affirms some doctrines over time (pantheism, idealism), while persistently transforming others: Nietzsche, Plato and even the much-acknowledged Schopenhauer. In this gravitational move of essayistic explorations, his refutations, postulations and variations of any one philosopher’s concepts can be seen as a ‘confluence of ideas’, as Sylvia Molloy puts it (1994, 31), never fixed, never final, always fluid and always susceptible to further alterations. We see then that throughout the genres, Borges displayed some very idiosyncratic ‘takes’ on philosophies and theologies but which increasingly, as he enters the middle years of his life, reveal a struggle to attain a faith reality, a deep spiritual searching or longing for a personal encounter with the divine. Borges seems to be driven by a searching mind which not only investigates philosophical claims, but challenges and takes issue with Berkeley, Nietzsche, Leibniz and, in fact, with Schopenhauer himself. Roberto Paoli (1992) has noted this divergence from Schopenhauer, whom Borges acknowledges to have been influenced by most profoundly. Engaging in a passionate and, at times, anguished debate, the essays of the period between 1922 and 1953 reveal a longing, accompanied by a certain apprehension to establish conclusively a definitive answer to the nature – if not to the existence – of time, reality, identity and the absolute. His preoccupation with philosophers and theological concepts goes further still than challenging their particular claims. Borges both modifies and transforms them. There is evidence, both in the early essays in Inquisiciones and also in the texts of the 1940s, that Borges was gravitating towards his own philosophical credo, or at any rate his own take on philosophies, most

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

notably in his divergence from Schopenhauer’s and Berkeley’s idealism, but also in his battling with the Eternal Return, and in his life-long fascination with Platonic Forms. Over the course of several decades, Borges proposes his very own, very particular version of idealism which Juan Nuño calls ‘ese idealismo de los instantes y las fugacidades’ (1986, 138–139). He also carves out his own preferred version of the Eternal Return. And engaging intensely with both the Platonic and the Aristotelian concepts of Ideas or Forms in the course of three decades, Borges eventually, in the prologue to Otras Inquisiciones, arrives at reconciliation with Platonic archetypes. This move from dismissal to embrace is one expression of his gravitation towards a notion of faith reality.

The Critical Debate: Religion and Philosophy While some critics identify in Borges a marked spiritual scepticism, others go further and interpret this as agnosticism or atheism. My own reading is that Borges oscillates between intellectual scepticism and an intuitive leaning towards a faith reality. There is evidence of recent analyses, especially in Latin America but also in Europe and the USA, which recognize the spiritual component in Borges’ work. In this context, the work of William Bossart, Ignacio Navarro, Stephen N. Williams and Edwin Williamson deserve special mention. Bossart’s book, Borges and Philosophy: Self, Time and Metaphysics, published in 2003,12 is a lucid book of analysis and interpretation written by an expert philosopher. It is an indication, albeit tentative, of a newly emerging trend among scholars who approach Borges’ writing from a spiritually inclusive perspective. Bossart argues against the prevalent rejection of theological and mystical readings of Borges’ texts and, although he is firmly grounded in the philosophical aspects, offers a reading from a Buddhist perspective. Ignacio Navarro’s ‘El más extraño de los hombres’ of 1997 13 identifies a Christian perspective in the poems which Borges wrote from the 1960s onwards. Navarro offers a lucid and theologically rigorous and inspiring interpretation of Borges’ work. Stephen N. Williams in ‘Concerning Borges’ identifies not only a spiritual sensibility in Borges’ writings, but also points to the significance of Schopenhauer and the connectivity between religion and literature (2007, 4, 5, and 6 respectively): ‘To that extent, at least from a religious point of view, the story of [Borges’] spiritual search can be told in religious terms. [. . .] What is the connection

Introduction

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between religion and literature in Borges? His work evidences some personal and agonised wrestling with fundamental questions of life and the world. From time to time, the specifically religious question (if we can attach specificity to a general term) surfaces very evidently. But the thoughts do not run uni-directionally.’ ‘Borges’ literary world is the world of the knife, machismo, cruelty, indifference, the tiger, the mirror, the labyrinth, the library. It is a world of duplication and repetition, the world of fragile identity encompassed by the sphere of definitive Possibility.’ ‘In Schopenhauer’s work, we notice both the wake of the ship that heads for the western horizons and the mirror that enables Borges to have a glimpse of the man on Golgotha [. . .].’ Edwin Williamson’s biography highlights a strong spiritual component to the writer’s latter life when he speaks of Borges’ ‘hunger for faith’ in his closing years (2004, 468). A growing number of authors have examined the philosophical and metaphysical concerns raised in Borges’ work, and some, especially in the Hispanic world, acknowledge an additional, spiritual element. Juan Nuño in La filosofía de Borges (1986), Juan Arana in El centro del laberinto: Los motivos filosóficos en la obra de Borges (1994), and in La eternidad de lo efímero (2000), and William Bossart’s Borges and Philosophy: Self, Time and Metaphysics (2003) deserve special mention. They all focus on reinstating a valid, coherent philosophical dimension to his work, as does Savater (2002). Lastly, for a recent study on Silesius in the work of Borges see Rogelio Rodríguez Cáceres (2004) El peregrino querubínico: estudio comparativo: la mística de Angelus Silesius en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges. *** From the 1950s to the 1980s, the critical trend was, broadly speaking, to dismiss the philosophical aspect of Borges’ work. Since the 1980s however, we note a trend towards the positive evaluation of the philosophical aspect, indeed of the philosophies put forward directly or indirectly by Borges. In a reversal of thought therefore, the mid-1980s sees a tendency to critically acclaim and analyse his contribution from a philosophical point of view. Foremost in this regard are Juan Nuño (1986), Roberto Paoli (1992), Juan Arana (1994), Ana Sierra (1997) and W. H. Bossart (2003). This trend is heralded in 1986 with Nuño’s La filosofía de Borges. Until then, apart from few though notable exceptions such as the pioneering contribution by Ana Maria Barrenechea (1957), Louis Vax (1964), J. Agassi

26

The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

(1970), Erika Lorenz (1975) and Jaime Rest (1976), who all did validate the philosophical significance of Borges’ writing, critics leaned towards disclaiming the value of his philosophical meditations.14 Nuño’s work may be considered a hallmark. It emphasizes Borges’ innovative, narratorial contributions to literature which, in Nuño’s view, although rooting in philosophy, are nonetheless undisputably narratives. He asserts that Borges’ true strength lies in ‘la creación de estructuras narrativas a partir de ideas filosóficas’ (1986, 15). Two less recent but significant contributions from the 1970s are those by Agassi (1970) and Lorenz (1975).15 In ‘Philosophy as Literature: The Case of Borges’, Agassi (1970, 291) notes Borges’ disagreement with the idealists and claims that Borges raises the issue of individuation from Schopenhauer’s point of view rather than impart his philosophy on the reader. This differentiation is significant, as critics in general have focused largely on Borges’ adoption of the doctrine, when in fact his declarations reveal a very particular branch of idealism which diverges significantly from several of the philosophers proclaimed by Borges himself. His modification of ideas and doctrines, philosophical and spiritual, is evident only on close analysis of how he puts forward the various metaphysical doctrines. In most instances, he does not openly – nor, perhaps, does he always intend to – contest them. His divergence, although in some cases explicit and deliberate, is, in other cases, only detectable in his portrayal or paraphrasing of ideas, which reveals a certain personal bias or understanding. This bias, particularly when he discusses mystical concepts, reveals a tendency to give a particular slant to a concept. These omissions, personal propensities, and slippages can be useful to our understanding of his work.

Philosophies, doctrines and their significance to Borges The view that Borges’ philosophical debt was a display of intellectual game playing, or purely instrumental to his narratives is a view which Borges himself may have lent great weight to in his much-quoted statement in the 1952 epilogue to Otras Inquisiciones. Borges confesses to an underlying scepticism to his belief system when he says (Borges, 1952, 192): Dos tendencias he descubierto, al corregir las pruebas [. . .]. Una, a estimar las ideas religiosas o filosóficas por su valor estético y aun por lo que encierran de singular y de maravilloso. Esto es, quizá, indicio de un escepticismo esencial.

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In 1973, in an interview with María Esther Vázquez (in Nuño 1986, 11), Borges is quoted as stating: No profeso ningún sistema filosófico, salvo, aquí podría coincidir con Chesterton, el sistema de la perplejidad [. . .]. Yo no tengo ninguna teoría del mundo. And in a radio interview with A. Carrizo in 1979 (in Nuño 1986, 12) he declares: A mí no se me ha ocurrido nada. Se me han ocurrido fábulas con temas filosóficos, pero no ideas filosóficas. Yo soy incapaz de pensamiento filosófico. One may, on the face of it, conclude that philosophical and spiritual ideas held no truth for Borges other than being of narratorial and inspirational use. But despite its many citations, the reference to his scepticism remains largely uncommented. And yet, it is this very scepticism which, in the case of Borges, underlies the pursuit of knowledge. It is curiosity which lies at the heart of investigating the great metaphysical questions of the how, why and who of our existence. But knowledge is tied to causality and also to time and space, which, when analysed with philosophical rigor, are prone to lead one to question, rather than answer, the underlying purpose of the things in themselves.16 It so seemed to have happened to Borges: his intellectual probings into the big metaphysical questions led him, at best, to what he calls perplejidad, and at worst to doubt and resignation into the nothingness of all that is deemed essential. Arana (1994, 29) comments on Borges’ increasing frustration with the unknowability of the nature of the world, which is accentuated as the years go by: ‘¿Son vanos, entonces, los esfuerzos del hombre para conocer? Así lo indica Borges muchas veces. [. . .] El desaliento de Borges se acentúa con los años.’ Borges’ professed scepticism is possibly a confluence of religious, philosophical and global doubt. At the heart of religious scepticism, which had affected Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche alike – all of whom much referred-to by Borges – is the notion of causality, that is, of referring the effect to a superior cause: [In the post-Newtonian age] it was no longer necessary to claim that the cause must manifest a higher level of being than its effect, e.g. that the

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The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

origin of mind and intelligence must itself be intelligent [. . .]. [It became harder] to superimpose a benign teleology upon nature to see the working there of a divine hand.17 Philosophical scepticism, on the other hand, ‘questions our cognitive achievements, challenging our ability to obtain reliable knowledge’.18 And global scepticism, particularly in the twentieth century, ‘casts doubt upon all our attempts to seek the truth’.19 Nuño holds that despite Borges’ preoccupation with idealism and his all-encompassing scepticism, which might easily have created a disjointed narrative worldview, the Borgesian world is instead kept together, as it were, by his holding on to the notion of memory. He goes so far as to propose that the very act of remembering constitutes for Borges his main ontological security, the proof of his own existence. Yet, the question of identity, of being or not being the same, remains open (Nuño 1986, 138–139): La inspiración metafísica de Borges, alimentada por ese idealismo de los instantes y las fugacidades [what he calls Borges’ ‘presentismo’ (1986, 132)], bien pudiera haber dado una visión discontinua y rota del mundo creativo borgiano, lo que no es ciertamente el caso. La recuperación de una seguridad filosófica, de un centro de operaciones cognitivas y, por supuesto, narrativas, tiene mucho que ver con la obsesión de Borges por la memoria, única garantía de la identidad del yo. Si Borges hubiera sido un filósofo a la moda cartesiana, su contrapunto al francés, padre del cogito, habría sido, en todo momento: Recuerdo, luego existo. La memoria salva no tanto porque recupera cuanto porque mantiene; aunque siempre quedará abierta esa duda por la que se cuela la fisura de otro: ser o no ser el mismo. This view may well be confirmed when proceeding from the fictions; however, it cannot from a reading of the early essays, where Borges categorically denies that the seat of identity, of the self, should be found in memory: Equivócase quien define la identidad personal como la posesión privativa de algún erario de recuerdos. (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, 1923, 94) Nuño (1986, 138–139) identifies time as the arch enemy of man as a whole, the catalyst for doubt and scepticism, the victor also over Borges himself.20

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La duda, la desazón, el desgaste provienen del viejo y arquetípico enemigo: el tiempo como forma de existir que sólo el hombre conoce. Por eso la gran batalla metafísica de Borges, en prosa y en verso, [. . .] contra el tiempo, resignado a dejarse arrastrar por él. In his view, Borges ‘translates’ philosophy into fiction, and in so doing avoids using philosophical terms; instead, Borges invents new narrative means to serve his ‘translation’ and Nuño suggests that in order to fully appreciate Borges one need not, indeed one must not limit oneself to a purely philosophical reading (1986, 138–139, my emphasis): Entre mentalismo y temporalidad se contiene el arco apretado de recursos metafísicos de Borges: los mundos posibles, las paradojas como grietas de irracionalidad, los espejos abominables por multiplicadores de las fugaces copias. Pero lo mejor es que para lograr la expresión de esas abstractas nociones, Borges levanta la imaginería de sus poderosos símbolos literarios. Dicho así, con términos del trillado vocabulario filosófico, no pasaría de ser un inane corolario de media docena de viejas ideas metafísicas. Lo bueno es que jamás Borges lo dice así: lo dice en y a través de sus relatos y ensayos, con el suficiente vigor literario como para cobrar vida propia y poder existir en tanto obras de creación artística, sin ninguna necesidad del apoyo interpretativo metafísico. I would like to add this: what Nuño calls the ‘metaphysical crutch’, which in his view is redundant to the art and the analysis of reading (Nuño refers mainly to Borges’ stories), can be a useful instrument in tracing the progression in Borges’ thinking, both from a personal-biographical, and also a literary point of view. His creative appropriation of philosophical and theological ideas is a sign of a conviction – as evidenced also in some of his most famous stories – that neither authorship, nor indeed the original text or idea, are sacrosanct. His transformation of philosophical ideas is, apart from being a conviction, the sign of a searching mind which cannot find solace in any of the answers which the intellect arrives at so painstakingly. For philosophy and spiritual notions can be shown to have been immensely relevant to Borges’ work. He is a ‘reader of ideas’ in the Barthesian sense that ‘a text [in the case of Borges: a concept] is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (Barthes 1977, 147).21 More so, the sheer perseverance over many decades and the unrelenting will to engage, debate, and argue with or against thinkers and their doctrines

30

The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

in his essays is ample proof of Borges’ seriousness in the matter. His engagement with doctrines is in both manifest and hidden relation to his texts (manifest in his essays, hidden in his stories).22 It deserves a great deal more than cursory attention. To ignore these philosophical and theological dimensions would mean to deny his texts the integral amplitude which attests to his thinking, his preoccupations, his textual passions and obsessions. Like Nuño, Roberto Paoli in ‘Borges y Schopenhauer’ (1992) identifies the various philosophical strands which constitute Borges’ worldview.23 Paoli focuses on two of Schopenhauer’s maxims: 1. that what we commonly perceive as chance is really necessity or causality; and 2. that the Will, as opposed to the free will, operates in both our successes and failures. Paoli poses the question whether Borges actually does believe in Schopenhauer’s philosophy which states that time multiplies that which is essentially one, or whether it serves him a merely literary purpose, an idea to be exploited literarily (1992, 201): A Borges le parece una imagen asombrosa la que brinda la filosofía de Schopenhauer, cuando afirma que el mundo no es tal como aparece y que el tiempo y el espacio multiplican y varían ante nuestros ojos alucinados lo que en la esencia es uno y lo mismo: es muy probable que Borges también crea que el mundo es así, pero más cierto es que él ha hallado en esta idea del mundo una imagen explotable literariamente al infinito. Arana, too, validates the philosophical inspirations in the works of Borges. In El centro del laberinto: Los motivos filosóficos en la obra de Borges (1994), he analyses Borges’ philosophical preoccupations and treats them homogeneously in the sense that he consciously brackets out considerations of chronology or evolution of thought. However, I would say that through tracing the very evolution we glean more of Borges’ worldview and draw closer in our understanding of his texts.24 Despite the positive evaluation of philosophical strands in Borges’ work, there are few who go so far as to identify a Borgesian philosophy as such. Arana, for example, insists on asking a crucial question: ‘¿Hay en Borges una filosofía?’, to which he answers: ‘Sí, creo que hay en Borges una filosofía, como en todos los hombres lúcidos y curiosos’ (both 1994, 19). As does Bossart who shows that Borges’ work evidences a coherent, philosophical path, Arana is undeterred by the various claims made by Borges himself as to his non-contribution to philosophical thought. Although it might of course be that in his statement, Arana has changed the meaning of the

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word ‘philosophy’ from its usual, more rarified sense to mean that any intelligent person has a basic outlook on the world which informs all of their views on more specific questions. Against Arana’s assertion that there is indeed a philosophy in Borges’ work, I would like to juxtapose the warning by Nuño against a purely philosophical and therefore limiting reading (1986, 12–13): Sería además de falso, pedante e innecesariamente recargado empeñarse en rastrear ideas filosóficas en toda la obra de Borges. [. . .] Que en Borges haya ciertos y determinados temas filosóficos no deberá nunca entenderse como que su propósito fue hacer filosofía y menos aún que su obra entera resuma o contenga claves metafísicas que sólo esperan por su despertar. [. . .] Jamás una lectura filosófica de Borges, por acertada o inteligente que sea, podrá sustituir la verdadera lectura, que es aquella que permite disfrutar de todo el esplendor de su expresión literaria y toda la fuerza de su riqueza imaginativa [. . .]. Finally, I would suggest that it is hard to imagine how any one reading of Borges can ever do justice to the creation, depth, and layering of his writing.

Chapter Synopsis The book’s three parts focus largely on one genre each, essay, ficción and poem. We’ll be moving from the one might say intellectual essays to the more expansive and flowing field of the stories before arriving at something altogether more intuitive and spiritual with the poems. These intuitive, spiritual seeds, however, are scattered all along this trajectory. The essays from the 1920s onwards are examples of particularly enduring themes. They are part of an abiding quest which can be traced across the genres. The essays inform and in turn are informed by the fictions of the 1930s and 40s. Self, time and the quest for God: these are some of the driving forces for Borges in his writing and searching. Although not overtly explicit, the presence of or desire for the God figure, and in some cases the marked absence of such, pervades much of his writing. The chronology of the essays which the book establishes reveals an evolution of thought which allows us to trace his attempts at finding conclusive answers. When Borges shifts his creativity to writing fictions and poetry, the progression is less obviously chronological. There is nonetheless an overall,

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spiritually intensifying trajectory from the early 1920s to the mid-1980s which allows us an insight into what compels Borges. Part I, entitled ‘Preludes to Mysticism’, constitutes a chronological analysis of essays from the 1920s to the 1950s, published in Textos recobrados: 1919–1929 (1997), Inquisiciones (1925), Discusión (1932), Historia de la eternidad (1936) and Otras Inquisiciones (1952). It introduces the reader to Borges’ major philosophical and theological preoccupations. Although he dismisses the notions of self, time and God altogether in his early days, he does engage with these just a few years later, after which his arguments become increasingly involved. Chapter 1 starts out with the youthful texts of the early 1920s as first instances of his philosophical and theological explorations when Borges boldly declares the nothingness of self and of God. These themes can be seen to be of an enduring nature, taken up time and time again in the course of more than half a century of writing. His reflections on the metaphysical questions of time and identity are symptomatic of a deeper, spiritual searching which can only be answered by a divine absolute. Chapter 2 traces the essays up to the mid-1930s to find the correlation between Borges’ notion of time, selfhood and the concept of God, as evident in his doctrinal explorations. In Chapter 3 we will see how his texts reveal an openness towards spiritualities, and how certain dualities are at the heart of the texts from 1936 onwards: the duality between time and eternity; between the individuated self and the self-subsumed; between pantheism and mysticism. The progression in Borges’ search is witnessed through key mystical texts, from Christian, Islamic, Judaic and Eastern spiritual traditions. Part II, ‘From Essay to Ficción’, opens with a bridge between the genres: the fictions as organic explorations of the essayistic themes. It also looks into Borges’ own debate, which, though carefully constructed, reveals in its very persistence a highly passionate and personally involved approach. Revisiting certain key essays raises several questions: What exactly is at the heart of Borges’ sense of dual self? How does this link to his concept of the divine? What is the link between his concept of identity and the presence, or otherwise, of a spiritual reality in his stories? It introduces those stories which exemplify the quest for the divine in the context of fragmented identities and fraught quests in Ficciones: El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (orig. 1941/42), Ficciones: Artificios (orig. 1944/56) and El Aleph (orig. 1949/52).

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Two major themes, which Borges works in different ways, stand out. They are the quest for God on the one hand, and plurality of time and self on the other. In the presence, or with the possibility of an absolute, his characters engage in a quest which, however, does not bring about a conclusive or fulfilling result. What emanates from his ficciones is a God who, on one level, is named only to be denied, belittled, proved improbable and rendered an intellectual or logical impossibility. The same God is, on a deeper level still, the very presence searched for. Knowledge, where attained, is a poisoned chalice, and divine attributes, where exercised by his characters, have crippling effects as the divine has been objectified. In this second part of the book, I attempt to answer some more questions: Why is it that Borges’ characters do not succeed in their quest for transcendence? What are the results of this objectification of the divine? Is it not that he communicates something, albeit obliquely, through the characters’ unsuccessful search by laying down pointers which allow the reader to unveil some of his own passionate concerns which permeate his writing? Part III, ‘The Long Quest’, points to the continuity of Borges’ explorations. These culminate in the poems of the 1950s to the 1980s, from El Hacedor to his last book of poetry, Los Conjurados, published in the year before his death. The poetic voice reveals that Borges cannot abandon the concerns which he explored intellectually in the essayistic period, and creatively in his fiction writing. The search for a spiritual reality is the underlying, driving force for many of his poems. They express a personal and at times tormented longing to encounter the divine. In these later poems, Borges reveals a hermeneutic, almost mystical intuition of a reality beyond that which can be expressed in either ordinary language or thought, as apprehended in the supreme art forms of music or poetry. This may account for the choice of poetry with its potential to transcend the very language it employs. Borges certainly has an increasingly intuitive, although perhaps unwitting sense of what is the core of Christian spirituality: a living relationship with a loving God. He approximates this encounter with the divine in many of his poems which bear titles relating to the Scriptures: ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’, ‘Juan, I, 14’, ‘Lucas, XXIII’, ‘Eclesiastés, I, 9’, ‘Para una versión del I King’, ‘Cristo en la cruz’. They reveal a poetic voice, which, in contrast to previous voices adopted, allows for the quest and also the longing for the divine object of the search to be gleaned more openly. His quest in these instances is no longer obscured, as it was in his earlier, more famous stories and essays.

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Instead, his poetry speaks explicitly of brotherhood, of the universality of suffering, the audacity of faith, of Christ crucified, of redemption and salvation. Borges relates these with an affinity to his own life, but also with a sense of personal regret as evidenced in the at times self-castigating poetic voice. These poems reveal a growing focus on, and identification with the crucified Christ. Finally, the very last chapter, ‘Towards Relationship’, explores a question which Borges asks and which goes to the core of Christianity itself. In ‘Cristo en la cruz’, a poem which he wrote two years before his death, Borges poses this question: what is the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice to me, who is suffering now?

Part One

Preludes to Mysticism

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Chapter 1

1922–1925: The Nothingness of Self and God

The mirage, the mirror image, the simulacrum, the dream are synonyms for Borges’ search for order and structure; for an underlying (absolute) reality or truth; for some permanence giving cohesion to our fleeting mortal existence; for some purpose. His quest only confirms to him what his sceptical mind had suspected all along: it renders visible the fissures through which the questioning mind, forever misled by its own limitations, must perceive the futility of any system claiming to give purpose or conclusive answers. For Borges, therefore, ideas, theories, philosophies and, indeed, the intellect that he employs so astutely, are insufficient. The conclusion he reaches in these early years is that there is quite literally nothing beyond or underneath the illusion which constitutes our everyday existence. His earliest arguments for idealism are based on, yet also deviate significantly from Berkeley and Schopenhauer. The belief that the world is but a dream, a man-made, mental construct where the notions of time, space and selfhood hold does not mean that appearances, that is, that which constitutes our empirical world, are mere hallucinations. Both Kant and Schopenhauer insist that appearances are not hallucinations, and that as such they can be experienced: The whole world of objects is and remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and forever conditioned by the subject; in other words, it has transcended ideality. But it is not, on that account, falsehood or illusion. (Schopenhauer, quoted in Sierra 1997, 12)1 Appearances are the necessary rules of our empirical world: time, space, individuation and the self are real in the sense that they are what we have access to, what we experience. This is unlike the things or the world as it is in itself, both of which lie beyond experience.2 But despite the oneric nature of the world, the dream is not to be mistaken for illusion or irreality. And herein lies the crux of what can be termed ‘the philosophy of Borges’.

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In the early 1920s, there is in Borges’ work, as yet, no differentiation in his discussion of time and identity; there is only denial. Borges holds that the world is a dream or illusion, with no dreamer to it. He accepts the minddependency of the world of appearances or perceptions but, in almost solipsistic fashion, denies it not only any underlying reality, but also denies the reality of the dream itself. It is interesting that when arguing his concept of non-causality in ‘El cielo azul, es cielo y es azul’, he recourses to Lichtenberg’s famous suggestion that we should say ‘It thinks’ rather than ‘I think’, as this very assertion by Lichtenberg has always found favour with solipsists.3 ‘El cielo azul, es cielo y es azul’ of 1922 (referred to as ‘El cielo azul’ (Borges, 1977)) is a very brief text in which Borges sketches and encapsulates all of the concerns which he is to take up and develop in the slightly later essays ‘La nadería de la personalidad (Borges, 1977) of 1923 and ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ (Borges, 1977) of 1925. In ‘El cielo azul’, he questions the nature of reality and wonders how to determine conclusively the one and only ‘reality’ of any one perceived thing. He resorts to various doctrines, mainly materialism and (Schopenhauer’s) idealism, in order to establish the difference between appearance and reality. Schopenhauer’s will, he says, is what underlies the phenomenal reality; but Borges cites other philosophers and their theories as to what underlies the world of appearances (the phenomenal world), such as the Platonic Idea, the Kantean thing in itself, etc. Having established the underlying fault of all of these doctrines (that fault being the adherence to the notion of causality), Borges then proposes his own doctrine of non-causality, claiming (like Hume) that there is no causal link between matter and mind, between object and subject, but a merely relational one. He also formulates his view on language as a player when he introduces one of his recurring convictions: that it is the intellect, not language, which, rather than elucidate the searching mind, misleads it. He argues that language, with its successive, linear structure and inept at arguing non-causality, is not to be blamed for causality itself. In ‘El cielo azul’, Borges explores the question of perception and reality and defames materialism, professing himself an advocate of Schopenhauer’s idealism.4 He introduces the subject by posing this question: how do we determine which is the ‘real’ landscape which changes before our very eyes? In ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ Borges asks the same question again in relation to the figtree. He argues that if it is sensory impressions which govern our perception of a (version of a) given thing – the landscape or the tree in his particular example – then how, when these impressions change, as

1922–1925: The Nothingness of Self and God

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they would in different circumstances of light, etc., can we decide which of the versions was the real one? How could we determine which qualities were essential and which were non-essential? And he asks: What are essential qualities anyway? What are the qualities that identify the landscape or the figtree as an individual in its own right? What are the non-essential qualities which, as such, are subject to change? In answer to this, Borges first resorts to the materialist’s explanation. The materialist denies the reality of sensory perceptions, situated somewhere between matter and spirit (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 119). The materialist postulates that the essence of the world is the atom. Substantividad is constituted by extension. Therefore, reality is physical extension, is matter and assumes the hallmark of existence. To which Borges retorts that the atom, which in itself is not perceptible sensually, nonetheless generates matter, which is indeed perceptible via the senses. This, he says, makes a mockery of the materialist’s attempt to denounce the reality of sensory perception, when, at the same stroke, it is sensory perceptions which the materialist uses to seemingly prove the reality of matter. Borges decries the materialist’s postulation of two universes, one essential and made of essential qualities, and the other phenomenal and made up of non-essential qualities (‘El cielo azul’, p. 155). And Borges hates multiplication. This is why he is so vehemently opposed to materialism: it adds one reality to another. Nuño (1986, 38) states that for Plato, the dream, as well as intercourse, are instances where man proves the unbridled multiplicity of the material world. Translated into Borgesian terms: in the dream, one reality (that of the dream, of the phenomenal world) is being referred to another (that of the waking state, the inaccessible, absolute reality) and so horribly and unnecessarily multiplied. Borges favours the idealist notion of perception as mind-dependent. In favour of idealism Borges says: Escuchemos al idealismo entonces. Schopenhauer, el mediador que con más feliz perspicacia y más plausibles abundancias de ingenios, ha promulgado esta doctrina, quiere dilucidar el mundo mediante las dos claves de la representación y la voluntad. (‘El cielo azul’, p. 155) We turn to Schopenhauer’s debt to the idealism of Kant and Berkeley, as well as to Plato’s archetypes.5 One of Schopenhauer’s great feats were the fusion of two essentially distinct notions: the fusion of Kant’s thing in itself with Plato’s Idea. Schopenhauer came to conclude that the Kantian thing

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in itself (albeit unknowable, inaccessible and never to be experienced) and the Platonic Idea (very knowable) were one and the same. Janaway gives this excellent explanation (1997, 245–246, my emphasis): Schopenhauer [. . .] begins by expounding an idealist position. This is the view that the material objects which we experience [matter] depend for their order and their existence on the knowing subject [mind]. [. . .] [Kant had explained] how what is perceived constitutes a world of objects when it is governed by the necessary rules of space, time and causality. Schopenhauer’s account of the world of empirical things is [that they] consist of matter, which fills distinct portions of space and time, and which is in causal interaction with other such portions. But his idealism says that without the subject of experience, all such objects would not exist. To be more specific: it is individual things that would not exist without the experiencing subject. What we experience in the ordinary course of our lives are distinct things [individuation]. One table is an individual distinct from another, one animal or person likewise. But what is the principle on which this division of the world into individual things works? Schopenhauer has a very clear and plausible answer: location in space and time. Now if you take this view, and also think, with Kant, that the organizing of things under the structure of space and time stems from the subject [i.e. the perceiving mind], and applies only to the world of phenomena, not to the world as it is in itself, then you will conclude that individuals do not exist in the world as it is in itself. The world would not be broken up into individual things, if it were not for the space and time which we, as subjects, impose. Here then are two important tenets of Schopenhauer’s philosophy: Space and time are the principle of individuation [. . .] and there can be no individuals on the ‘in itself’ side of the line. This view echoes the Hindu notion of the oneness of all there is. None of the relationships between subject and object, between time, space and causality ‘applies beyond the phenomena out of which our experience is composed’ (Janaway 1997). It means that none of it applies in the world considered as the thing in itself (the essential, underlying reality to our world of phenomena or representation). The nature of the underlying reality, of that which lies beyond ‘all these subject-imposed modes of connection’ is as follows: ‘The thing in itself [for Schopenhauer: the will] was a hidden essence working away underneath the order we imposed on the objects of our experience’ (Janaway 1997, 243). So, there is then something else besides the world of representation which is the ‘way things present themselves to us in experience’. It is the

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other side of the world, the Will, which in turn is ‘the world in itself, beyond the mere appearances to which human knowledge is limited’ (Janaway 1997, 226). Borges says in ‘El cielo azul’ (p. 156) that there is the Will, which operates inside of us and which is a counter-force to the external influences that surround us. Although we are subject to and able to register perceptions, that is, sensory stimuli, we can also create and manipulate them through the Will, which is inherent in all things animate and inanimate. What underlies all three essays, ‘El cielo azul’, ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ and ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ is a strongly anti-materialist and pro-idealist position. Borges’ questioning of the ‘reality’ or otherwise of the landscape in ‘El cielo azul’, and of the figtree in ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ echoes the debate between Locke’s materialism and Berkeley’s idealism which may be summarized as follows: Berkeley’s philosophy is perhaps the simplest version of idealism. For him the world consists of the infinite mind of God, the finite minds that he has created, and, dependently on them, the ideas possessed or experienced by these minds. For Berkeley there are no material things that exist independently of minds; common objects are collections of ideas in finite minds to the extent that they are observed by them, in the mind of God to the extent that they are not. (Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, quoted in Bullock and Trombley 1999, 412) By contrast, Locke’s materialism is defined in the following way: The universe is really a mechanical system of bodies in space. It is made, as it were, of matter; and material bodies really possess just those qualities required for their mechanical mode of operation – ‘solidity, figure, extension, motion or rest, and number’. These bodies operate on, among other things, the sense-organs of human beings, who possess minds – ‘immaterial substances’ – as well as bodies. When this occurs, the mechanical stimulation of these sense-organs and brain causes ‘ideas’ to arise in the mind, and these are the objects of which the observer is really aware. In some respects these ideas faithfully represent the actual character of the ‘external world’, but in others not. (Urmson and Rée 1989, 47) It is this very Lockean notion of an external world, somehow and to some extent representative of our mental ideas, which Berkeley challenges. For, he argues, ‘how could an observer, who was aware of nothing but his own

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ideas, know anything about Locke’s “external world”?’ (Urmson and Rée 1989, 47). We can now understand Borges’ assertion versus materialism in ‘El cielo azul’ (p. 155): Oigamos a los materialistas ahora. [. . .] Aberración es ésta [explicación]. [. . .] El materialismo, en suma, no explica nada, y el concepto de dos universos paralelos y coexistentes, uno esencial, continuo, colectivo [Locke’s ‘external world’], y el otro fenomenal, intermitente, psicológico [Locke’s ‘ideas’], es antes una complicación que una ayuda. Si lo aceptamos, nos encaran dos problemas en lugar de uno. Here, Borges takes particular exception to the notion of multiple universes and realities; it is an early statement of his later, more fervently expressed aversions to anything that smacks of multiplication, duplication, proliferation, such as occurs in mirrors. This is a view very much like Schopenhauer’s, who had felt that ‘realism – the alternative to idealism – saddles itself with two “worlds”, one of which is redundant’ (Janaway 1997, 247). Borges then goes on to scorn the distinction (Lockean in essence) between essential, objective qualities on the one hand, and subjective ones on the other, such as smell, sound and colour which, as Locke holds, are qualities that have no ‘outside’ reality (‘El cielo azul’, p. 155, and ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ p. 118). In order to eliminate both the intellectual absurdities and the aesthetic repulsion which he felt pervaded Locke’s position, Berkeley came up with a solution to all these horrors. All he had to do was deny the existence of matter. Up to this point, Borges agrees with Berkeley’s non-material universe, and with his denial of existence outside of the perceiving mind. But Berkeley, apart from holding intellectual and aesthetic objections to Locke’s materialism, also felt that Locke swerved dangerously towards atheism. It is in this next stage of Berkeley’s idealism, which explores the cause of our ideas in the mind, that Borges diverges most drastically from Berkeley and to which he dedicates a major part of his analysis in ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’. For it is with the notion of an absolute reality, Berkeley’s God, that Borges grapples and struggles with and ultimately argues against most vigorously. It lies at the heart of his scepticism. In the earliest of the three essays, ‘El cielo azul’, he does not explicitly argue with or against Berkeley, but he does argue against the notion of an underlying reality, against a higher reality beyond the landscape. Let us begin by posing the obvious objection to the mind-only existence of things as ideas in our minds: surely our ideas have causes that must come

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to us from some independent source such as a Lockean external world. Now Berkeley uses this very notion of necessary causation in order to both refute the ‘external world’, and to introduce his notion of the divine mind as the unifying force which lends cohesion to our perceptions; it is because of God, in whose mind ideas persist ‘and who is always there to “conceive” things, that they do not disappear when I turn my back on them’ (Scruton 1996, 24). Berkeley’s position can be stated like this (Honderich 1995, 90): To cause is to act; and nothing is genuinely active but the will of an intelligent being. Locke’s inanimate material bodies, therefore, could not be true causes of anything; that ideas occur in our minds as they do, with such admirable order, cohesion, and regularity, must be the will of an intelligent being [. . .]: God, eternal and omnipresent, omnipotent, ‘in whom we live, and move and have our being’, ‘who works in all, and by whom all things consist’. In ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ (1925) – referring and intending to strengthen the argument of ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ (1923), but also referring back to his initial position in ‘El cielo azul’ (1922) – Borges adopts Berkeley’s theory about the mind-dependency or perceptiondependency of things, but challenges his belief in a divine being lending coherence, reality and persistence to these things even when not perceived. The claim Borges makes of the mind-dependency of the world is therefore consistent. He confirms the nullity of time, space, and the self. He denies that there is a subject (self, and also God) as well as an object (the dream, our mirage existence, what we perceive as reality). But only in the last of the three essays in question, ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, does he explicitly challenge Berkeley’s underlying reality, which is God. He openly calls attention to Berkeley’s mistake, ‘la falacia raigal de Berkeley’ (p. 122), a mistake which he attributes to the fact that he was not only a thinker, but also a theologian and therefore, in his view, somewhat constrained. Berkeley affirms that nothing exists outside the mind of an observer. He says that while things are not being perceived, they either do not exist at all (which is what Borges seems to hold) or they exist in the mind of an eternal spirit, which Borges denies. Thus freedom of thought, for Borges, comes at a price: the realization as to the nothingness of existence, a kind of of solipsistic loneliness beyond that which is mere apparition. In his critique of Berkeley, Borges does more than object to the notion of a God who is at the heart of, and sustains, the phenomenal world. What Borges seems to object to is the very nature of Berkeley’s God, whom he

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sees devalued, diminished as it were, to a kind of cement which serves to lend cohesion to the otherwise disparate sensory perceptions. Borges laments that in this case God is not even creator, but merely serves to stop the world from emerging and submerging from existence depending on the whim of the individual beholder: [For Berkeley,] Dios no es hacedor de las cosas; es más bien un meditador de la vida o un inmortal y ubicuo espectador del vivir. Su eterna vigilancia impide que el universo se aniquile y resurja a capricho de atenciones individuales, y además presta firmeza y grave prestigio a todo el sistema. (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 122, my emphasis) His objection is this: since things do not really have an existence in themselves, they only figuratively speaking come and go into existence through the mind of the beholder. There is no necessity, not even on logical grounds, for Berkeley’s God: ‘Olvida Berkeley que una vez igualados la cognición y el ser, las cosas en cuanto existencias autónomas cesan de hecho y sólo traslaticiamente cabe decir que se aniquilan y resurgen’ (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 122). Borges sets out to prove the fallacy by applying Berkeley’s reasoning to the spirit which Berkeley had applied to matter. Berkeley says that things only exist for as long as they are being perceived by a mind, to which Borges replies: yes, but the mind only exists in as much as it perceives and thinks of things. The implication is that since the thing has no reality outside the mind, and the mind only exists as perceiver of that which is unreal, the mind or spirit itself has no reality. This is how Borges can claim that the existence of a mind does not entail a self or a divinity lending coherence or persistence; that life turns into a dream without a dreamer, and that the grand tenets of metaphysics, self, space and time, are null and void: Sí, pero sólo existe la mente como perceptiva y meditadora de cosas. De esta manera queda desbaratada, no sólo la unidad del mundo externo, sino la espiritual. El objeto caduca, y juntamente el sujeto. Ambos enormes sustantivos, espíritu y materia, se desvanecen a un tiempo y la vida se vuelve un enmarañado tropel de situaciones de ánimo, un ensueño sin soñador. [. . .] Lo que sí se vuelve humo son las grandes continuidades metafísicas: el yo, el espacio, el tiempo. [. . .] Convendréis conmigo en la absoluta nadería de esas anchurosas palabras: Yo, Espacio, Tiempo . . .. (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, pp. 123–124, my emphasis)

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It means that life turns into a muddle made up of states of mind, a lie without even a liar, an object without a subject, a simulacrum without anything that may give rise to it. This Borgesian view contrasts of course sharply with Schopenhauer’s concept of subject and object. Just as Schopenhauer’s world of representations is only the as it were visible layer of a construct, the real dynamics and ingredients of life, according to Borges’ rendering of his favourite philosopher, are Representation and the Will. But Borges gives his reader the explanations of other philosophers as to what underlies the world of appearances: Pitagoras, whose world is built on numerical principles; Plato’s notion of the existence of universal Ideas which are being copied in this world and whose memory resides in us, allowing us to recognize and place sensory perceptions; the Cabbala which proposes that we are all just emanations of a God whom we long to be united with once again. By this stage, Borges has prepared the ground for his own refutation of causality and teleology. His debate around idealism gravitates towards his objection to causality, and as this is linked to the relationship between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, the denial of causality leads him to deny the self, personal identity, as well as time. Schopenhauer’s understanding of causality and the relationship to subject and object is that there can be no subject (mind) without the object (matter) and vice versa. He also makes a case for causality in the phenomenal world, and this is one of the main points of divergence between Schopenhauer and Borges. For Schopenhauer, there could, to take Borges’ example of the landscape, be no landscape (object) without a perceiver (subject), nor could there be a yo (subject) without something (object) ‘que ocupe el campo de mi consciencia’ (‘El cielo azul’, p. 156). Schopenhauer’s view of causality is subject-centred and subject-dependent, and although both subject and object are mind-dependent, they are mutually necessitating, mutually inclusive: [One of Schopenhauer’s main arguments for idealism] rests on the concepts of subject and object. The subject is that which knows or experiences, the object that which is known or experienced. The world of representation, for Schopenhauer, requires both. He makes two large claims: first, that nothing can be both object and subject [the self cannot know itself], secondly that there can never be a subject without an object, or an object without a subject. It is the last point which he takes to establish idealism [. . .]. Nothing can be an object for experience without there being a subject to experience it or think about it. [. . .] Whatever we can

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experience must exist only in relation to our experiencing it. ( Janaway 1997, 248–249) For Hume, on the other hand, there was no such causal link, only a purely relational one. Schopenhauer’s conception of causality is one of the main tenets of his philosophy, as causality is one of the necessary principles of the phenomenal world. Causality is for Schopenhauer as necessary a principle as is the notion of a perceiving subject and a perceived object, a concept which he shares with Kant and the Upanishadic writings.6 When Borges declares that life turns into a dream without a dreamer, he goes against one of the ground rules of Schopenhauer’s philosophy: It is vital to understand that Schopenhauer’s subject of representations is not any part of the world of objects. It is not a thing at all. It is not in space or time, does not interact causally with objects, is not visible, not identified with the body, or even with the individual human being. His favourite metaphorical images for it are the eye that looks out on the world but cannot see itself [. . .]. The subject is where experiences all converge, but it is never itself an object of experience. [ Janaway quotes from Schopenhauer:] ‘We never know it, but it is precisely that which knows wherever there is knowledge’ (Janaway 1997, 266). Borges’ attitude to the subject, and by extension his attitude to the self may be problematic, but Schopenhauer’s causes great confusion in itself and is not without its flaws. This is due to the fact that Schopenhauer himself is ambivalent and remains unclear. For him there is between the subject (mind) and the object (matter) a veil of illusion, mâyâ which renders the objects (matter) oneric in nature. The only explanation he had was of a miracle par excellence in order to explain the predicament in which his conception of the subject as pure mind and not identifiable with the individual human being places us: how can I not be a part of the world of time, space and objects, when at the same time I have an acting, material body? The famous analogy he uses is of the subject as the all-seeing eye which cannot see itself (Janaway, 1997, 269)7: The subject which we take ourselves to be is – in Schopenhauer’s most extreme claim about it – merely apparent. [. . .] The subject that represents and the object that is represented are both, in a sense, illusory, because in the world in itself the division between subject and object does not exist.

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Borges’ concept of non-causality originates in Hume, who famously attacked the notion of a necessitating tie between cause and effect. Hume’s view, proposed in his Treatise of Human Nature, I.iii.14 of 1737 (cited in Honderich 1995, 128) and borne out of his own scepticism, is that causality is only a matter of relation: resemblance, contiguity and causation. There are no necessary connections over time ‘for it is always possible that the world should end before the second event occurs’ (Scruton 1996, 176). For Hume, causal necessity is mind-dependent and subject-centred, it does not exist between objects: We have no grounds for affirming that things in the world are necessarily connected. [. . .] Necessities merely reflect the ‘relations of ideas’. [. . .] Necessities do not inhere in the world, but only in our ways of describing it. (Scruton 1996, 175) This is a view very much unlike Bradley’s for whom nothing is contingent, not in the absolute and not even in the world of appearances (see Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 1893). When Hume speaks of the cement of the universe, he is referring to the building blocks of our perception of the world (Honderich 1995, 128): Hume’s description of resemblance, contiguity and causation – the three relations which induce people to associate ideas –, and hence to build up their picture of the world. There is an echo of Hume’s negation of the ‘I’ within consciousness when Borges denies the personal subject (‘I’) in the Cartesian formula cogito ergo sum in both ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ and ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’. What Borges really does is oppose the Cartesian ergo sum, in fact the ergo itself, causality: De nada os valdría el famoso baluarte del cogito ergo sum. Pienso, luego soy. Si ese latín significara: Pienso, luego existe un pensar – única conclusión que acarrea lógicamente la premisa – su verdad sería tan incontrovertible como inútil. Empleado para significar pienso, luego hay un pensador, es exacto en el sentido de que toda actividad supone un sujeto y mentiroso en las ideas de individuación y continuidad que sugiere. La trampa está en el verbo ser, que según dijo Schopenhauer es meramente el nexo que junta en toda proposición el sujeto y el predicado. Pero quitad ambos términos y os queda una palabra desfondada, un sonido. (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 124)

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The famous Cartesian formula is derived from the one and only indubitable proposition which Descartes had arrived at through his doubting: that it is beyond doubt that he was doubting, which meant that he was thinking. And from this followed the other indubitable proposition, I exist, ‘for it was self-evident that nothing could think without existing’ (Urmson and Rée 1989, 74), that is, that there could be no thinking without a thinker. This reminds us of Borges’ introduction of Lichtenberg’s (solipsistic) assertion in ‘El cielo azul’ that we should say ‘It thinks’, analogous to ‘It is raining,’ rather than ‘I think’. It amounts to an attack on Descartes’ ‘I’ in the cogito and is the negation of the self as such. Borges had already, in the same essay of 1922 resorted to Lichtenberg. Borges’ assertions in ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ take an even more definite shape in the above quote from ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’: he holds that there is only a subject, a thinking, therefore a process, but it does not follow therefore that there is individuation or continuity (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 124); he holds that there is no thinker (no subject) nor indeed a thought (no object) but only the processes (the verbs) of thinking. Once one removes subject and object, as Borges does, there only remains a sound without any meaning (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 124). Life, once again, is rendered a dream with no dreamer to it. Scruton explains (1996, 82): [Lichtenberg] suggested that Descartes was entitled only to assert the existence of thought: not ‘I am thinking’ but ‘it is thinking’, to be understood on the analogy with ‘it is raining’. Certainly, there is thinking going on; but why assume the existence of a thinker? Citing Schopenhauer, Borges holds that the verb ser denotes merely a relation between the subject and the object (see also Hume), and not, he is adamant about that, existence; the verb ‘be’, as Schopenhauer argues, does not denote self-existence or being, but serves only as the link between the subject and the object (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 124). This has consequences for the notion of a self. For Borges it raises the question of being vs. existence. Borges’ denial of causality, and his rejection of the Cartesian cogito lead us back to Schopenhauer’s conception of the will as a non-teleological force,8 a drive towards survival and reproduction, which is present in man and nature alike, and which Schopenhauer believed necessarily involved the dual evils of pain and boredom (see Janaway 1997, 226–227). The will is ‘the murky reality underlying the empirical world in which the individual toils and tries to understand the connections of things.’ (Janaway 1997, 244). Through art, however, man could escape ordinary consciousness and also

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the ‘murky reality of the will’ into the realm of Platonic Ideas, which is ‘an exceptional vision to aspire to, of all connections undone and a brighter reality contemplated without striving and pain’ (Janaway 1997, 235). When Borges questions causality as well as teleology, then this is not a whim. It is an expression, as it has been for generations of post-Newtonian thinkers, of his grappling with truths which do no longer hold a conclusive answer. At the heart of this new scepticism is the doubt as to the purposefullness of the universe.9 Borges is not alone: the Platonic-absolutist conception of time and the nature of the universe is based on the intelligibility of the world. It is also based on the belief that language and thought (or logos) are accurate vehicles for recognizing and representing an intelligible reality. Language and thought are of course the very vehicles which Borges questions, and yet this is precisely what he is compelled to resort to. For Plato, Aristotle and Descartes there exist necessary truths. This reveals their conviction as to the teleology of the universe: Aristotle’s cosmology operates for a purpose and can be explained according to certain goals. The teleological view which supported Aristotle’s Prime Mover and St Augustine’s creator, suffered great losses in the age of Newtonian mechanics which paved the way for a deterministic approach to science and to the universe: each action, each effect could be explained by way of referring it to a natural cause, and there no longer seemed to be a need for a creator. Teleology, which received a further blow when Einstein raised the problem of the intelligibility of the universe, had finally to be abandoned altogether when Max Planck developed his quantum physics which removed all certainty from a hitherto deterministic world. Effects no longer needed causes, least of all a creator; uncertainty, chance and probability now reigned supreme, and Borges is very much a man of this age. For Kant and also Schopenhauer, causality, teleology, time, space and self are real and can be experienced, albeit only in the world of appearances. This is not so for Borges for whom, at this youthful stage, these appearances are all illusions, even in the phenomenal world. He disagrees with the concepts of causality and of an absolute reality, put forward by Plato, Kant and also Schopenhauer. He denies the validity of those tenets which constitute the world of experience, that is, the phenomenal world: time, space, the principle of causality and the notion of the (individuated) self. It must be emphasized that Borges, in denying the existence of those principles even in the phenomenal world, diverges drastically from both Kant and Schopenhauer.10 His vehement denial of causality leads him to deny time and succession which prepares the ground for his own ensuing refutation of causality and the postulation of no causalidad. What all of the doctrines put forward by Borges have in common, be it Schopenhauer’s, Plato’s,

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Kant’s or Berkeley’s, is their teleology, their purposefulness, in referring one thing to another in a causal, teleological chain which places some kind of higher or underlying force at its centre. Borges considers this a major weakness in each one of these doctrines: Empero tantas divergencias [entre los filósofos citados] tienen un centro común: la configuración práctica de referir un fenómeno a otros [i.e. causality], y remachar a la existencia un eje que, según las idiosincracias de escuelas, denomínase Dios, Representación o Energía. Los que han subrayado esa universal endeblez hanse obstinado en ver en ella una mera bravata del idioma [. . .]. La culpa está en la indagación, que no en la respuesta. (‘El cielo azul’, p. 156) This is what Borges objects to most vigorously: the concept of causality which means that in each doctrine, one reality is merely referred to another and so, in fact, doubled, which is a horrendous notion for him (‘El cielo azul’, p. 157). This is an early voicing of his repulsion against the doubling of worlds which he is to reiterate all through his work. In ‘El cielo azul’, Borges invites an application of any of the previously given (teleological, causal) doctrines to the landscape and concludes that, far from elucidating or submerging with our initial impression of the scenery, any doctrine of causality merely adds another layer, another version of that which is perceived, another present. By referring one reality to another, a potentially endless multiplication ensues.11 For an absolute idealist like Bradley, knowledge of ultimate reality cannot be attained by any mode of thinking, since perceptions or any other components of the external world do not have any material, independent existence (espoused in Appearance and Reality, Book xviii, 1946 edition). What really constitute absolute reality are finite centres of experience, unidentifiable for man who is adversely affected by the notion of time. Time, for Bradley, is a matter of relation between events (Urmson and Rée 1989, 53): [Bradley] shows that quality and relation, substance and cause, space and time, self and object, are all of them, if taken as real, beset by insoluble contradictions and must therefore be dismissed as ‘appearance’. The absolute reality must have a nature which transcends all these categories. [. . .] Reality must have a type of unity unlike anything in our worlds of rational thought, a unity above and beyond relations, a unity to whose

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nature only the undifferentiated unity of feeling gives any clue. This absolute reality differentiates itself into finite centres of experience which however cannot be identified with human persons because of the element of time which infects all human life. For Schopenhauer, transcending time, causality, and the division between subject and object were possible through art; in Bradley’s philosophy, transcendence is possible through feeling. Borges, however, remains sceptical of his own intuition as to the possibility of transcendence. Even his strong experience of a state of timelessness which he is to recall seven years later in ‘Sentirse en muerte’, is insufficient to sustain his doubt. Borges’ ‘new present’ (the other version) groups together all other presents into the word ‘past’, which remains inaccessible and unalterable. Due to the randomness of dividing time into past, present, future, the past, for him, is just a word to denote difference, not any inherent temporality (‘El cielo azul’, p. 157). The present does not change into the past but adds another state, another instant. This is how he can ask ‘¿Dónde está mi vida pretérita?’ (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 123). The multiplication of instances, what we conventionally consider the past, raises for Borges the question as to where these instances go and whether they continue to exist. He asserts that not any one (‘present’) moment is capable of modifying another (‘past’) one, which means that nothing can alter anything, everything is static (what he calls enterizo). The consideration of the nature of the present moment in relation to the concept of eternity is to become ever more crucial to him. When Borges speaks of the dream, or rather the nightmare, he posits that even though we may awake from the dream, it still exists as a mental image, with all the distressing emotional consequences, and cannot be undone: ‘El horror de la pesadilla que nos maltrate en la noche no aménguase en un ápice por la comprobación que al despertar hacemos de su “falsía”’ (‘El cielo azul’, p. 157). The nightmare for Borges is the simulacrum of our supposed ‘reality’; for what would we wake up into, what would we refer the simulacrum, the phenomenon to? We would wake up into the absolute reality, except that we cannot fathom this, due to the confines of our limited consciousness. Waking from the illusory empirical world into a reality where we realize that we have been dreaming, is useless, because the underlying reality, even if there was one, is inaccessible to us, we cannot experience it. We are in a no-man’s-land, somehow worse off than before: woken up from the dream

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which we held to be our reality, yet left outside some absolute reality. Both these scenarios are fates suffered by some of Borges’ later, fictional characters. There is therefore no solace in living in the illusion of the dream, nor is there a revelation, an entry to be experienced into a higher reality. This state of ambiguity is Borges’ nothingness. When we link his notion of an unalterable moment with the above, we arrive at the following: the past moment is the dream (nightmare, mirage, reality), whereas the present moment is the waking state. But neither the present moment nor having woken up changes anything. This is so because, according to Borges, there is no time and thus no change. And even if there were to be anything beyond the dream, or the mirage, we would be forever barred from experiencing it. This causes a kind of experiential stalemate. Borges concludes in ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, where he had developed this theme further: El tiempo es un hecho intelectual y objetivamente no existe. Tendríamos así una eternidad que abarcaría todo el tiempo posible [. . .] en un presente puro. (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 126) He asserts the inaccessibility of any underlying reality and holds that since we are forever prisoners of our consciousness and have never experienced anything outside of it, it is pointless to postulate anything outside of this inescapable consciousness: Pero la verdad es que no podemos salir de nuestra consciencia, que todo acontece en ella como en un teatro único, que hasta nada hemos experimentado fuera de sus confines, y que, por consiguiente, es una impensable y vana porfía esa de presuponer existencias allende sus linderos. [. . .] No hay en la vida continuidades algunas. Ni el tiempo [. . .] ni el yo [. . .]. Todo está y nada es. (‘El cielo azul’, p. 157, my emphasis) The fault in attempting to access or at least fathom reality, the fault also in trying to apprehend the nature of the illusory concept of time, however, lies not in language alone, says Borges, but in posing the question in the first place. Yet he also believes that language is inept at arguing anything but causality, such as his own concept of non-causality: ‘No engañan los sentidos, engaña el entendimiento’ (‘El cielo azul’, p. 158). He urges readers to go beyond that and get to the essence of what he has expounded, upon which they will surely realize that all certainties come tumbling down:

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Vuestro Yo consumará su jubiloso y definitivo suicidio; las más opuestas opiniones nunca se darán el mentís; la Eternidad, arrugada, cabrá en la corta racha de lo actual, se quebrantarán las formidables sombras teológicas, y el espacio infinito caducará con su exorbitancia de estrellas. (‘El cielo azul’, pp. 157–158) In ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ Borges reiterates his conviction, first expressed in ‘El cielo azul’, that there are no underlying divinities nor realities, that life is mere appearance, and that there is no reality, not even to the phenomenal world (p.102), thus deviating, as he had done before and was to consistently over the following two decades, from both Berkeley and Schopenhauer: No hay en los árboles divinidades ocultas, ni una inagarrable cosa en sí detrás de las apariencias, ni un yo mitológico que ordena nuestras acciones. La vida es aparencia verdadera. (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 102) There is only appearance, and there is no transcendence of ordinary consciousness as Schopenhauer had promised. ‘Todo está [appearance, transitory, illusory] y nada es [essence, continual]’ (‘El cielo azul’, p. 157). There is no end, no purpose, no cause. Citing Lichtenberg, the eighteenth-century German physicist quoted by Schopenhauer as well, Borges proceeds to question causality and affirms the evanescent nature of all things; the absence of any continuity or permanence; the non-existence of time and the self; the ineptness of language: ¿Y si el principio de causalidad fuera un mito [. . .]? Esa conjetura [Lichtenberg’s denial of causality] se nos antoja imposible. Sin embargo, una fácil meditación nos convencerá de su validez y hasta de su certidumbre axiomática. (‘El cielo azul’, pp. 156–157) On the question of language, Honderich (1995, 487) affirms that: Our false philosophy is incorporated in our whole language; we cannot reason without, so to speak, reasoning wrongly. We overlook the fact that speaking, no matter of what, is itself a philosophy. In place of teleology, Borges therefore proposes non-causality, what he calls entereza (‘El cielo azul’, pp. 156–157). See also ‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 94 for the solipsistic independence of everything. His conclusion is that it is wrong to suppose that a predicate entails a subject. He holds

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instead that a predicate entails merely a process, at which point he continues to question the existence of a subject, of a self altogether.12 We can therefore delineate his early philosophy, as it were, when we proceed from his analysis and interpretation of Schopenhauer’s and Berkeley’s idealism. The consequence in accepting Berkeley’s denial of matter, a most radical statement indeed, would, against all expectation, be far from unsettling since: The actual course of our everyday experience would be quite unaffected. On Locke’s own admission, we are never actually aware of anything but our own ideas; to deny the existence, then, of his ‘external objects’, material bodies, is not to take anything that has ever entered into our experience, and is indeed to leave quite undisturbed the opinions of unphilosophical men (Urmson and Rée 1989, 48, my emphasis). Berkeley’s certainties are not affected; Borges’, on the other hand, come to suffer greatly. It is important to stress again: idealism, both Schopenhauer’s and Berkeley’s particular versions of it, does not deny the existence of time, space, causality and the self in the phenomenal world. But Borges does deny exactly that: his standpoint is that neither the tenets of the phenomenal world, nor that which lies beyond it are real or accessible respectively. He denies not only matter, as Berkeley had done, but also that which is held to constitute the phenomenal world: time, space, causality, the self. He diverges from Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer, and develops his own strand of idealism which does not accept the duality of Kant’s appearance and thing in itself; it denies the difference between Schopenhauer’s worlds of appearances and of will; between Bradley’s appearance and absolute, and Berkeley’s distinction between appearance and reality. It is the bleakest of idealisms, because, quite literally, nothing is, and nothingness reigns supreme. As he says in ‘El cielo azul’: todo está y nada es, neither the dream nor that which lies beyond it; for even if there were such a reality beyond the dream, we could never experience it. This indeed is a Borgesian no-man’s-land where everything that had hitherto lent certainty and coherence to existence crumbles. Yet, bleak as this outlook may seem, Borges consoles the reader that it only affects the unimaginable whole of all instances of which life is made up, the non-existent yo de conjunto of which he speaks in ‘La nadería de la personalidad’; it does not, he assures us, affect individual instances or even clusters of instances. The self-sufficiency and inalterability of the moment as well as the accumulation of states (Borges’ presentismo) is left intact:

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No hay que dolerse de la confusión que trae consigo esta doctrina, pues ella únicamente atañe al imaginario conjunto de todos los instantes del vivir, dejando en paz el orden y el rigor de cada uno de ellos y aun de pequeños agrupamientos parciales. Lo que sí se vuelve humo son las grandes continuidades metafísicas: el yo, el espacio, el tiempo. (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 123) In ‘La nadería de la personalidad’, which he is to rework two years later as ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, his focus is on identity and causality. He again denies Descartes and sets out to prove that the concept of personality (self or subject) lacks both metaphysical foundations and innate reality, and that it is a construct brought about by vanity and habit. He raises the difference between being and existence, that is, between the awareness of being and actual existence and takes a strong anti-psychological, antiromantic stance when he talks of ‘idólatras de su yo’ (p. 99–101): selfcentred, romantic writers of the nineteenth century, ‘egolatría romántica [. . .] vocinglero individualismo’ (p. 101)13. Most notably, Borges recounts his personal experience of the nothingness of personality and proposes his own definition of what the self is or not is. He holds that identidad personal does not rest in memory. This is a theme which is later to find its way into another one of his fictions, ‘El inmortal’ in El Aleph: ‘Equivócase quien define la identidad personal como la posesión privativa de algún erario de recuerdos’ (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 94). We see therefore how in the 1920s, he denies that memory entails personal identity; rather: memory is merely a name for the repeatability of one or more states of mind. It is a mere repetition of a state of mind, of one or more sensory perceptions (feel, touch, etc.), which is confirmed by our sense of alienation at revisiting any past states. When Borges denies that there is a fixed identity, this leads him to postulate that the self is no more than a will and some physical attributes of muscular and sensory activity. But although he denies the self, he does not deny feeling or conceiving of oneself as an individuated self. In other words, he is convinced that the only thing he can possess is the mental certainty of being, which, however, does not entail actual existence: Yo [. . .] sólo soy una certidumbre que inquiere las palabras más aptas para persuadir tu atención. Ese propósito y algunas sensaciones musculares y la visión de límpida enramada que ponen frente a mi ventana los árboles, construyen mi yo actual [present instant of self]. Fuera vanidad suponer que ese agregado psíquico ha menester asirse a un yo para gozar

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de validez absoluta, a ese conjetural Jorge Luis Borges en cuya lengua cupo tanto sofisma y en cuyos solitarios paseos los atardeceres del suburbio son gratos. No hay tal yo de conjunto. (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 94, my emphasis). Existence, too, is to be proved by sensory perception or the physicality of a body: ‘No soy mi actividad de ver, de oír, de oler, de gustar, de palpar. Tampoco soy mi cuerpo, que es fenómeno entre otros’ (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 103).14 His experience of being therefore contrasts with the notion of an absolute (Honderich 1995, 2): [The absolute is] that which has an unconditioned existence, not conditioned by, relative to, or dependent upon anything else. Usually deemed to be the whole of things, conceived as unitary, as spiritual, as self-knowing (at least in part via the human mind), and as rationally intelligible, as finite things [such as time, space, Bradley’s God], considered individually, are not. The expression was introduced into philosophy by Schelling and Hegel. In the English-speaking world it became the key concept of such absolute idealists as [. . .] F. H. Bradley. For Bradley, ‘the Absolute is one system and its matter is sentient Experience’ (Appearance and Reality 1893, Chapter XIV, 127–142): The Absolute is not many; there are no independent reals. The universe is one in this sense that its differences exist harmoniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing. Hence the Absolute is [. . .] an individual and a system [. . .]. Can we say anything about the concrete nature of the system? [. . .] When we ask as to which matter fills up the empty outline, we can reply in one word, that this matter is experience. [. . .] Sentient experience , in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real. [. . .] Feeling, thought, and volition (any groups under which we class psychical phenomena) are all the material of existence, and there is no other material, actual or even possible. [. . .] It will hence be a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. [. . .] The Absolute holds all possible content in an individual experience where no contradiction can remain. In ‘La nadería de la personalidad’, Borges recounts the extraordinary experience which had revealed to him the nullity of personality from which he concludes that that there is no such thing as an enduring, permanent

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identity (yo de conjunto), only fleeting instances or states of self, each subsequent instance annihilating the previous. On departing from his friend whom he is sure never to see again, Borges feels the overwhelming need to bare his soul and offer it to his friend, when all of a sudden he is struck with the conviction that there is no such thing as personalidad, that there is nothing persistent or enduring that would lend cohesion to this disjointed, fragmentary series of self-sufficient (what he calls enterizo) instances of self, all present and devouring of any previous one. He realizes that beyond the merely circumstantial and transitory (lo actual, which is the accidental, the contingent self) he is nothing and nobody, and he asks: is there therefore no soul, no essence to my fragmentary being? He tocado con mi emoción ese desengaño [de que no hay tal yo de conjunto] en trance de separarme de un compañero. [. . .] Entendí ser nada esa personalidad. [. . .] Ocurrióseme que nunca justificaría mi vida un instante pleno, absoluto, contenedor de los demás, que todos ellos serían etapas provisorias, aniquiladoras del pasado y encaradas al porvenir, y que fuera de lo episódico, de lo presente, de lo circunstancial, no éramos nadie. Y abominé de todo misteriosismo. (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 99) His mistake here, as he is to admit in the 1953 prologue to ‘Historia de la eternidad’, is to treat time as being made up of divisible instances, which is something that also underlies the paradox. His resignation into the non-existence of an all-inclusive moment in time and his denial of a unity which might encompass all personal states past and present, ties in with the assertion voiced in ‘El cielo azul’: that not one moment can modify nor change another, that the past is indelible. Borges’ presentismo is therefore somewhat fragmentary. He cannot ascertain his soul, his essential self, the yo de conjunto which he so vehemently denies yet seems to long for so earnestly. There is, as yet, no unified, non-circumstantial self, no essential self: ‘cualquier actualidad de la vida es enteriza y suficiente’. In an extremely fractured view he asserts that every one of life’s instances is whole and self-contained; there is nothing lacking, but, and this is significant, there is nothing underlying either. Borges quotes Grimm and states: the self is not the world of appearance, not any sensory phenomena nor any physical entity or existence, and neither is the self consciousness or thought (cogito) (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 103). Both Grimm and Schopenhauer conclude that the self is a static, undifferentiated point of reference for (the passing of) time. For Borges, this reduces the self to a mere logical necessity which lacks any

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properties and any distinguishing marks which would differentiate one from the other: ‘Esta opinión traduce el yo en una mera urgencia lógica, sin cualidades propias ni distinciones de individuo a individuo’ (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 104). In the last of the three early essays, ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, he takes explicit issue with Berkeley, and in particular with the notion of God as the absolute reality. He develops further his claim that reality is a dream, a mirage, and cements his divergence from the idealists, expounding an ever more radical view which borders on solipsism. He again recourses to a refutation of Descartes, and develops his view on language as an accessory to, rather than the culprit of, causality. In this essay of 1925, Borges strengthens and lends coherence to ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ when he restates his denial of the self.15 If he recourses to Berkeley, it is in order to refute the materialist: only perception ensures existence of things, and these have no ‘outside’ existence, other than in the minds of the perceiver. Even when one imagines one thing or another with no-one ‘there’ to perceive it, it then exists as mental image and thus as perception in the mind of the one who imagines the object. This is how Borges can assert that the dream, his pesadilla, is a reality. He explicitly challenges Berkeley on the issue of an underlying reality or divinity and holds that this is a simulacrum, a mirage. He categorically states that there is nothing underlying our empirical reality, nothing that we might call absolute reality. A few decades later, Borges is to change his view quite drastically. It is we who, in Kantian fashion, postulate our reality and its constituents of time and identity (except that for Kant the phenomenal world is real); it is we, the subjects, who give rise to the illusion of reality, which, once investigated by us, reveals itself for what it is: forever a mirage. Borges’ reality is one which, once we cease to exist, vanishes. There is thus no persisting, underlying reality (no soul? asks Borges) to our fleeting, mortal existence. This compels him to claim that there is neither individuation nor continuity. There is no self which holds together, which lends cohesion to the otherwise disjointed, fragmentary processes of thought. Each process is self-sufficient, is enterizo (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 124). It is to the notion of God as a mere unifying, consolidating force that Borges is opposed to in Berkeley.16 In order to arrive at his conclusion that things that we perceive with the senses do not have reality (not even in the mind of God), all we had to do was think that reality is a simulacrum like our reflection in the mirror: La Realidad es como esa imagen nuestra que surge en todos los espejos, simulacro que por nosotros existe, que con nosotros viene, gesticula y se

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va, pero en cuya busca basta ir para siempre dar con él. (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 127) We saw how he takes an extreme view when he denies that there is no underlying reality to our dream existence, and he goes further still when he questions the existence of the subject (the dreamer), as well as the existence of the object (the dream itself). The three essays of the 1920s reveal an increasing engagement with both the idealist philosophies and the Platonic doctrine, all of which, Borges holds, are ineffective in resolving the duality of the distinction between the world of appearances and the underlying reality. The fault, what he calls the talismánico mistake, lies in the notion of causality, against which he poses non-causality. This, in turn, leads him to deny time and identity, which he feels are levelled out not only in the ‘beyond’, but also in the here and now. For Borges, all certainties fall which might give coherence and a sense of centrality. Not even his own feeling of being, esa certidumbre de ser, is sufficient to ensure actual existence. More so, not only is reality revealed as a mirage, a dream, an illusion, but so is the dreamer, the self, the subject. What remains are processes, verbs, which as such are fluid states. This is a state of chaos, of causal and existential barrenness in what might be called nothingness. But what generates the simulacrum? What gives rise to nuestra imagen? And if, as Borges says, our supposed reality is nothing but a mirage, and we cannot experience anything outside of our consciousness which is instrumental in both perceiving and creating the mirage (‘El cielo azul’, p. 157), then there really is no point, as he says, in postulating or imagining anything outside of that confined consciousness; then we are forever the prisoner of the mirror, holding its reflection to be the real thing. It means that we are not able to see anything but the mirage yet we know that it is exactly that. Knowledge (or what we hold it to be) no longer liberates nor enlightens, but rather torments and isolates the individual who does not have any place of belonging other than to the fragmentary, fleeting and unreal. Since there is no distinction between dream and reality, between the world of appearances and the world as it is in itself, Borges’ empirical world (unlike Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s) is indeed illusion. When he denies the self, time, space and causality in the empirical world (the here and now), he applies the rules of the world as it is in itself (where indeed none of the above hold, where there is no individuation and no temporality) to the world of appearances also. His own awareness of an absolute is threefold. First, it is an intellectual understanding, partly grounded in the necessity which results from the belief in a world of appearances. If the empirical world is appearance, then

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it follows that there must be something beyond these appearances. Secondly, it is based on actual mythical, transcendental experience. Thirdly, despite intellectual understanding and mystical experience (or at any rate: the intuition of it), this is undermined by doubt and scepticism. Most of all, Borges seems to me to be acutely aware of the seemingly unattainable, unexperienceable character of this illusory, yet longed-for absolute in what is a conflicting awareness. This symptom of twentieth century crisis brings to mind Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf who is both endowed and cursed with the awareness of living a life in the ‘in-between’: in-between times, inbetween religions – but mostly, and most painfully so: in-between selves.17 This duality and conflict is shared by Borges and seems to produce a painful questioning of all that was certain and true. It accounts for a certain sense of alienation and isolation, of a strangeness to the world. It also results in a distance from and at the same time a longing for a more defined sense of personal identity, for an innermost core of personal identity which he intuits yet cannot apprehend as yet.

Chapter 2

1928–1934: Time, Paradox and Heresy

In the era of modern physics, possibility and probability reigned above absolute truths. From determinism – which disposed of God on the ground that effects no longer needed suprahuman causal explanations – to the new physics which took shape in Borges’ lifetime, there did not seem to be a place for the divine. But as Max Planck categorically stated: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature’. It cannot prove nor disprove the existence of a God, since scientific theories come and go. Immediate causes may be determined mechanistically, whereas ultimate, final causes can point elsewhere. Through his exploratory fictions and the intellectually active essays, Borges seems set to attempt the union of science, philosophy and ultimately theology in their quest for truth. This is a task set against a personality torn between the beauty and the torment of these conjectures. Whereas the period between 1922 and 1925 is marked in his essayistic writing by the denial of the concepts of time and of self, the year 1928 sees the publication of a crucial text, where Borges makes a significant shift away from the denial of time towards an experience, albeit fleeting, of timelessness, and of an intimation of what he terms ‘eternity’. While a year later he arrives back at the conclusion of the non-existence of time, the three years between 1928 and 1931 see him explore the concept of time in the light of the notion of infinity, before, in 1934 arriving at highly involved explorations of cyclical time. This shift is heralded by ‘Sentirse en muerte’. It is an autobiographical essay which Borges first published in 1928. It is, for him, a prelude to mysticism, the intimation of an experience of eternity and of oneness. It is a crucial text in that it reveals a glimpse of an alternative to the non-existence of time, which had marked his very early writings of the 1920s. The slightly later essays ‘La duración del infierno’ and ‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’, both of 1929, introduce the themes of the paradox. They link the loss of personal identity to the notion of infinity (as yet not differentiated

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by Borges from eternity), which is a manifestation of time en abîme. In 1931 he explores mystical concepts of Judaism in ‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’, and Gnosticism in ‘Una vindicación del falso Basílides’, where he introduces the themes of knowledge and enlightenment, salvation, faith and concepts of God. Lastly in this cycle of essays which spans the years 1928 to 1934, Borges writes ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ in 1934, where he engages with Nietzsche’s cyclical notion of time as put forward in the concept of the Eternal Return of the Same. ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ can be seen as a prelude to his own alternative to infinite cycles, which he proposed in 1943 with ‘El tiempo circular’. Whereas in the early 1920s Borges had flatly, and intensely, denied notions of time and of selfhood, he does, in the course of the subsequent decades, develop a more differentiated approach to these concepts. While he still arrives at a fundamental denial, this is through a perhaps more mature process of arguing, debating, postulating and refuting, whose evolution and progression can be traced chronologically. This tension – between the refutation of time and identity in the early 1920s on the one hand, and resignation in the 1940s into their inescapability on the other – is only ever relieved in a very few and privileged, almost mystical moments of transcendence when Borges actually lives timelessness, eternity and the release from individuation.

1928: ‘Sentirse en muerte’ ‘Sentirse en muerte’ is perhaps the most crucial text in marking the threefold transition from Borges’ rejection of time in the early 1920s, to the intuition of time as eternal in 1928, to the notion of time as infinite in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and lastly to the notion of time as cyclical from the mid 1930s onwards. What he experienced in 1928 is a fleeting moment of release from time and individuation, liberated from the probing and tensions of his intellect and released into intuitive certainty beyond words and reason. This stricture between intuition and intellect is at the heart of his particular style of argumentation, which oscillates between postulation and refutation of a given doctrine; between intellectual scepticism and intuitive certainty. It also makes for a shifting text which, in the words of Molloy (1994) ‘is oscillating between fixity and non-fixity’. ‘Sentirse en muerte’ was published for the first time as the second of ‘Dos esquinas’ in El idioma de los argentinos (1928). Eight years later, Borges

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chooses to include the same text in ‘Historia de la eternidad’ (in Historia de la eternidad, 1936). It is to feature one more time as part of ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, A’ of 1944 (in Otras Inquisiciones, 1952). Let us recall the story: one night Borges embarks on an aimless stroll through the mythical backstreets of the Buenos Aires of his childhood; this leads him to a corner of the simplest beauty, a sight so typical it seems to him unreal. It occurs to him that the footpath is made of the clay of a still unconquered America, and as he pauses to contemplate the scene he realizes that everything is the same as it had been 30 years previously. A past that he ponders might be recent for other nations, yet remote for Argentina. At the sound of crickets and a bird he abandons thought, and, he tells us, feels the past. Words deepen into a profound reality in which he feels an abstract observer. Being abstract, he is withdrawn and separated from matter, embodiment and, freed of material identity and weight, feels dead: ‘me sentí muerto, me sentí percibidor abstracto del mundo: indefinido temor imbuido de ciencia que es la mejor claridad de la metafísica.’ In a moment of awe-inspiring knowledge, he realizes that he has not gone back in time but instead is part of eternity. There follows an analytical account in which he reaches the conclusion that what he had experienced was not only identical to a past experience, but was this very experience, one and the same in a timeless zone of eternity. Time has been refuted by the experience of total identity of two apparently separate moments in a foreshadowing of Leibniz. But moments of total identity are few and limited, says Borges, from which he derives the conclusion that they be recurring and infinite (inmortal). What is tangible with our sentiment, however, is not so for our intellect in which, to his dismay, time persists despite all refutations. The experience proves insufficient. Indefinido temor : his fear or awe is inspired by a knowledge synonymous with science, which, for him, equals a kind of truth. Now he feels and lives that total identity which bestows upon him the revelation of the Eternal Return which is eternity in the truly Nietzschean sense of eternalized temporality.1 Nietzsche rejects the view that the world develops in a linear manner, proceeding towards a pre-established final goal; the will to power does not aim at a final state. In this respect, he had departed from Schopenhauer who held that animals are determined by a purposive will.2 But like Nietzsche’s, Schopenhauer’s animals live in the timeless zone of the perpetual present unmarred by notions of memory and death. In his moment of truth in ‘Sentirse en muerte’, Borges lives the affirmation of what he had previously conceded only reluctantly: ‘La primacía de la especie y la

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casi perfecta nulidad de los individuos’ (‘Sentirse en muerte’ p. 18). For a brief moment he has entered the timelessness of the Eternal Return. This is a view on eternity which Borges associates with wholeness, plenitude, intemporality, epiphany, and the transcendence of time and self. In ‘Sentirse en muerte’, he experiences eternity as being timeless in time, as it were. Two identical moments, one past one present, as one and the same. The release from painful, nihilistic, intellectual torments is the mystical experience of the timeless moment; the moment past and present alike; the abstraction from individual perception. It transcribes the experience of eternity in a moment of epiphany in a release from temporality and individuation. This emphasis on experience echoes Bradley’s notion of the absolute: ‘The Absolute is timeless, but it possesses time as an isolated aspect, an aspect which, in ceasing to be isolated, loses its special character’ (Appearance and Reality, 1893, Chapter XVIII, 1946 edition, 185). The finiteness (what Borges calls pobreza) of such moments of total identity must result in an eternal return, thus rendering the moment and the perceiver immortal and timeless. But soon his intellect takes over, and Borges analyses this moment of lived intemporality which by its very nature is beyond words. His attempt at grasping the intemporal by intellect and language is therefore at odds with his very experience in the desperate need to reconcile the intellectual with the experiential.3

Borges and Bradley How can Borges resolve the philosophical idea of losing one’s individuality and of transcending time into eternity, the spiritual notion of the self reaching union or communion with a higher reality or being? ‘Sentirse en muerte’ is a recording of a personal experience of transcending time and identity, but is it enough? Both Schopenhauer and Bradley were drawn to mystical concepts, and we saw that in Bradley’s absolute there are no contingencies.4 This view is unlike Hume’s for whom there are no necessary connections over time. It is also a view unlike Borges’, for whom, in what must be his most radical departure from both Hume and Bradley, there is no causality, not even in the phenomenal world. Bradley’s conviction that the thing-in-itself is impossible to experience corresponds to Kant’s view and claims the relativity of our world of experience, the relativity of (the direction of) time and space, and the possibility of parallel lives (Bradley 1893, 190).5

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Borges’ emphasis in ‘Sentirse en muerte’, as well as Bradley’s own, is on experience. But there is a tension between the total vision, or the glimpse of the absolute – which is linked to a mystical yearning for transcendence – and Borges’ relapse into scepticism. At this, Borges makes a move towards a differentiation. It appears that by the late 1920s the poles have slightly but significantly shifted in an intellectual and experiential opening: no longer does Borges oscillate between time and the nullity thereof, but he oscillates between time and eternity. His interpretations of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, of Nietzsche, idealism and of Schopenhauer are linked to the mystical yearning for transcendence of time and individuation. The following is Bradley’s rendering of the nature of time, and of how time relates to eternity (Chapter 18, 185): Time is an appearance which contradicts itself, and endeavours vainly to appear as an attribute of the timeless [i.e. eternity] [. . .]. Time is not real as such, and it proclaims its unreality by its inconsistent attempt to be an adjective of the timeless. It is an appearance which belongs to a higher character in which its special quality is merged. Its own temporal nature does not there cease wholly to exist but is thoroughly transmuted. It is counterbalanced and, as such, lost within an all-inclusive harmony. The Absolute is timeless, but it possesses time as an isolated aspect, an aspect which, in ceasing to be isolated, loses its special character. It is there, but blended into a whole which we cannot realize. But that we cannot realize it, and do not know how in particular it can exist, does not show it to be impossible. It is possible, and, as before, its possibility is enough. For that which can be, and upon a general ground must be – that surely is real. The liminal revelation of the timeless moment in ‘Sentirse en muerte’ recalls the experience of the nullity of self and personality which Borges had recounted in ‘La nadería de la personalidad’. The fundamental difference between the two, despite their shared revelatory character, is that the experience of 1923 is perceived as negative, of annihilating any notion of oneness and plenitude, whereas the experience of 1928 is positive, albeit unsustained, and recounted by Borges as addenda to various other texts over three successive decades. It is what he longs for and yet only ever experiences as a fleeting state of utter contentedness. ‘Sentirse en muerte’ is about the experience of a union with, and at the same time a transcendence of, the material universe; at once becoming one with the material universe, and dissolving its very constituents: time

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and selfhood. This is reminiscent of the mystic who, in union with the divine, passes from time to eternity. But is Borges’ ecstatic moment a lifetransforming, mystical union with God? It surely is a case of momentary transcendence and may well have been a spiritual moment that was perhaps over analysed and therefore only wistfully remembered and reiterated over decades.

1929: Infinity and Paradox Borges’ very attempts at finding order, universal design or answers do reveal to him the fissures through which he must perceive the futility of any system claiming to answer chaos and uncertainty. It is the counter-intuitive logic of the paradox (which perpetrates the notion of infinity) that reveals these fissures in our carefully constructed reality, and the artifice of time, space and identity shows itself for what it is: forever artifice, forever mirage. Borges, ‘torn between the splendour and the despair afforded by the paradox’, in Beatriz Sarlo’s words (1993, 58), returns, time and time again, to probe the consequences of the concept of infinity – of the regressus ad infinitum, of Sarlo’s ‘structure en abîme’ (1993, 56) – which threatens causality, teleology, order, motion and therefore time.

‘La duración del infierno’ The experience of timelessness of ‘Sentirse en muerte’ foreshadows the dream Borges tells of in ‘La duración del infierno’, a personal, nightmarish vision of losing his sense of identity and forever waking into another dream. This is not a mystical emptying of the self, but an appalling, albeit oneric experience of the loss or oblivion of self. It is akin to the experience of realizing the nothingness of self in ‘La nadería de la personalidad’. In ‘La duración del infierno’ of 1929, Borges puts forward hell as a metaphor of the immortal. He understands eternity as synonymous with perpetuity, the attributes of hell (what he calls ‘perduración sin fin’ p. 102) and sets out to invalidate this kind of eternity.6 He also differentiates between different types of eternity. For the first time, he establishes a link between the loss of identity on the one hand, and eternity, time, and hell on the other. Hell, for Borges, is God’s oblivion7: Soñé que salía de otro [sueño] – populoso de cataclismos y de tumultos – y que me despertaba en una pieza irreconocible [. . .]. Pensé con miedo

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¿dónde estoy? Y comprendí que no lo sabía. Pensé ¿quién soy? Y no me pude reconocer. El miedo creció en mí. Pensé: Esta vigilia desconsolada ya es el Infierno, esta vigilia sin destino será mi eternidad. Entonces desperté de veras: temblando. (‘La duración del infierno’, in Discusión, 1932, 103)

‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’ In the same year, Borges introduces the paradox, which deals, to a great extent, with the question of infinity. He postulates not only the illusory nature of the world, such as any idealist would, but urges us to look for irrealities, such as Zeno’s paradox, to confirm that illusion. Paradoxes pose questions of causality and infinity. Defined as apparently self-contradictory statements, they are methodological and therefore convincing, yet infuriatingly irresolvable. They encompass the tension of truth and error by leading to a necessary yet absurd or counter-intuitive solution which disqualifies the initial premises, demonstrating the power and at the same time the limitations of logic. For Borges, the paradox is instrumental in uncovering the falseness of the dream.8 The following is a useful definition: [Common to the paradox is] the idea of conflict. [The term ‘paradox’ applies] to the conflict itself, when it is a conflict between what are (or have been) regarded as fundamental truths. [. . .] An early propounder of the liar paradox, Eubulides of Megara [intended to] discredit rationalism by showing that its basic standards of reasoning [. . .] lead to what they reject – inconsistency. The derived contradiction may be contrary to reason, but it is also derived according to reason. Honderich (1995, 642–643, my emphasis) The four most famous Zenoan paradoxes are Achilles and the Tortoise (which proves that the slower mover will never be passed by the swifter), The Dichotomy (in which an object never reaches the end in a finite time), The Arrow (in which a moving object is actually at rest), and The Stadium (where of two sets of objects travelling at the same velocity one will travel twice as far as the other in the same time). They all aim at the reductio ad absurdum of the claims that the many are, and that motion exists, thus supporting Parmenides’ monistic claim of a single reality and a motionless being. At the heart of their argumentation lies the concept of infinity, for Borges ‘un concepto corruptor y desatinador’ (‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y

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la tortuga’, in Discusión 1932, 1299). Paradoxes are absurd and logical at the same time: logic and reason refute our intuitive apprehension of reality by showing us a reality which, according to the very laws of logic and reason, we cannot possibly inhabit. The superiority of the paradox, or ‘image’ as Sarlo calls it (1993, 56), over reality is exemplified in the fact that in the paradox’s logic, Achilles never reaches the tortoise, yet we know that he does of course do exactly that. Logic defeats its own logic. This creates a tension between what can be perceived logically and what can be perceived empirically. Logic, reason and the empiricism which experience provides, are incompatible with one another, and any demand for knowledge which is based on experience is thus futile. If reason is said to lead us to knowledge, which itself is founded on experience and yet is contradictory to reason, then this quest is fraught with contradiction from the very outset. Paradoxes explore the very possibilities available to the human mind and at the same time expose the limitations of that very mind in trying to apprehend reality and organize corresponding patterns. The principle of effect and cause ad infinitum lies at the heart of many theological and philosophical debates, used as a vehicle to prove the existence or otherwise of an ultimate creator. Borges continuously examines the many ways in which the universe could possibly be organized while he also exposes the failure of imposing any such organizing system. This does not allow him to resolve the conjectures which stimulate his particular kind of intellect which seeks order only to invalidate the order found. Anything seems possible, everything is proved impossible, and nothing is excluded. So, is the world nothing but an illusion? For Borges, it certainly is a strong possibility. A decade later in 1939, he takes up the paradox once again with ‘Avatares de la tortuga’. He expresses his conviction that we invest the dream world with reality, temporality and personal identity, but that with it we weave in the flaws (intersticios de sinrazón, such as the paradox) through which we must perceive its falseness. This likens us, the dreamers, to Novalis’ magician who takes his illusions for independent, real occurrences: El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalís) sería el que hechizara hasta el punto de tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas. ¿No sería ése nuestro caso?’ Yo conjeturo que así es. Nosotros (la indivisa divinidad que opera en nosotros) hemos soñado el mundo. Lo hemos soñado resistente, misterioso, visible, ubicuo en el espacio y firme en el tiempo; pero hemos consentido en su arquitectura tenues y eternos intersticios de sinrazón para saber que es falso. (‘Avatares de la tortuga’, p. 136)

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Borges himself contributed his own version of the paradox, which echoes both Russell’s set of all sets which would have to contain itself, and Epimenides the Cretan’s who claims that all Cretans are liars. In ‘Notas’ (No. 2, p. 166), which is an essay added in 1957 in a new edition of Discusión, Borges adds this to the many illustrious paradoxes: A esas perplejidades ilustres [Russell, Zeno], me atrevo a agregar ésta: En Sumatra, alguien quiere doctorarse de adivino. El brujo examinador le pregunta si será reprobado o si pasará. El candidato responde que será reprobado . . . Ya se presiente la infinita continuación. Russell’s and Borges’ own formulation of the paradox are variations on Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems in which he showed that any consistent mathematical system must suffer from the limitation that it can never fully prove its own consistency, which is only known by methods that cannot be formalized in the systems themselves. Paradoxes of the Zenoan type are a kind of prose translation of more abstract problems, transferred from the mathematical system to the realm of human experience or a belief system by means of symbolic logic. It seems to me that Borges, too, in wrestling with the validity of existential theories as to the nature of this world, touched on the twentieth-century problem of Saul Kripke’s ‘possible worlds’ in which different sets of logic can be semantically interpreted in terms of possible worlds (as opposed to our ‘real’ world) with different kinds of relationships between the worlds, raising questions of identity, names and referents. Kripke, following Leibniz (see his notion of the best of all possible worlds) in this branch of mathematical philosophy called ‘modal logic’, makes the crucial distinction between what is true as a ‘matter of facts’, and what is ‘necessarily’ true. This constitutes what came to be known as ‘possible world semantics’. To give an example, it only happens to be true as a matter of fact that there are nine planets in our solar system, but it is perfectly conceivable that there could have been more or less than nine planets, in this or any other possible world. However, it is not only true but necessarily true that two and two makes four, since there are no possible circumstances or worlds in which two and two is not four. Returning to the paradox, it is a perpetrator of infinity. But it is also a means of challenging one set of logic by putting forward another logic, valid yet counter-intuitive. In the two essays on the paradox, ‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’ (1929) and ‘Avatares de la tortuga’ (1932/52, both in Discusión), the concept of infinity, put forward by the paradox, threatens the artifice of the

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dream reality. Borges equates infinity with the infinite regress or progress, the breaking down of the continuum of time into an ever-spiralling abyss of individually measured instances in time; symbols of which are the nightmare of waking into another dream, which he is to develop in some of his most noted ficciones (in the guise of the prison, the cell, etc.), where he is also to put forward immortality as a manifestation of perpetuity. In proposing perpetuity, the paradox is, on a deeper level, a metaphor for the unrelieved tension between Borges’ sense of the nothingness of his self, and the desire to be contained in an absolute. This tension points to a fundamental woundedness of the self. In other words: infinity – which the paradox perpetuates, and which is also its crux – is a pointer to Borges’ metaphor.

1929–1931: Cabbala and Gnosticism His writings in the 1920s and 1930s on Gnosticism and cabbalistic wisdom, first raised in ‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’ and ‘Una vindicación del falso Basílides’, attest to his interest in heresy and spirituality, which continues through the 1940s right into the 1980s (‘La flor de Coleridge’, 1945 in La Nación, later in Otras Inquisiciones; ‘Del culto de los libros’, 1951; ‘El Golem’, the essay of 1957 and the poem of 1958 respectively; La cábala’, in Siete noches, 1980; and ‘El Simurgh y el águila’, 1982), gravitating ever more towards mysticism. In these early essays on the Cabbala and on Gnosticism, his focus is on the nature of God, knowledge and on the possibility of salvation through the spiritual enlightenment of the elect. The theme of the elect is recurrent, even though Borges does not seem to consider himself among them (as evidenced in his essays) nor the characters of his stories. The mysticism of the Cabbala offers Borges the notion of an absolute being and of knowledge, a sacred and absolute text which allows for multiple readings and hidden meanings. The gnostic reading, states Borges, evolved from the Cabbala (see ‘La cábala’, 1980, p. 128, 131). And in relation to his stories, the notion of the Golem, the cabbalistic being fashioned from inferior material is crucial to many stories (‘Las ruinas circulares’, ‘La escritura del Dios’). The Cabbala is: A Jewish mystical system of theology and metaphysics [. . .]. Its aim was to relate the finite and the infinite, which was brought about by emanations from the Absolute Being. Passages from the Old Testament were treated as

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symbolic, and interpretation was based on the significance of numbers. The most important Cabbalistic work is the Zohar, written in the 13th century but based on older material. (Room 1999, 12) Stockum (1967, 16-24) refers to it as a system of pre-Christian wisdom and revelation, with God at the centre of the world. Because the soul is lost in individuation, alienation from God occurs. Salvation can be found in the renunciation of all that is worldly, and especially of self-will in favour of serenity (Gelassenheit). Alazraki (1988, 140–141) points out Borges’ rejection of idealism and relates an interview in 1971 in which Borges reveals his motivation to study the Cabbala10: Since I have not been able to believe in a personal God, the idea of a vast and impersonal God, the En-Sof of the Kabbalah, has always fascinated me. It would seem that the concept of a ‘vast and impersonal God’ proposed by Borges in this instance would be a purely ‘stand-alone’ God, as conceptually this would simplify the trinitarian vision of a God living in a dynamic relationship. ‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’ also raises the question of identity. This is pertinent to the issue of plurality and the Trinity, a subject which much perturbs Borges. For him, the Trinity is a monstrous construct of which he only speaks in terms of horror. In ‘Notas’ (p. 177), another text of Dicusión, he had mentioned it in the same breath as the Chimera, a Chinese zoological monster, geometrical figures and the synchronisation of voices. For Borges, the Trinity implies multiplicity and hence loss of identity, comparable to what he calls ‘opposing mirrors’11: Imaginada de golpe, su concepción de un padre, un hijo y un espectro, articulados en un solo organismo, parece un caso de teratología intelectual, una deformación que sólo el horror de una pesadilla pudo parir. [. . .] Las tres inextricables personas importan un horror intelectual, una infinitud ahogada, especiosa, como de contrarios espejos. (‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’, pp. 56–57) Interestingly, his discussion displays a marked emphasis on the second person of the Trinity: Entendemos que renunciar a la Trinidad – a la Dualidad, por lo menos – es hacer de Jesús un delegado ocasional del Señor, un incidente de la historia, no el auditor imperecedero, continuo, de nuestra devoción. (‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’, p. 57)

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On that basis, he is stuck in a paradox, where on the one hand he cannot understand the trinitarian dynamic of reciprocity in relationship - which is the opposite of the disharmonious stasis of ‘opposing mirrors’ -, while on the other he acknowledges that without the Trinity, Christ cannot be a valid salvific force. This is reminiscent of his aversion to Berkeley’s God as a kind of ‘binder’ in ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’.12 He holds that, since the Scriptures are held to have been dictated by the Holy Spirit (‘Una vindicaciónde la Cábala’ p. 56 and 58), it is a sacred text, ‘un texto absoluto, donde la colaboración del azar es calculable en cero’ (p. 59).13 This refers us back to the ‘página de perfección’ of ‘La supersticiosa ética del lector’ of 1932 (Discusión, p. 48); and also to ‘La cábala’ of 1980. One of his later ficciones, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’, is an expression, as it were, of his fascination with chance and contingency. With ‘Una vindicación del falso Basílides’, Borges introduces the gnostic notion of a supreme God, an elusive, absolute being who is juxtaposed against the lesser being(s), the demiurge(s) who are inferior gods pervading our world and our existence. The demiurge is, according to Room (1999, 332): In the philosophy of Plato, the mysterious agent that made the world and all that it contains. Among the gnostics, the Demiurge is also creator of the universe, but a being that is subordinate to the Supreme Being. Another kind of demiurge is Abraxas (Room 1999, 4): A word used by the Gnostics to personify a deity, the source of 365 emanations. This figure is not only the number of days in the year but the sum of the numbers represented but the word’s Greek letters [. . .]. The word itself is perhaps of Cabbalistic origin and is said to derive from Hebrew [. . .] ‘hide the four’ (meaning God, and alluring to the Tetragrammaton). The significance and the attraction of Gnosticism to Borges is manifold. In the first instance, it offers a notion of knowledge which is seen to be the key to salvation. It is a kind of knowledge, or mystery, however, which goes beyond normal intellectual understanding (Room 1999, 3): The name drives from the Greek word gnosis, ‘knowledge’, but it was usually used by the Gnostics in the sense of ‘revelation’, which gave them certain mystic knowledge of salvation that others did not possess. It was essentially based on oriental Dualism [which asserts that creator and

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creation, mind and body are distinct entities], the existence of two worlds, good and evil, the divine and the material. The body was regarded as the enemy of spiritual life. In most Gnostic systems there were seven worldcreating powers, in a few their place was taken by one Demiurge. Christ was the final and perfect Aeon [the personification of an age]. We can see the attractiveness to Borges who was fascinated by the notion of knowledge which is beyond the intellect and which as such points to a transcendent realm of the unknowable. For gnostics, the ultimate purpose in life is receiving that special knowledge, union with God and so fulfilment (in Harris 1999, 2, 38, and 143 respectively): ‘At the heart of gnosis there is mystery, the mystery of the Divine secretive purpose for the world, the unfathomable mystery that is the essence of divinity. The gnostics conceived of the mystery in metaphysical and theosophical terms, as one whose veil is only penetrated by those who are spiritually “mature” and able to receive the revealing gnosis. This is the “higher” knowledge that elevates the spirit through enlightenment into the nature of God and his purpose. The theme of election, prevalent in Judaism and orthodox Christianity, flourished amongst the Gnostics, who believed in an elect elite who were capable of receiving special knowledge that pointed the way to perfect fulfilment.’ ‘In the gnostic system the Supreme God is the head of the hierarchy and below him is the demiurge, who created the world, and below him again are the lesser powers. Here the demiurge is one of the lesser angels who is identified with the God of the Jews.’ ‘The creation of the world and human life is the work of the God of the Jews, who is leader of the lowest class of angels. In this context he is known as Abraxas. It is from him and his works that deliverance is required.’ ‘Una vindicación del falso Basílides’ (Discusión, 1932) further elaborates on the cosmology of the gnostics, a theme Borges is to reiterate in 1980 with ‘La cábala’. He speaks of the gnostic God as inhabiting the ‘inconcebible museo de los arquetipos platónicos’, which echoes his comment on Platonic archetypes in the prologue of 1953 to ‘Historia de la eternidad’. Borges calls the supreme God ‘un Dios inmutable’ (p. 62), ‘el inmovil dios Abraxas’ (p. 64), from whom proceed the lesser divinities. He elaborates on the origin of man: shadows, darkness and vague memories all speak of the lesser god. This shows our origin as a mere aside, a chance occurrence; it also shows man’s supreme insignificance.

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Borges addresses the problem of evil through Gnosticism which accounts for the presence of evil through the lesser divinities, the least of whom being the God of the Scriptures, while leaving intact the supreme being. The gnostics removed the supreme God from the creation and from any notion of personal responsibility for evil and suffering by interpolating the lesser divinities. Most importantly, Borges concludes that there can be no greater gift for the supreme God than being absolved of the world which we, insignificantly, inhabit. God is thus absolved, excused and ultimately not responsible for his creation. These early explorations of heresy and spiritualities find an echo later where he is to translate this notion of an evil or indifferent God into his fictions before arriving at a radically different view in some of the poems of his closing years, where there is an approximation between the poet and the divine searched for.

1934: Nietzsche and the Eternal Return Leibniz and Nietzsche are fundamental influences in Borges’ writing. His critique of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return is first formulated in ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ of 1934. The adaptation of, and variance from, Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same, together with his application of the Leibnizean Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, lead Borges to re-affirm his conclusion that the concepts of time and self are null and void. This logic, however, is in constant conflict with the limitations of the very intellect that gives rise to the refutation of time and self, and which does not allow for the actual experience of the very claims it puts forward. In other words: the notions of reality, time and self, albeit illusory, are nonetheless inescapable in that they constitute and are necessary for our apprehension of this world of experience, of representation. What Borges is left with is a sense of teleological futility and of nothingness. He came to conclude that the release from all intellectual tensions, the quasi-mystical experience of the eternal moment, is only ever fleeting. Neither ideas, theories, philosophy, nor indeed the intellect can provide answers or lend order to our existence. He turns to writing fictions in an attempt to penetrate the impenetrable through the creative process, often without clearly demarcating the line between essay and ficción, in his famous blurring of genre. In ‘Historia de la eternidad’ of 1936, Borges is to put forward eternity as ‘un juego o una fatigada esperanza’ (p. 11), but one which holds the

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promise of overcoming the loneliness of individuation by uniting the separate parts in the womb that originated them into the whole of the eternal Form. ‘Aquel terrible pasaje de Lucrecio sobre la falacia del coito’ concludes with these words: ‘del todo en vano, ya que no alcanzan a perderse en el otro ni a ser un mismo ser’ (p. 35). Borges adds that ‘los arquetipos y la eternidad – dos palabras – prometen posesiones más firmes’. This promise echoes Schopenhauer’s appreciation of art as transcending ordinary consciousness. Nietzsche objects to this very projection of the here and now, of time, into a transcendental endlessness. It impedes the total affirmation of life by conceiving of eternity (in the Christian sense) as linearly taking over from time which is an outsider to the eternal, and, after Nietzsche’s death of God, forever an exile from it. The notions of a God and of eternity, he argues, reduced time to a mere apparition, to a state apart from the ‘real’ and irreconcilable gulf between time and eternity. In Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1961), the death of God is pronounced with nonchalance in a mere subordinate sentence by Zarathustra as he descends from the mountain and encounters the saintly hermit who had dedicated himself to a life of retreat from mankind in prayer and praise of a non-existent God. For Nietzsche, the death of God pointed the way to nihilism. In The Will to Power Nietzsche writes: ‘A nihilist is a person who says of the world as it is, that it better were not, and, with regard to the world as it should be, that it does not and cannot exist’ (quoted in Heller 1988, 180). The death of God meant the end to the ‘ideality’ of a life beyond this worldly existence, and left only two options: banality and rationality in the moral and spiritual decline, or a new ideality creating man-made ideals of the here and now. These two options are manifest in the Letzte Mensch (the Last Man or Nihilist), and the Übermensch (the Overman), a placeholder for the aim of human aspiration towards greatness. It is the task of the Übermensch to renounce all dreams and hopes of a beyond, and to embrace this life on earth. This colossal effort is necessitated by, yet in turn necessitates the death of God through the discovery of the will to power. The will to power is the creative force of the here and now, intent on overcoming the notion of an eternity beyond time, thus reinstating time as the real dimension of all being, with no limits other than this-worldly ones. Nietzsche’s will to power tends towards the future, still open and possible; it cannot will, but only affirm, the past. As such, it is anchored in the flow of time, willing ever higher states of existence. But can man continue to overcome himself, endlessly in time? In the face of infinite time, what Nietzsche calls die Schwere (the greatest weight or burden), all sense of greatness is diminished. Or is there a deeper knowledge of time, where the past can

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become future again? Zarathustra draws some very unusual conclusions from the infinity of the past and the future: if ‘behind’ the present there is a past ‘eternity’ (what Borges calls ‘la eternidad anterior’ in ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’, in Historia de la eternidad, 1953, 87), then everything that can move must have moved down the same lane already. In other words, everything that can happen must have happened: a past eternity cannot be incomplete. If we accept the notion of a past and a future eternity, we must conceive of either as the whole eternity, a whole of all possible time – twice? At this point of his reflection, the hour of utmost silence, the stillste Stunde, Zarathustra dares to think the unthinkable: the Eternal Recurrence (of the Same). A cry issues as a snake had crept down a shepherd’s throat. The thought of the eternal recurrence, in the allegory of the snake, entails loathing and nausea: if everything returns, then each petty state of existence, endless repetitions of all frustrations, losses and imperfections, must be lived again; everything that had been overcome, must be overcome again. More than ever before, the will to power, the will to overcome oneself, seems weighed down by the burden of perpetuity. But: ‘Bite off its head!’ Zarathustra calls out to the shepherd, and so he does. The transformation is remarkable: the shepherd laughs, such as he had never laughed before. He had dared to think, and survived thinking through the unthinkable. All weight is now lightness, and he recognizes that with every recurring moment of frustration, there is also the promise of that tremendous moment when we say ‘I want to live again.’ Affirming the eternal recurrence calls for the total affirmation of this life by postulating that it be willed to be relived over and over again. Only the Übermensch can survive, can live, can actually demand the glory and the gloom of the eternal recurrence.14 Thinking the eternal recurrence could be seen as eternalizing temporality. Time is made eternal, transitoriness is permanent, the singular is repetitive: Nietzsche’s eternity is in this world, it is the world. This is how he can solve the dilemma posed by the notion of repetition. For Nietzsche, the eternal recurrence is ‘the being of becoming’ (cited in Wood 1991, 28), which overcomes the stasis that had paralysed the thinking of Parmenides: becoming, which is change, is the one thing that never changes, and hence embodies permanence, the hallmark of being. Heidegger remarked upon this (in his Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, cited in Wood 1991, 32): [Nietzsche] thinks Being as Time itself, as Eternity which is not a static Now, nor a sequence of Nows rolling into the infinite, but as the now that ‘bends back into itself’: [eternity] is the concealed essence of Time . . . the most difficult thought of philosophy means to think Being as Time.

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The notion of repetition or recurrence of the same introduces an intriguing metaphysical problem, that of sameness and identity. It is central to Borges’ personal experience in ‘Sentirse en muerte’ (1928); to his critical approach to the eternal recurrence in ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ (1934) and ‘El tiempo circular’ (1943); and to his explicit acknowledgement of philosophical doctrines in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’ (1944). Sameness and identity are also at the heart of debates concerned with the philosophy of mind and take us back to the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Leibniz maintained that if two things were alike in absolutely all respects without there being any differentiating features between them at all, then they were not two things but just one and the same thing, that if they are qualitatively identical, they are numerically identical as well.15 The planet Venus, for example, depending on whether observation took place in the morning or at night, had long been conceived of as two different planets, referred to as the ‘morning star’ or ‘evening star’ respectively. Complication arises once the question of meaning or content is raised: the two expressions do not mean the same, whereas they do refer to the same object. The matter becomes even more complicated once we introduce mental and physical ‘qualities’ or ‘properties’, essential and non-essential, as the criterion for differentiation: Leibniz’ thesis of the identity (i.e. numerical identity) of indiscernibles (i.e. qualitative identicals) states that no two things can be exactly the same in every way, sharing all their qualities. This is disputable, but becomes a tautology if numerical-identity-with-a is allowed to count among the qualities of a. The converse thesis (often called Leibniz’ law), that things differing in quality must be two, is hard to doubt. But it must be interpreted in such a way as to banish change, since a can have some quality that b used to lack, and still be numerically the same as b: many things persist through change. Hume thought that in the ‘proper’ sense identity over time requires changelessness. That would be true if the proper sense of identity were exact qualitative identity; but in fact the numerical sense is no less proper, merely different (Honderich 1995, 390). There are implications for plurality when Borges wonders whether two identical moments in the minds of two or more individuals are one and the same moment and therefore refute time. The question is whether qualitatively identical things can be numerically distinct. This does not matter for monists who believe in only one fundamental entity. However, the problem becomes acute for pluralists, who hold that there are many, numerically

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distinct things, and must either make them out to be all qualitatively distinct, or else find something else to avoid the full force of Leibnizean Identity of Indiscernibles. In ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, Borges seems to be adopting a monist stance.16 Agassi’s lucid discussion is helpful here. He points out that Borges raises philosophical problems from Schopenhauer’s viewpoint rather than actually putting forward his philosophy: The aim of Borges is to impart to his reader the sense of the mystery of the world, a sense of skeptical reverence, akin to Einstein’s ‘cosmic religious feelings’. [. . .] There is, I think, a strong philosophic reason in Borges’ dual theme of the mystery of time and of blurred identity: like Schrödinger he feels that we need a theory which will account for our sense of multiplicity of things, even will ground them in reality, yet will deny, in the last resort, the existence of more than one final entity. Borges, thus, is more intent on raising a problem, albeit from a given philosophical (Schopenhauerian) viewpoint, rather than advocate his philosophy. [. . .] Clearly the only promising suggestion, thus far, is that there are levels of identity (Agassi 1970, 290–291). He also comments on Borges’ criticism of the British empiricists’ idealism: Borges says that he assumes the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. This is true, strictly speaking. [. . .] What [the British idealists] speak of is experience, and the identity they assume is the identity of experiences, not of things. Once you allow the multiplication of one experience at will, the Occam’s razor is blunted and the strongest case for British idealism is given up. Assume, however, the identity of indiscernibles. Assume also, with Berkeley and Hume (pace Chesterton and Borges), that our stock of possible experiences in all their combinations is finite. [. . .] It follows that quite possibly (and in the long run certainly) simultaneous with my present experience here, there is an identical experience elsewhere. We need not fear, however, that these two have to be considered identical; they belong not only to different parts of the geometer’s space (which the idealist denies the existence of) but even to different parts of experienced space which, we remember, is mapped into the geometer’s space. And so the idealist and the geometer will come up with the same result – to the idealist’s delight. [. . .] And so idealism ends up with loops, both in space and time. [. . .] Subsequently one must reject one’s sense of identity as illusory. And so the British idealists’ programme of leaving the world of

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experience as it is fails and the world all of a sudden is experienced as an eerie place. End of argument. What has gone wrong here? Borges himself is an idealist of the same school as Schopenhauer and Schrödinger. [. . .] What he finds otiose in the British empiricists’ idealism is not its being idealistic but its being so reassuring, common-sense, flat. (This incidentally is what he, following Shaw, views as the most eerie and unreal thing – hell indeed.) What he rejects in British empiricism most strongly is not so much that it flattens the universe, but, and more deeply, that it denies the existence of a limitation on reason; not so much that it identifies the knowable with the observable, but, and more deeply, that it identifies the knowable with what there is. Borges himself is not all too aware of his own message: the world is not, in principle, fully knowable. He is no less aware of lacunae and difficulties in his own philosophy. Destroy all sense of identity, and the sense of self-identity, perhaps even of responsibility, is gone as well (Agassi 1970, 291–293). Perhaps, I would suggest, this is why Borges kept seeking and exploring not only the possibilities of philosophies and doctrines - which ultimately proved insufficient for him - but also those of faith and spiritualities which he may have intuited have the potential of uniting enquiry and experience.

Borges’ Critique of Nietzsche The ambivalence of the desire to be absorbed in a greater union than can be provided by the individual bound within the successive nature of time, is evident in Borges’ approach to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in both ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ and later, in 1943, in ‘El tiempo circular’. The former displays a tremendous effort to refute Nietzsche on all planes naturalscientific and mathematical before finally admitting to its psychological and idealist-philosophical validity. ‘El tiempo circular’, written nine years later, focuses no longer on possible (or, as we will see, rather impossible) refutations, but on three different modes of interpreting the doctrine, Platonic, Nietzschean and Borgesian. As a main line of his critique, Borges starts out by presenting Nietzsche’s position (‘La doctrina de los ciclos’, p. 75): Esa doctrina (que su más reciente inventor llama del Eterno Retorno) es formulable así: El número de todos los átomos que componen el mundo es, aunque

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desmesurado, finito, y sólo capaz como tal de un número finito (aunque desmesurado también) de permutaciones. Set in italics, this appears to be a paraphrasing of a Nietzschean atomic explanation for the Eternal Return, which Borges then dismantles in order to prove the extreme unlikeliness of such repetition based on the finiteness of atoms in infinite time. This first refutation, supported by the vast number of atoms and the even vaster number of possible combinations, is followed by a the recourse to Cantor’s sets: the infinity of number of points in the universe, or even in a fraction of the universe renders the part no less numerous than the whole; there are hence an infinite number of terms and thus of combinations, and no need for a recurrence for want of variation. Cantor’s definition of the set of 1874 is as follows: ‘A set is a totality of certain definite, distinguishable objects of our intuition or thought, called the elements of the set.’ It was doomed to failure, however, due to their being based on the use of undefined synonyms, such as ‘collection’, and leading to logical inconsistencies, such as have been uncovered by Russell’s paradox in 1901 concerning the set of all sets that do not contain themselves as members: the condition for it to contain itself is that it should not contain itself. Mathematicians soon came to regard the notion of a set an undefined, primitive concept (Howson 1972). Borges’ refutation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ is fourfold. Regarding his first, the physical refutation, Borges admits in the very same essay that Nietzsche ‘tampoco habló - y eso merece destacarse también - de la finitud de los átomos. Nietzsche niega [Borges’ emphasis] los átomos; la atomística no le parecía otra cosa que un modelo del mundo, hecho exclusivamente para los ojos y para el entendimiento aritmético’ (p. 86). We see that Borges’ paraphrase of the Nietzschean position on the atomic proof for the Eternal Return turns out to be a somewhat erroneous attribution of authorship, formulable not by Nietzsche, but by Borges. Does he thus refute his own attempt at refuting Nietzsche? Secondly, this time algebraic, Borges uses Cantor’s definition which, at the time of writing, had long been disproved by Russell whose work Borges quotes in the essay’s bibliography and whose familiarity with the paradox is well documented (eg. ‘Notas’ in Discusión, ‘La biblioteca de Babel’, etc). The third refutation is theological. He cites Augustine who rejects the Stoic and Pythagorean precursors of the Eternal Return which speak of perpetual change, endlessly moving towards no goal. Does this historical evidence invalidate Nietzsche’s prophetic message of a new revelation? Borges does not think so. He argues that Nietzsche’s ‘ignorance’ of his precursors

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is a stylistic means to give it theological credibility: a prophetic revelation does not admit footnotes nor other references. This would explain what otherwise would appear a contradiction of Nietzsche’s own proclaimed ‘perspectivism’ in which all interpretations are acceptable. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche elevates the text to a quasi-biblical status, to a unquestionable repository of profound truths. In a later essay, ‘El propósito de Zarathustra’ (La Nación 1944, quoted in Rukser 1962, 191), Borges argues that what Nietzsche wanted to create with the book was a holy text, and himself as its founder or apostle; fully conscious of the precursors, these would help confirm the new religion. The psychological-literary affirmation of the Eternal Return as a religion shows, more obviously than in the other two instances, how Borges first attempts to refute, only to then affirm the doctrine, whether consciously or otherwise remains hard to ascertain. And last, Borges’ fourth refutation is of a mnemonic kind: ‘el recuerdo importaría una novedad que es la negación de la tesis’ (p. 86). Memory points at succession rather than repetition since knowledge of the same having happened before brings with it a different awareness every time the cycle is completed; it would induce the individual to act differently. This reasoning, however correctly applied to a man like Funes, does not apply in general. Borges does not take into consideration oblivion as a major trait of the human mind, a fact which, incidentally, had not been overlooked by Nietzsche himself. Before Freud, Nietzsche spoke of forgetting as an activity of the mind, screening and preventing us from remembering what would upset our equilibrium. Successful repression buries experience in the ‘inarticulate’ which is the subconscious. Nietzsche insists on the vital contradictoriness of life, and on logic as stifling this fullness of life. Art, he insists, is the only ‘articulation’ in which this contradictoriness is kept intact. Forgetting is the source and indispensable condition for the Eternal Return and for transforming the identity of the person to whom it appears.17 The above discussion of Borges’ Eternidad Anterior showed us how Nietzsche – far from reaching Augustine’s and Borges’ conclusion of the regressus in infinitum and therefore of a creator – instead formulated the Eternal Return as eternalized temporality. But Borges then turns to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as had Nietzsche, and concludes from the irreversibility of transforming light into heat that ‘esa comprobación [. . .] anula el “laberinto circular” del Eterno Retorno’ (‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ p. 88). Unlike Borges, however, Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, concludes from the same law that, since the world has not reached the final and most likely state of equilibrium of energy, it cannot be supposed to move towards such a state as required by a mechanistic theory.

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The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which also serves to lend a direction to time, was formulated in 1850 by Clausius.18 It states that all processes are wasteful, and that some of the energy available for a process will be squandered. This waste, which can no longer be usefully employed, is measured as an increase in a quantity called entropy, or useless energy which always goes in the irreversible direction of increased entropy and thus disorder. We can imagine a finished jigsaw in its box. This initial state of order is the indispensable condition for the ensuing disorder: once we shake the box, the jigsaw disintegrates into a different order, a disorder. Some fragments of the picture will still be recognizable, but the more often we give the box a shake, the more disintegrated the picture is likely to become. The irreversibility of increased entropy or disorder is often said to correspond to the unchanging time arrow. Time and entropy are held to advance together, since every process on which our lives depends results in entropy increase: we proceed in one direction and therefore age. Entropy is thus equated with the time arrow pointing from the past to the present to the future.19 From the fact that the universe’s entropy is remorselessly increasing and tending towards a maximum, Nietzsche concludes that it cannot move towards such a state since it should have reached it by now. Borges’ paints the full scenario: ‘una vez alcanzado el máximo de entropía [. . .] el universo entero [. . .] estará tibio y muerto’ (‘La doctrina de los ciclos’, p. 88). This scenario of a change from ever-increasing to ever-decreasing entropy is feasible when we imagine that the source of our energy, the Sun, is switched off. Heat on earth decreases down to a maximum entropy level, and life ceases to be. There is no longer an ‘arrow’ of entropy, and hence no ‘arrow’ of time. Implosion, the Big Crunch, incurs in which all laws of nature are broken down, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It cannot prevail since that would demand a time arrow where there is no time. The only word we have for a domain without the Second Law, without decay, nor increase in disorder is eternity, the only eternity so far as a consequence of natural events. Nietzsche refuted both the mechanistic and the thermodynamic approach to determine the universe, yet Borges structures his critique in a way which suggests that Nietzsche had tried to do exactly that. This oscillation between the emotional comfort of an Eternal Return, and, in the absence of anything else, Borges’ intellectual realization as to the futility of any such possibility point yet again to his need for a something beyond theory and concept which could satisfy his need for fulfilment.

Chapter 3

1936–1953: Entries into Spirituality

In the year 1936 Borges makes a significant shift in his exploration of time and self as he introduces the notion of eternity into his debate. This enables us to delineate the link between time and individuation on the one hand, and that between eternity and union with a higher reality on the other. Borges, however, does not make these links explicitly, and perhaps not consciously either. This means that for him, there remain the duality and ultimately irreconcilable tensions between time and eternity, and also those between the individuated self and the self which is in communion with a higher self. These tensions could be resolved by an experience of a mystical union, a longing which he expresses in both intellectual and emotional terms throughout his writing. The texts of this period in his life reveal an intuition of, an empathy with a divine existence, and also a certain sense of frustration at the lack of spiritual fulfilment. In the mid to late 1930s, the time also of writing many of his most noted fictions, he seeks new ways of satisfying his yearning for transcending the limitations of the mind, and, along with the mind, the abhorred yet inescapable notions of time and identity. To that effect, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics of art, which allows for the transcendence of selfhood and temporality, had a marked influence. Schopenhauer realized that the artist in each one of us is blessed with the ability to transcend ordinary consciousness, which is marked by egocentricity, interestedness, pain and anxiety, the manipulation of the perceptual content by the will. The transcendent power of art enables one to reach aesthetic consciousness, which is not marred by any of the above, because artists lose themselves in the object of perception and no longer separate the perceiver from the perceived: they have become one. Perception becomes disinterested and truly ‘objective’ by losing its painful (what he calls ‘useful’ rather than truthful) quality. We thus reach a painless state in which art no longer mirrors nature but truth,1 a state in which art redeems life.

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For Schopenhauer, true aesthetic experience is an intense form of knowledge and reveals reality as selfless, objective, subject-independent, timeless and changeless: a ‘timeless reality that is not carved up into individuals’ (Janaway 1997, 286). Aesthetic experience reveals, and is capable of uniting the individual with the timeless and undivided Idea. The supreme quality of music in particular reveals the unity with God in a quasi-mystical transcendence.2

1936: Time, Eternity, God, and Soul With ‘Historia de la eternidad’ of 1936, Borges shifts his discussion of time further.3 Where we saw how in the early 1920s he had flatly denied the concept of time and had by the late 1920s moved towards an exploration of notions of infinity, he now tentatively introduces, though not fully fledged as yet, the differentiation between time and eternity. In ‘Historia de la eternidad’ he discovers and intellectualizes eternity and discusses at great lengths both the gnostic and the Church’s (Bishop Irenaeus’) conception of eternity, which has implications for the notion of the Trinity. He also discusses, and rejects Platonic Forms. But here we note something interesting. In a new prologue to the 1953 edition of ‘Historia de la eternidad’, he speaks of a radical change in his vision of archetypes: whereas in 1936 he considered them piezas inmóviles de museo, in 1953 he recognizes their nature as poderosas, vivas, acknowledging that they are indeed an underlying reality. Initially however, Borges arrives at his own notion of eternity from which he had to omit God, archetypes and any other underlying reality: ‘Es una pobre eternidad ya sin Dios, y aun sin otro poseedor y sin arquetipos’ (p. 37). Although he denies Platonic Forms and eternity intellectually, he chooses to conclude his essay with ‘Sentirse en muerte’, his experience of 1928 of something he calls eternity. What has happened here is that Borges effectively refutes his own argument, as he cannot avoid constantly returning to an experience of a spiritual moment. Much of his argument in ‘Historia de la eternidad’ revolves around Platonic Forms, and much of his unresolved contradictions can be attributed to the difference between Aristotle’s and Plato’s respective notions of Forms. The debate concerning F(f)orms centres on the distinction between Platonic Forms (or Ideas), which are transcendental, and Aristotelian forms, which are immanent. This is a debate which Borges takes up again with ‘Avatares de la tortuga’.4 The crucial difference between Plato and

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Aristotle is the question of an entity existing independently of its concrete manifestation, which also raises the question of how this affects time.5 Borges’ initial classification of Platonic Ideas as monstrously immobile (inmóviles piezas de museo, ‘Historia de la eternidad’, p. 9, 16; an assertion he also makes in ‘Una vindicación del falso Basílides’ of 1929, p. 62) can be attributed to his conclusion that since the Idea (and hence the image) is unchanging, so also is it motionless. But although for Plato Ideas do not change, the individual things in our world do change in time. This is possible because the common universal Ideas could be separated from particular things which are thus subject to different laws. Where Borges stumbled, is in the fusion of the strictly Platonic with the Aristotelian variant which rejects the notion of Forms (forms in Aristotle) as existing independently of the individual thing. Aristotle still agreed with Plato, though, on the unchanging nature of underlying forms. How, then, do individual things change while their form (which according to Aristotle do not exist independently) remains unchanging? The answer lies in the introduction of ‘substance’, which gave rise to an ongoing philosophical debate surrounding body and soul, mind and matter, and which also infected Borges in his concern for identity and the underlying reality of phenomena. An individual thing remains constant despite the fact that it changes and has different properties (or accidents) at different times, because its essence (that aspect which identifies the individual as a particular individual) cannot change. For Aristotle, the individual thing is substance, is reality, and consists of matter. Both matter and its underlying form are unchanging; what can change, however, is the way they combine, and although substance and form cannot exist separately they can be distinguished through the various combinations they undergo. In this way, Aristotle can avoid the unacceptable notion of immobility and changelessness of both Form and individual thing (which his predecessors such as Parmenides upheld) while still holding on to underlying realities. The step Borges had to take was to recognize the changelessness of eternal F/forms and of individual things in their ‘essence’, but not necessarily in their idiosyncratic makeup. It is in the recognition of the combinatory value of form and matter that, in 1953, he could reconcile his rejection in 1936 of F/forms on the basis of these being riddled by ‘mezcla y variedad’ instead of being pure and single (‘Historia de la eternidad’, p. 21). In typically understated manner, and 17 years on, in the ‘Prólogo’ to the new edition of Historia de la eternidad, Borges is to admit his error and acknowledges a significant shift in his philosophical outlook and his concession to Platonism (also in ‘La metáfora’, 1952):

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No sé cómo pude comparar a ‘inmóviles piezas de museo’ las formas de Platón y cómo no sentí, leyendo a Erígena y a Schopenhauer, que ellas son vivas, poderosas y orgánicas. (‘Prólogo’, Historia de la eternidad, p. 9) The refutation of time, as only vaguely suggested in the prologue (‘entendí que sin tiempo no hay movimiento [. . .] tampoco puede haber inmovilidad’) points to the idealist’s approach which Borges adopts later in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’ of 1944 and in ‘La metáfora’ of 1952. Without consulting the former, however, we cannot fully understand how the latter is meant to modify his views in Historia de la eternidad. ‘La metáfora’ concludes that there are only a limited number of affinities which one can discover between life’s essential things, what he calls afinidades íntimas, necesarias. This confirms Borges’ philosophical intuition that ‘el número de percepciones, de emociones, de pensamientos, de vicisitudes humanas, es limitado, y que antes de la muerte lo agotaremos’ (‘El tiempo circular’, p. 97), that is, that the number of authentic experiences we may have is small, a view which leads him to the partial acceptance of the Eternal Recurrence. He reiterates this conviction ten years later in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, where the keyword is ‘experience’ and points to idealism. Bradley’s notion of time as a matter of relation between events is a concept which Borges introduces in ‘Historia de la eternidad’, and under the Buddhists’ name in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’. This relational view of time came much later to be termed the ‘static view of time’ (Seddon 1987). Events are ordered by the relation ‘earlier than/later than’ and do not cease to be future in order to become present, nor do they move in time, since time is a relation only between intemporal things. These relations are transient and asymmetric (A is earlier than B, but B is not earlier than A). This static view of time opposes the notion of time as flowing, in whichever direction, which is the notion most stubbornly ingrained in our mode of perception, not least of all due to our conditioning through language.7 Flux and change are the main features of the dynamic view of time,8 and Borges objects to the Platonic eternity on the grounds of its lack of variety and plenitude, the limited vision of ‘una eternidad que es más pobre que el mundo’ (p. 23). There are three identifiable anchors for the flux and direction of time: language, psychology and memory, and we saw that in his discussion of the Eternal Recurrence, Borges adds a fourth one in the guise of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The uniqueness of reality, the conviction that there is only one correct view of reality, is the touchstone for truth in absolutists such as Plato, Aristotle

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and Descartes. Kant, too, in his Critique of Pure Reason, proves by way of his ‘transcendental deduction’ that although we ourselves supply the rules for our experience, constitute our world, and determine what can be true for us, we don’t really have a choice because our intellect cannot go beyond that which we postulate. This is Kant’s elaborate attempt to prove that there is only one set of categories (basic rules or a priori concepts) which all rational beings must use when constituting their experience (cited in Solomon 1993, 296). The Platonic-absolutist conception of time and the nature of the universe is based on the intelligibility of the world, on the belief that language and thought are accurate vehicles for recognizing and representing an intelligible reality. For Plato, Aristotle and Descartes there exist necessary truths. This reveals their conviction in the teleology of the universe: Aristotle’s cosmology operates for a purpose and can be explained according to certain goals. This teleological view gave way to the Newtonian, purely deterministic understanding of the universe before arriving at quantum mechanics which revealed that particles no longer occupied well-defined positions and speed and that it was no longer possible to predict one but many possible outcomes as to a particle’s place and speed at any one time (see Hawking 1995, 78). The absolutist, or ‘Newtonian’ conception of time and space, in fact, was dealt its final blow by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (STR).9 STR claims that there exists no absolute, global way of dividing events into past, present and future: if two observers are in motion relative to each other, each is entitled to draw her own ‘now’ line, which is the line linking all events which have the same time co-ordinate in her frame of reference. Since the ‘now’-lines of the two observers differ, the classes of events they regard as ‘future’ differ. There is hence no unique, global simultaneity constituting ‘now’. The flow of time is not in the world itself, but in the mind of the observer. This ‘relational’ (‘Leibnizean’ or ‘reductionist’) conception lent irrefutable arguments to those who regard time as being mind-dependent, anthropomorphic, subjective and psychological since all propositions about time would be false in a world devoid of conscious beings. This thesis of the total mind-dependence of time, in turn, has been extended to a notion of relative truth: if absolute truth lays claim to reality, and reality is determined by time, then the relational conception of time destroys the absoluteness of both reality and truth – and art can claim to mirror truth, whatever truth and whose-so-ever truth. In fact it is Nietzsche who argues (in Human All Too Human, cited in Solomon 1993, 270) that

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since there are no facts, but only interpretations, there are as many equally ‘true’ or ‘false’ (it makes no difference) worldviews as there are creative people, whom he encourages to adopt, as a matter of experiment, as many different worldviews as possible. This is taken up by Borges when he asks himself: ‘si el tiempo es un proceso mental, ¿cómo lo pueden compartir miles de hombres, o aun dos hombres distintos?’. Plato, Berkeley, and Schopenhauer have all found an answer: in the archetype; the supranatural mind of God; and the will respectively. Borges comments on the Church’s eternity (what he calls la segunda eternidad ) which is, in his understanding, necessitated by the principles of predestination and reprobation, and manifest in the simultaneous creation of the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. When he speaks of ‘la Eternidad Anterior’ (‘La doctrina de los ciclos’, p. 87) he refers to the notion of a beginning of the universe in time, which had been rendered meaningless both by Kant’s and Nietzsche’s view since this presumed the past eternity of time regardless of a beginning or not of the universe. Augustine, too, had provided an answer by conceiving of time as a quality of the universe created by God and which did not exist previously. Time and creation came into existence simultaneously. But this is only so in the static universe which has either existed eternally, or which was created and continues to be the same unchangingly. Since there are no physical necessities in such a static universe, the beginning of time must have been caused by an otherworldly force or God. This was the universe known until the discovery in 1929 of galaxies moving away from us. From that, of course, arose the Big Bang Theory in which the universe is continuously expanding from a state of infinitesimal size and density, a state in which all laws of nature are dispensed of. Previous times are thereby not defined (Hawking 1995, 67). In ‘Historia de la eternidad’, Borges leads the reader through the history of eternity, from Aristotle’s perfect circles and lights, which determined his cosmology, to Einstein and the Big Bang theory, which he witnessed as a contemporary. He directs the reader’s attention to the rift between theology and science, and traces it back to Galilei. He also points to the fact that scientific dogmas have shaped notions of the physical universe – and with it our conception of time, truth and reality – in the most contradictory ways possible: as absolute or relative. He calls eternity ‘un juego o una fatigada esperanza’ (‘Historia de la eternidad’, p. 11). But it is a concept which holds the promise of overcoming the loneliness of individuation by uniting the separate parts in a safe (divine) place, a symbolic womb that originated them, into the whole of the eternal Form.

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1936: Gnosticism and Sufism Borges displayed a lasting interest in Gnosticism and Sufism, particularly between the late 1920s and early 1950s. We see this in essays such as ‘Los avatares de la tortuga’ of 1932; ‘La flor de Coleridge’ of 1945, but which also reveals his pantheistic slant on mysticism; ‘Nota sobre Walt Whitman’ of 1947; and ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ of 1948. With ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ of 1936 Borges branches out towards an apprehension of a notion of God by writing texts which have mystical undercurrents. This is a curious text, a hybrid between ficción and essay. Borges had, in fact published it as either, depending on context. More about this text in the following chapter. The themes introduced in this period of time are those of salvation, knowledge, faith, enlightenment and G(g)od. His focus, however, remains gnostic and, as we shall see, displays pantheistic tendencies.

1943: The Eternal Return Revisited In 1943, and with another essay on the Eternal Return, Borges takes up the theme explored in ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ of 1934. He now introduces his idealist alternative mode of interpreting the doctrine. Experience is at the heart of his outlook, and his personal understanding of it is subject to considerable fluctuations during the course of his writing. In ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, A’ of 1944, he formally introduces repetition without precision of identical moments, in which circumstantial variations do not impede identity. In ‘El tiempo circular’, he had already introduced the concept of ‘partial identity’ when he proclaimed his preferred mode of interpreting the Eternal recurrence: ‘Arribo al tercer modo de interpretar las eternas repeticiones: [. . .] La concepción de ciclos similares, no idénticos, [. . .] experiencias análogas’ (p. 94).10 The idealist mode of interpreting the Eternal Return in ‘El tiempo circular’ (1943), helps him resolve the ultimate uncertainty expressed in the earlier essay ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ (1934) when he wonders: ‘Aceptada la tesis de Zarathustra, no acabo de entender cómo dos procesos idénticos dejan de aglomerarse en uno’. In ‘El tiempo circular’, he presents three modes of interpreting the Eternal Return, the first of which is Aristotelean-Platonic. Under the influence of the prevailing Platonic insistence that a circle was a perfect (ideal) shape, Aristotle’s cosmology conceived of the earth as stationary (since we do not feel it moving) and of

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everything else, like the Sun, the Moon and the planets revolving around it in a series of circular orbits. Motion should be circular, according to the Platonic ideal. Since man’s destiny is determined by the stars, whose course is circular, that destiny in turn had to be circular and recurrent.11 The second mode of interpreting the Eternal Return is Nietzschean, to which Borges applies the same logic as before by equating Nietzsche’s ‘forces’ with atoms in order to demonstrate how a finite number of terms in infinite time cannot permute infinitely. He then calls in Russell’s Identity approach to recurring events, implying that if they are identical in quality, they have to be identical in number. This is impossible in a world of linear time where repetition means succession. The third mode is favoured by Borges in which he interprets recurring cycles as only partially identical. The way in which he salvages the Eternal Return from the apparently irrefutable atomic-mathematical evidence, is by applying finiteness not to atoms or physical objects, but to experiences in what he later was to propose as ‘repetition without precision’ (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’), that is, the identity of variegated circumstantial experiences, which is how he avoids the full impact of the Leibnizean principle: ‘Se repiten las tautologias de mi vida repetitiva sin precisión’ (‘El tiempo circular’, p. 243). He refutes time by pointing to the idealist conviction that time is a mere relation between intemporal events and puts forward the Eternal Return as the truly Nietzschean ‘Being of Becoming’ in the way that Heraclitus of Ephesus philosophized the world of perpetual change as endlessly repetitive cycles. The analogy of all human experience points not so much at a world without plurality, as to a world where every possible variation is firmly anchored as the part in the whole of experience already lived, be it by one individual or more. Whereas Borges had simply argued against Nietzsche in ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’, he later, in ‘El tiempo circular’, offers a more differentiated discussion, before arriving at his own version of variegated repetition. ‘El tiempo circular’ concludes with a double outlook on the fixedness of life’s experiences: the discomfort to our sense of individuality at the prospect of merely reliving, instead of creating our own lives; but also the comfort that nothing can deprive us from the huge, albeit limited, pool of life’s ingredients. Although it has a political ring to it in the essay, it is also a statement about Borges’ own tension.12 On the one hand he dismisses the doctrine as intellectually unchallenging and possibly unacceptable, while at the same time continuing to toy with it in what is perhaps, in the absence of any faith experience, an emotional bias.

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1944/1946: New Refutations The 1940s are a period of great tension for Borges between mysticism and pantheism, between faith and resignation, between immanence and transcendence. It is also the time when Borges branches out further towards the notion of eternity as an alternative to the nothingness of time and individuated identity. As a telling conclusion to the first of the two versions of his essay ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, version A, (in Otras Inquisiciones) of 1944 , Borges places a text we have come across several times already: ‘Sentirse en muerte’. But he is also still fascinated by the Leibnizean idea of the sameness, or identity of two processes (see ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ 1934; ‘Historia de la eternidad’ 1936, p. 13; ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, version A, p. 243, and version B, p. 253). Leibniz’s doctrine states that if two things were alike in absolutely all respects without there being any differentiating features between them – which the time and space co-ordinates would confer to any two or more identical things, processes, thought, etc. –, then they are not two things but one: ‘Dos argumentos me abocaron a esa refutación [del tiempo]: el idealismo de Berkeley, [y] el principio de los indiscernibles, de Leibniz’ (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo A’, p. 237). In ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, Borges reiterates his youthful assertion of the nothingness of personality, first voiced in 1922. He also develops his discussion of Leibniz further and introduces a concept which he had first formulated in the mid1920s: he applies Berkeley’s idealism minus God, which he had expounded in 1925 in ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, where he took issue with Berkeley by denying that things (continue to) exist in the mind of God: Lo repito: no hay detrás de las caras un yo secreto, que gobierna los actos y que recibe las impresiones; somos, únicamente, la serie de esos actos imaginarios y de esas impresiones errantes. ¿La serie? Negados el espíritu y la materia, que son continuidades, negado también el espacio, no sé qué derecho tenemos a esa continuidad que es el tiempo. [. . .] Cada instante es autónomo. Ni la venganza ni el perdón ni las cárceles ni siquiera el olvido pueden modificar el invulnerable pasado. No menos vanos me parecen la esperanza y el miedo, que siempre se refieren a hechos futuros; es decir a hechos que no nos ocurrirán a nosotros, que somos el minucioso presente. [. . .] Consideremos una vida en cuyo discurso las repeticiones abundan: la mía, verbigracia. [. . .] No puedo lamentar la perdición de un amor o de una amistad sin meditar que sólo se pierde lo que realmente no se ha tenido [. . .]. Esas tautologías (y otras

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que callo) son mi vida entera. Naturalmente, se repiten sin precisión [. . .]. Sospecho, sin embargo, que el número de variaciones circunstanciales no es infinito: podemos postular, en la mente de un individuo (o en dos individuos que se ignoran, pero en quienes se opera el mismo proceso), dos momentos iguales. Postulada esa igualdad, cabe preguntar: Esos momentos idénticos, ¿no son el mismo? ¿No basta un sólo momento repetido para desbaratar y confundir la serie del tiempo? (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, pp. 122–123) In the absence of undoing time, or the past (which even mystics would not attempt to do, only to transcend it by lived experience and grace), there is a possibility of redemption or salvation, which continues to remain elusive. Borges poses the all-too-simple yearning for the time series to be confounded when he says: ‘¿No basta un sólo momento repetido para desbaratar y confundir la serie del tiempo?’. But what is most striking is the shift from the personal to the intellectual. As in the earliest essays of the 1920’s, especially ‘La nadería de la personalidad’, Borges alludes to the deeply personal (mi vida), yet swiftly, and almost imperceptibly moves on to the intellectual and the speculative (the Leibnizian question of the indiscernibility of two identical moments). In this move from the personal to the intellectual, Borges shifts the reader’s focus without undoing his allusion altogether. In that sense, the reader participates in Borges’ struggle to reconcile the experiential with the conceptual. One particular phrase strikes me as significant: Sólo se pierde lo que realmente no se ha tenido. The loss Borges refers to is all the more keenly felt because it is a loss of something never truly possessed, never timelessly experienced in the then present moment, and as such never timelessly present. Only that which is experienced fully in the present moment, with all of one’s being in the moment, is eternalized, never to be lost. The above quoted passage in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’ reveals several profound themes: loss; the impossibility of pardon or redemption; the implacability of life; the irreversible nature of time; the eternal repetition of the same in similar versions. But when Borges philosophizes and intellectualizes the release from temporality, then this masks a much deeper, personal longing: the release from the selfness and pain which individuation brings. It is at this personal, confessional juncture in the essay that he again introduces ‘Sentirse en muerte’, his account of the timeless, the eternal, which resists being captured by words and the intellect. Having previously arrived at the conclusion that there is no self and no subject, Borges takes the issue further and asks rhetorically: ‘¿no se aglomeran

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en uno dos procesos idénticos?’. The numerical sameness of identical momens leads him to apply a version of the doctrine of the Eternal Return. He agrees with Nietzsche on the finiteness of all experiences or possible combinations, but holds that, since there is no subject, the cycles would be one and the same, and that therefore there could not be repetitions or recurrences (see ‘Sentirse en muerte’: Borges lives the self same moment now that was 30 years ago, thus levelling different time planes). In fact, Borges asks the same question three times over the following ten years: Aceptada la tesis de Zarathustra, no acabo de entender cómo dos procesos idénticos dejan de aglomerarse en uno. ¿Basta la mera sucesión, no verificada por nadie? (‘La doctrina de los ciclos’, 1934) Si el tiempo es un proceso mental, ¿cómo lo pueden compartir miles de hombres o aun dos hombres distintos? (‘Historia de la eternidad’, 1936, p. 130) Podemos postular en la mente de un individuo (o en dos individuos que se ignoran, pero en quienes se opera el mismo mecanismo) dos momentos iguales: Esos idénticos momentos ¿no son el mismo? ¿No basta un solo término repetido para desbaratar y confundir la serie del tiempo? (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, A’, pp. 243–244) And he expands on this idea in the subsequent version of his essay: Negar el tiempo es dos negaciones: negar la sucesión de los términos de una serie, negar el sincronismo de los términos de dos series. (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, B’, p. 153) The experience of timelessness, recounted in ‘Sentirse en muerte’ of 1928, 1934, and again of 1944, has a personal, intuitive certainty which goes beyond the rational. In ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, Borges formulates this as what appears a confluence of Nietzsche’s notion of the Eternal Return and Leibniz’ Principle. In ‘El tiempo circular’, Borges sketches an idea for a story (‘Los teólogos’): the theologian and the heretic, whom the former brings to justice, are really one and the same person in a fictionalization of the principle that the one instance is identical with the other. After the epiphanical moment of timelessness in ‘Sentirse en muerte’, Borges’ intellect takes over and he analyses his experience beyond words: the finiteness, nuestra pobreza, of such moments of total identity must surely

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result in an eternal return, thus rendering the moment and the perceiver immortal and timeless. But intellect and language alone cannot grasp the intemporal. In resigned frustration Borges concludes ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’ with his famous words that the world, alas, is real, that he, alas, is Borges. He is torn between the longing for the ‘eternal womb’, and the unsettling certainty of individuality forced upon him by his mind. Identity is now irreconcilable in its two meanings of oneness on the one hand, and of self-identity or otherness on the other. What Borges seeks is permanence, or an experience of transcendence from fleetingness to permanence in some kind of spiritual reality. To put it differently: he is torn between the existential fear of leaving conceptual reality and leaping into a spiritual dynamic which his deepest self craves.

Excursions into Christian Mysticism The appeal to Borges of mysticism in general, and of Silesius, the seventeenthcentury German mystic in particular lies in their freedom from specific, outwardly dogmatic tenets and the concentration on inward spiritual experience. What lies at the heart of his interest in mysticism, and in philosophers who explore notions of transcendence or permanence? Just how would pantheism and mysticism dissolve for Borges the duality of time and eternity, of the accidental and the essential self? And why is mysticism so important to him in the first place? It could provide the answer to certain vexing dualities. Since the relationship between time and eternity corresponds to that between the accidental self and the essential self, mysticism (more so: the experience of a mystical reality) could effect the release from the accidents of time and self, from an otherwise irreconcilable duality between time and eternity on the one hand, and accidental and essential self on the other. Time and individuality are thus juxtaposed to eternity and communion. In Christianity and in some other faiths such as Judaism, eternity can be apprehended and shared by the individual in this world by living in communion with the divine in the present moment, which is the only ‘real’ here and now; it is the only moment which is truly ours. In living the present moment as the only purpose of living, working and striving, the self (the individual) reaches God within the self. In this union with God, which can be constant if lived in each moment, the present (time) opens out and touches the divine eternity so that there is the fullness of life which the self longs for. The presence of God is also there in the absence of this union, that is, in its forsakenness. It is a life shared in the divine, and therefore in eternity.

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Schopenhauer might have termed this ‘the eternal present’, yet Borges, however great his debt to him, is granted no lasting moments of aesthetic transcendence. But Borges looked not only to the conceptual aesthetics of Schopenhauer. He also drew on German mysticism. The German medieval mystics Daniel Czepko von Reigenfeld and Angelus Silesius are explicitly acknowledged in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’. The overt acknowledgements are the epigram by von Czepko which heads the ‘Nota preliminar’ to ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’. Another epigram by Silesius concludes the 1946 version of the same essay (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, B’). These two texts are crucial in tracing Borges’ debate of time and identity across the genres and across the decades. Daniel von Czepko Reigersfeld was a seventeenth-century German mystic and one of the leaders of Silurian spiritual reformers. He was also a poet and writer of religious epigrams who exercised considerable influence on Silesius. Von Czepko, in the first epigram, speaks of the birth of time in and with God: ‘Vor mir war keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine seyn / Mit mir gebiert sie sich, mit mir geht sie auch ein’ (Daniel von Czepko, Sexcenta monodisticha sapientum, III, 1655; ‘There was no time before I was, and after me it will not be / In me alone it is born, and with me it will cease’, my translation).13 ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, B’ concludes with the Silesian epigram from The Cherubinic Wanderer, Canticle 263 of 1675, Silesius’ book of mystical revelations. It reveals a tension which is more pronounced than ever before: it is that between immanence and transcendence. Immanence (associated with pantheism and Eastern mysticism) brings with it the dissolution of personal identity, whereas transcendence (mysticism, Christianity) preserves the personal self in its union with God. The text also reveals a tension in Borges’ conception of the divine who acquires the characteristics of a deity to be worshipped in a sense, rather than an all-knowing and complete expression of transcendent love. This possibility of communion with a loving God remains, in my view, the object of his search. Silesius, like most German mystics, holds that ‘entering into union with God is by way of a breakthrough with the help of godly inspiration’. This is an immediate, unmediated process, unlike the ‘three-step-model’ of German theology of the time which held that union is via purgation and illumination (Schmidt in Shrady 1986). We can see the appeal of Silesius in the relationship which he establishes between time and eternity in their correspondence to the accidental self and the essential self. For Silesius, ‘Time [is] the abode of the fragmentary and unreal. It is the illusion of the accidental self’ (in Flitch 1932, 84).

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This unmediated, immediate experience of union with God does not require teaching nor knowledge nor intellectual understanding. As such, it is firmly rooted in an openness to the divine, in direct experience and, most importantly, in relationship. This is a very different model to the one Borges had explored with Gnosticism and its emphasis on knowledge per se. With Silesius and von Czepko, Borges intuits the possibility of life and love shared in and with the divine. Silesius’ sixth book is, according to Flitch (1932, 67) ‘overlaid by severe didacticism. [. . .] The emphasis falls principally on the need for action’. This speaks to Borges on the level of intuition and longing. A certain lack of spiritual experience, coupled with the wish for it, drives much of his intellectual explorations. We shall now for a moment fast forward to the epilogue to Historia de la noche (1977, 558) where he writes: De cuantos libros he publicado, el más íntimo es éste. Abunda en referencias librescas; también abundó en ellas Montaigne, inventor de la intimidad. [. . .] Como ciertas ciudades, como ciertas personas, una parte muy grata de mi destino fueron los libros. ¿Me será permitido repetir que la biblioteca de mi padre ha sido el hecho capital de mi vida? La verdad es que nunca he salido de ella [. . .]. The emphasis on books attests, in my view, to a life of intense empathy and sensitivity, though perhaps not fully realized in actuality. The library becomes a metaphor for vicarious experience. Borges is torn between intellectual comfort and a longing for the experiential. This is a tragedy. Because he is so embedded in the intellectual, he is afraid to enter the real fulfillment of a lived, spiritual experience. This is not to say that the love and appreciation of literature is a fallacy, because it is possible to apprehend humanity and the divine in reading and intellectual exploration. The problem may be that this could have an even fuller expression of beauty if joined with a lived spiritual experience. In the closing epigram to The Cherubinic Wanderer, as well as in the epigram which Borges chose to close ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, Silesius, like von Czepko before him, calls for active reading. The transformation of the soul-searching self lies in becoming the very word and essence of that which it aspires to unite with, God: ‘Freund es ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr willst lesen / So geh und werde selbst die Schrift und selbst das Wesen’, translated as ‘Friend, let this be enough; if you wish more to read Go and become yourself the writ and that which is’ (Shrady 1986). This reading process exceeds mere reflection but rather is a conversion; once the inner conversion process is complete, reading becomes obsolete,

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to be replaced by life.14 In this the urge to leave reading aside and now turn to life itself, Silesius echoes von Czepko. He urges the reader to this very action to give oneself over to the mystical experience. It is an exhortation which Borges recognizes, intellectually and emotively, but which he also capitulates to in his own lack of fulfilment. The final lines, which conclude The Cherubinic Wanderer as well as ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, B’, urge the reader, the searcher to emulate the writer’s own experience, to be that which s/he searches for: the eventual union of the self with God after the manifold manifestations of the search. Transcending selfhood and time are afforded by the mystical experience of serenity, whereby the worldly and corrupted ways of seeing things, and the slavery to selfhood, are transformed in order to arrive at a union of the self with what is no longer perceived as ‘other’ (see Flitch 1932, 79–81 and Shrady 1980, 22). For that to happen, the knower must become the known. ‘[Mystics] enter into union [with God] by way of a breakthrough with the help of [. . .] Divine inspiration’ (Shrady 1986, 23; see also Flitch 1932, 76 and 101). Borges had attempted to fictionalise this in ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’, even though we note that the reader remains on the threshold of revelation as the story ends. Ending his spiritual journey in the Cherubinic Wanderer, Silesius urges the reader-searcher to move from reading about the mystical union with God to being (at) one with ‘the larger self of the All, whether it be termed God, the Absolute, or Ultimate Reality’ (Flitch 1932, 76). In this process of becoming, writing is transformed into the experience itself which is the union and the identity of the self with God. Transcendence of selfhood for the mystic differs from the Buddhist notion of nothingness, a concept which, despite its influence, Borges cannot wholly embrace: For Angelus, [. . .] the self [. . .] must be quit of all desires, [. . .] even for God himself; for the persistence of any desire attests the fact that the desiring self still lives on. It must die. It must cease to be. The categorical of Angelus Silesius is Sei nicht – Be not. If this were the conclusion of the whole matter [. . .] the doctrine embodied in the Cherubinic Wanderer might appear to be scarcely distinguishable from [the Buddhist notion of the] extinction of self in Nirvana. [In Silesius’ mysticism,] the other, for which the self craved so long as it was a self, is no longer other. Rid of its selfhood the self finds that in its inmost essence it is abiding in the Godhead whence it has never ‘gone out’. [. . .] Gladly does the self surrender its individuality in order to find itself in the boundless Whole. [. . .] I and Thou are indistinguishable terms. (Flitch 1932, 80–81)

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The work of Silesius has at times been taken out of its monotheistic, Christian framework and read as a pantheistic text. Borges acknowledges these and perhaps even spiritualistic echoes in ‘La flor de Coleridge’. It is certainly true that Silesius’ intellectual poetry – in its brevity and condensity, coupled with the work’s paradox and its musical quality, its audacity and didactics – offers ‘poetic versions of key concepts of existential philosophy and which as such appeal to seekers of all faiths or none’ (Shrady 1986, xxii, 3). Borges himself, in ‘La flor de Coleridge’ of 1945 refers to Silesius as a pantheist: ‘Al promediar del siglo XVII, el epigramatista del panteismo Angelus Silesius dijo que todos los bienaventurados son uno (Cherubinischer Wandersmann, V, 7 ) y que todo cristiano debe ser Cristo (op.cit. V, 9 )’ (‘La flor de Coleridge’ in Borges 2005, 20, note 2, my emphasis). But reading Silesius out of context or as a pantheistic text is an incomplete reading. Borges, though on one level pointing to the importance of becoming Christ, brackets out the importance to Silesius’ own mystical experience of the divine as the ultimate source and aim of the search. God as the supreme, transcendental reality, not God as identical with the material reality. Silesius himself warns against a self that is not rooted in God.15 This points to a tendency in Borges to relegate the divine into a secondary arena, the material only. Again, he grapples with the question of a relationship with a living, though transcendental God, and that we can enter into this being by participation. But a leap in the darkness, as it were, has to be taken. Concepts and theories have to be exchanged with an active apprehension and giving of the self wholistically to the divine. The very passage by Silesius which Borges alludes to, canticle V7, speaks of the unity of all saints in mind and body: ‘Alle Heiligen sind ein Heiliger’ (cited in Gnädinger 1984). This unity is not pantheist but trinitarian: reciprocal and constantly life-giving. The second canticle is Silesius V.9: ‘Es muß ein jeder Christus seyn’ which exhorts every Christian to be Christ in their way of living (cited in Gnädinger 1984). In this communion with the divine through the Son, and in the ultimate oneness of all, the identity (and individuality) of the self is preserved (unlike in Borges’ Simurgh). This, in Christian mysticism, is the way in which the individual reaches union with the divine. Borges’ youthful, ambivalent stance towards the Son and the Trinity accounts for the attraction of pantheism: although he is drawn to the mystical notion of the Christ figure, he is repelled at the notion of the Trinity rather than recognize in it a model for mutuality and reciprocity, both in the spiritual and in society. We shall see that it is his conception of the Father as static and vengeful which exacerbates this dilemma and misunderstanding.

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In a much later lecture on beauty, Borges calls again on Silesius’ mystical rose to sum up his own view on beauty, which he concludes with one of Silesius’ verses, Die Rose ist ohne warum; sie blühet weil sie blühet, which he translates into Spanish as ‘La rosa sin porqué; florece porque florece’ (‘La poesía’ in Siete Noches, 120–121). The rose in Silesius symbolizes the crucified Christ (Christ crucified on the rose tree) and the mystical body; it also signifies the flower of (Christ’s) love. The rose in Borges, in turn, signifies love. Together, these symbols combine into Christ’s sacrificial love. It is in the later poetry that the Christ figure resurfaces in a move towards a living relationship with the divine.

1946/53: Buddhism and Platonic Forms Embraced Back in 1923, Borges had explicitly challenged Berkeley on the issue of an underlying reality or divinity (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 122) and considered reality a simulacrum, a mirage: he categorically stated that there is nothing underlying our empirical reality, nothing that we might call absolute reality. We saw that this a view which he was to modify and drastically change much later, in the 1953 prologue to a new edition of Historia de la eternidad. There, we detect the solace which Borges takes in Platonic Forms over Berkeley’s idealist universe held together by a God whom he struggles to believe in or experience.16 In the new prologue to Historia de la eternidad, Borges comes to embrace Platonic Forms, a view which marks a radical change of attitude from that displayed at the time of originally writing ‘Historia de la eternidad’ in 1936. This statement tentatively concludes his ongoing postulations and refutations and indicates an opening towards some kind of spirituality. In the 1946 edition of ‘Nueva refutacion del tiempo, B’, he had brought together those philosophers who had shaped his understanding of notions of time and of selfhood, from whom he, however, also departed the most radically. He had grappled with an intimation of transcendence, only to resign himself to his forever being a prisoner to his own consciousness, to time, and most poignantly so, to being himself. The exstasis which ‘Sentirse en muerte’ brings at the close of the 1944 version of the essay, gives way to resignation (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, A’, p. 240 and 248): Quede pues en anécdota emocional la vislumbrada idea y en la confesa irresolución de esta hoja el momento verdadero de éxtasis y la insinuación posible de eternidad de que esa noche no me fue avara.

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Borges concludes version B with these famous words: And yet, and yet . . . Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. [. . .] El tiempo es la substancia de que estoy hecho. [. . .] El mundo, descraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges. It is at this point of once more resigning himself to the inescapability of time and selfhood that Borges introduces the Buddhist tale of King Milinda’s (also known as Menandro’s) carriage in the ‘Nota al prólogo’ (1946) to the two versions of the essay. Again, he makes an interesting, intellectual attempt at offering himself alternatives to the nothingness of identity, while at at the same time putting forward the inescapability of his own being. The carriage is a symbol, and, like man, is neither its individual parts nor can it exist outside its parts. It is a text which is central to the Buddhist teaching of the non-existence of the self and soul. It centres on the belief that what we hold to be individually existing selves is really one. On this very question of identity and of what constitutes self, King Milinda and the enlightened Nagasena engage in a dialogue in which Nagasena asks the king to identify him with any of his attributes, bodily or mental. Nagasena denies that he himself, indeed that any self, is inherent in any of the attributes that pertain to his body or mind. He is neither his emotions nor his perceptions or his consciousness (dhakkas). King Milinda concludes from this that there is no unchanging, underlying essence to the self. This is the famous conversation between King Milinda and Nagasena about the analogy of the chariot and the self: ‘If you have come on a chariot, then, please explain to me what a chariot is. Is the pole the chariot?’ King Milinda responds by denying that the pole, nor any of the other constituents of the chariot are the chariot. He continues, however: ‘It is in dependence on the pole, the axle, the wheels, framework, the flagstaff etc that there takes place this denomination ‘chariot’, this conceptual term, a current appellation and a mere name’. He affirms what Nagasena had previously asserted about his own identity: ‘I am known as Nagasena [. . .] yet it is but a denotation, designation, a current usage, for Nagasena is only a name since no person is got at here’ (Beckerlegge 2001, 349).17 Buddhism affirms the non-permanence and changeability of self. Anatta is the no-self. It refers to the fact that ‘there is no permanent or immutable essence to anything, no underlying unchanging self [this is unlike the Upanishadic tradition which holds that there is indeed such a self, atman], not even within the human person’ (Markham and Ruparell 2001, 197).18

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For Buddhists, the nothingness of self is liberating. For Borges, it is problematic. In Borges’ writing, there are a few, but highly relevant texts which speak of the spiritual. These are ‘El coloquio de los pájaros’ in ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’; the two epigrams by von Czepko and Silesius in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’ (A and B); and the Buddhist tale of Melandro’s carriage which precedes the 1952 ‘Nota al Prólogo’ in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’. Although all of these appear in conjunction with other texts, none is an integral text in itself in that they either head or end other writings or feature as footnotes or appendixes. On that basis, they seem to be intuitive. They are not fictional, but rather autobiographical texts which recount actual experience. The fact that these transcendental texts are secondary ones is significant as it places these spiritual insights and experiences on the periphery of Borges and his characters. The only integral text which he felt came close to an actual transcendence of the limits of time and the painful process of individuation is ‘Sentirse en muerte’. Yet even this experience is fleeting and ultimately insufficient. When Silesius asks the reader to leave reading and writing behind and to become the very one who one is searching for, which is God, then he points to being in the divine by participation in a life of love for God and neighbour in each moment. This invitation is simultaneously wonderful and terrifying for Borges because it means a complete sacrifice, at least initially, of ideas and concepts, of which he seems to have total control, in exchange for a lived experience of total risk and commitment in an abdication of control.

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Part Two

From Essay to Ficción

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Chapter 4

Writing and New Direction

The depth of feeling which drove Borges in his creative pursuits, and which he ascribed to all literature, may be what accounted for his attempt at reconciling individual creativity with the concept of the ‘universal mind’. In 1968, he gave an interview to Rita Guibert (Guibert 1972, cited in Aitken 2001, 80). When asked whether an intellectual, if he shuts himself away in an ivory tower and ignores reality, can make a contribution to solving the problems of society, Borges replied: Possibly shutting oneself up in an ivory tower and thinking about other things may be one way of modifying reality. I live in an ivory tower – as you call it – creating a poem, or a book, and that can be just as real as anything. People are generally wrong when they take reality as meaning daily life, and think of the rest as unreal. In the long run, emotions, ideas, and speculations are just as real as everyday events. I believe that all the dreamers and philosophers in the world are having an influence on our present-day life. I would like to add to this another quote where he speaks of his conviction as to the obliqueness of literature (in Aitken 2001, 84): Literature is not a mere juggling of words; what matters is what is left unsaid, or what may be read between the lines; were it not for this deep inner feeling, literature would be no more than a game, and we all know that it can be much more than that. And lastly, in a quote in Williamson (2004, xxii), Borges, in 1967, states that ‘all writing is a form of autobiography’: I have felt my stories so deeply that I have told them, well, using strange symbols so that people might not find out that they were all, more or less, autobiographical. The stories are about myself, my personal experiences.

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He in my view transforms his intensely lived or felt experiences into stories, with a capacity to express personal experience and empathy in and through fiction. The Borges we encounter is a man with a beating heart, three-dimensional though harder to apprehend, able to engage with life, plunging into life and revealing a layer of himself, using certain codes and somehow translating or articulating experience into narrative. His texts, like art, resonate on the level of the human soul. They are something of life itself. In the following quote Borges re-states a conviction he had formulated 40 years earlier, when he was a very young man: All literature is autobiographical, in the last instance. [. . .] The autobiographical substance of a work may at times be rendered invisible by the accidents that embodied it, but it subsists all the same, like a heart beating in the depths. (quoted in Williamson, 2004, p. ix) This statement confirms a conviction I have always had about Borges: his writing is anything but cerebral, abstract, bookish, nor is it a case of playing very clever games. It is passionate and experiential, perhaps not literally, but in the sense of a deeply felt affinity. As such it is an emotional and intellectual reality expressed in fictional terms. Or, where experienced as an actual event, it is translated into fiction. This can resonate with readers not only intellectually, but also on an intuitive and emotional level.

Writing as Experience Since a leap of faith was denied Borges, a painful gap develops between knowledge and experience. There is an element of contradiction when on the one hand he attributes an inferior value to writing as opposed to living, while on the other he asserts the opposite in no less convincing terms. Adolfo Murguía in an incisive and sensitive article (1983, 77–84) discusses what may look like Borges’ deprecation of the act of (his own) writing as a form of compensation for ‘real’ living, that is, for experience. His point of departure is Borges’ statement in the prologue of Discusión: Vida y muerte le han faltado a mi vida. De esa indigencia, mi laborioso amor por estas minucias. Ne sé si la disculpa del epígrafe valdrá. Murguía puts forward the view that this is not an expression of modesty or rhetoric, but a genuinely felt inadequacy with regard to the value of his

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art. He points us to the dual meaning of vida in the statement which leads Borges to internalize and resent his own craft (1983, 82–84): En el citado prólogo borgiano aparece una misma palabra, ‘vida’, dos veces en la misma oración. Lo dicho en ambas es distinto. La primera vez hace referencia al juego de riesgo, movimiento y peligro. La segunda, ‘mi vida’, hace referencia a su biografía. [. . .] Ambas vidas aparecen como opuestas, y la una, en cierto modo, como compensación de la otra. La primera sería la decisiva, juez de la segunda. ‘La vida’, entendida como violencia, en cuanto agresión, aparece como la medida de la escritura. [. . .] Aparece aquí, a mi entender, la interiorización por Borges de una medida inadecuada: la literatura, el ejercicio de la escritura son presentados al lector como ‘minucias’. Me inclino a creer que no se trata aquí de retórica benevolente, o de honesta modestía, sino de una perspectiva, injusta quizá, sobre el propio quehacer. [. . .] Presentar ‘la vida’ entendida como algo ajeno, exterior, que está en otro sitio, lleva, naturalmente, al dolor de la nostalgia. Esta comienza a estrechar el mundo del pensador. Poco a poco comienza éste a creer que lo esencial está en otra parte, comienza a mirar papeles y libros como a sus enemigos, hasta que, por fin, los abandona. Murguia is right to make the distinction between el escribidor, the writer who merely writes, and el escritor, who, like Borges, is at once writer, thinker and creator, compelled to be pursuing his work despite the arduousness and solitude involved, and with a sense of the sacred nature of the intellectual art engaged in. The labours of a genuinely felt love for the ‘minuciae’ of writing are, in Murguía’s view, one with life itself.1 The theme of a life not lived to the full is one which, as Murguía points out, runs through Borges’ work, and he alludes to an interesting link between this theme of absence and that of courage: El tema que dio origen a estas consideraciones es el aludido por Borges, ‘la vida ausente’. Señalamos dicho tema porque él, de una manera u otra, aparece reiteradamente en la obra borgiana. Otras de sus formas es el tema de la violencia y del coraje [. . .]. El coraje, el ‘haber sido valiente’ es una de las virtudes que Borges más aprecia, y que se contrapone, según él, de algún modo, al orden y al silencio de las bibliotecas. La pregunta entonces, tácitamente aludida por Borges, planteada de un modo más explícito y general, resultaría la siguiente: ¿Es que acaso la

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vida pensante tiene su origen en el temor? ¿Es que son acaso los libros una defensa contra el miedo? [. . .] Este tema borgiano de la ausencia de la vida en las bibliotecas se ha convertido en un tópico, en un lugar común para referirse al alcance de la vida intelectual. (Murguía 1983, 86) I would like to extend this connection and say that courage is a redeeming virtue by which Borges attempts to save his characters. In defence of Borges, Murguía, in my view correctly so, shifts the focus from any supposed fear or feeling of inadequacy on the part of Borges to the creative and courageous interplay between language and the silence of the as yet unwritten word: Lejos de ser la obra efecto del temor, ella es, por el contrario, resultado del silencio ante la catarata vacía de fonemas, como atrevimiento de la palabra ante el anhelante silencio. Having started out with Borges’ apologetic words as to the minutiae of his writing, Murguía nonetheless makes a strong case for writing as true creation. I would add that perhaps we should take Borges’ words in Discusión at more than face value. It is not conclusive to me that Borges really had as lowly an opinion of his art, especially when we recall that he ascribed a deep inner feeling to literature which elevates it beyond artistic experimentation or clever mind gambles. To this effect, Aitken’s view is insightful: ‘[Borges possessed] a vision of an expansive sense of reality which challenged our human condition and extended the realm of our being here in time [. . .]. What he creatively construes to be true is made true in his work’ (2001, 80). Aitken refers us to the underlying, existential search in the fictions (2001, 81 and 83): Borges is not concerned with traditional narratives with credible characters and events; his realm of writing is itself a quest, a journey of literary exploration seeking out the meaning of being, searching after truth, after ultimate reality. It is for this reason that his work is constantly peppered with quotations and references from ancient Chinese religions and philosophical systems, from Jewish and Islamic mystics, from western philosophy and from virtually all known literary traditions. For Borges what is of the world is also of him since he is of the world himself [. . .] and fuelled by an ancestral dynamic which allows his mind such intellectual freedom. What Borges is doing in this kind of writing is stating the fact that the search relentlessly continues.

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In his enterprise of literature, Borges shows sincerity and courage, but also existential pain (Aitken, 2001, 84): This suggests a brave and deeply serious undertaking by a writer, and implicit in this bravery is a kind of existential anguish about our condition; an uneasiness with our being here and the conditions governing it. How we are and how it is for us is challenged by Borges through his literary and metaphysical reflections. By confronting our existential condition we extend ourselves, we reach out beyond ourselves, beyond time. This rich interpretation shows that this journey is the very essence of life, and I would like to add that Borges hints not only at life, but also, enigmatically so, at death: Vida y muerte le han faltado a mi vida. How can this be interpreted? On the one hand, ‘life and death’ can serve as metaphors for experiential activity, as an expression of passion and of intensity. But additionally, they may be metaphors for passion in a deeper, mystical sense. For the mystic, the notion of death is not only physical, as a gateway to life. Death is experienced as part of life itself. It refers to the death of anything that is ego and self-will (what St Paul calls ‘the old man’ inside) and which therefore stands in the way of the emergence of the true self. This new self is at once both empty and more truly itself because it is fully open to the other.2 Vida y muerte, we might then say, refer to the transcendence of what Schopenhauer calls the individuated self, ego, time, anything which prevents it from fully experiencing the union with its true essence, which, in many of the world religions, is understood as God. It is what Borges, and the characters of his fictions, long to experience. From that very death to the self then stems true vida, a life united in the spiritual reality. This is Borges’ longing, and also his regret. It is an expression of a man who seeks yet cannot ascertain the elusive existence of an enduring essence, of a soul, and with it a higher, spiritual reality into whose existence he feels he can only be admitted in death. Yates (1973, 324) quite perceptively suggests that Borges’ work be read as a metaphor of the ineffable. The dual self-image, then, may be only one of the things that are left unsaid and which compel a writing which Borges himself affirmed was driven by ‘a deep inner feeling’.

Denial of Self and Soul On the question of self, and in order for us to make the link between the genres, we shall return to an early essay. In ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ the

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denial of self is prompted by the departure from a close friend. In an intimate admission, Borges tells us that he wishes to open up his soul to his friend: No hay tal yo de conjunto. Allende toda posibilidad de sentenciosa tahurería, he tocado con mi emoción ese desengaño en trance de separarme de un amigo. [. . .] Pero encima de cualquier alarde egoista, voceaba en mi pecho la voluntad de mostrar por entero mi alma al amigo. Hubiera querido desnudarme de ella y dejarla allí palpitante. (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, 1923, p. 98, my emphasis) At this stage, we note an interesting shift. Rather than accept, let alone explore the possibility of a soul which might give cohesion to the fleeting existence, Borges sublimates it onto an intellectual plane by speculating on the existence or otherwise of the self as such. More so than allow for the suffering self, he denies it, and any relationship and sharing of soul is being suppressed. This closed position towards relationship is at the heart of much of his intellectual striving. Once the shift onto the analytical level has been performed, he is struck by the inexistence of his innermost being. He realizes, beyond any doubt, that whatever might constitute his self at the time does not carry forward into the void which this separation is about to bring: Seguimos conversando y discutiendo, al borde del adiós, hasta que del golpe, con una insospechada firmeza de certidumbre, entendí ser nada esa personalidad que solemos tasar con tan incompatible exorbitancia. Ocurrióseme que nunca justificaría mi vida un instante pleno, contenedor de los demás, que todos ellos serían etapas provisorias, aniquiladoras del pasado y encaradas al porvenir, y que fuera de lo episódico, de lo presente, de lo circunstancial, no éramos nadie. Y abominé de todo misteriosismo. (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, p. 99) Borges moves almost visibly from the personal onto the no less intense intellectual plane. He dares to make explicit the woundedness of his personal sense of self, but also the shift. This text, as do others, bears witness to an intensity of feeling and of suffering as opposed to the life of absences which is at times alluded to when Borges is being confined to the dusty, seemingly impassive realm of the library and the study. The above passage, especially the first half with its unashamed emotiveness, is strangely at odds with the rest of the essay, which is detached, analytical, scathing in its denunciation of the self and any value attached to it. We also note the emphasis on the emotional reality, as well as on the intellectual

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understanding of this pain: ‘he tocado con mi emoción ese desengaño’, and: ‘hasta que del golpe, con una insospechada firmeza de certidumbre, entendí ser nada esa personalidad.’ The need to bare his soul is perceived by the young Borges as something beyond egotism, beyond the confines of the self: ‘encima de cualquier alarde egoista, voceaba en mi pecho la voluntad de mostrar por entero mi alma al amigo.’ We saw how in a subsequent essay, ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, Borges moves on from denying the self and communion with the other, to a denial of God as the underlying reality of all existence. By that time, he had sublimated the question of the soul onto a spiritually abstracted plane. But there is in Borges also the desire to be seen in his innermost self. This is the expression of a fundamental, spiritual need. It confirms the bond between the ‘I’ of the self and the ‘You’ of the divine. There is a parallel between this essay, where Borges admits to an initial desire to be seen in all his brokenness, and the desire of John Vincent Moon, the protagonist and traitor in the story ‘La forma de la espada’. Moon too, expresses a fundamental need to be seen, in his case to reveal the full extent of his villainy, which points to his need for redemption. Borges’ focus in the essays was twofold: on the self and identity on the one hand, and on temporality on the other. Both are inextricably linked to one another, and also to the notion of the absolute. His preoccupation with time reveals that at the heart of his striving lie the desire and the inability to transcend the realm of the temporary into the eternal, which is for him the unacknowledged expression of the divine. But in another text, ‘Sentirse en muerte’, Borges is deeply struck by his own intimation of the link, the bond between the self and the soul, the individual and the eternal, the union of the one with the other. His experience of the timeless moment is a possibility which is still to become an actuality. With the slightly later essays on pantheism and mysticism, he introduces alternatives to, or ways towards the spiritual dimension of Christianity.

Mystical Undercurrents: ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ This story marks the transition from grand philosophical speculations to writing fictions. The main story revolves around the two versions of a book about the quest by an unnamed student, who had renounced his Muslim faith, for a divine being who casts its shadow onto other, lesser beings. The story also introduces its own precursor, ‘El coloquio de los pájaros’ which is a mystical tale of the birds in search of their king.

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In the main story, the first-person narrator reconstructs the student’s account from the two versions of a manuscript. He is, as in many ficciones, a ‘Borges’ of sorts and voices issues pertinent to the author. His main contribution, however, lies in his conjectures as to the nature of the divine. The following is the favoured one. It puts forward the gnostic nature of the god searched for, subject to ever higher divinities: ‘No diré lo mismo de esta otra: la conjetura de que también el Todopoderoso está en busca de Alguien, y ese Alguien de Alguien superior (o simplemente imprescindible e igual) y así hasta el Fin – o mejor el Sinfín – del Tiempo, o en forma cíclica.’ (‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’, 43) The two versions of the manuscript are entitled The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu’tasim: A Game with Shifting Mirrors of 1934, and the earlier, superior but irretrievably lost version of 1932, The Approach to Al-Mu’tasím. These versions of the manuscript serve as a vehicle for the narrator’s teología extravagante that God, possibly identical to the searching student, may be in search of another, who in turn is in search of yet another, ad infinitum, forever unconcluded. The main story with its gnostic visions of the divine universe echoes concerns which Borges had explored in early essays such as ‘La vindicación del falso Basílides’ (1931), ‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’ (1931), and is to do half a century later in ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ (1982). He now extends these into the realm of fiction. The persistent yet unfulfilled quest for ultimate knowledge and for an experience of the divine is foregrounded. The story ends on the very threshold of revelation. The searcher finds Almotásim and opens the door to enter into his room, while the reader, and possibly Borges himself, remain on the threshold of experience. The story is, on the face of it, an account, and at the same time a critique, of the mystic’s path. The 1934 version is deemed inferior due to its blatantly allegorical overtones: La novela decae en alegoría: Almotásim es emblema de Dios y los puntuales itinerarios del héroe son de algún modo los progresos del alma en el ascenso místico. (‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’, 43) But there is, quite literally, more to ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’. It is really two stories. In a footnote, Borges introduces ‘El coloquio de los pájaros’, an allegorical tale of the birds who find that their long lost king of birds, the Simurgh, is each and every one of themselves. The fact that this

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mystical tale is placed outside the main body of the text is interesting. It indicates that the mystical experience may be, or may appear, as lying outside of the experiential realm of Borges himself. The following is Borges’ rendering of the allegory of the birds and how he relates this to the story itself: El remoto rey de los pájaros, el Simurg, deja caer en el centro de la China una pluma espléndida; los pájaros resuelven buscarlo, hartos de su antigua anarquía. Saben que el nombre de su rey quiere decir treinta pájaros; saben que su alcázar está en el Kaf, la montaña circular que rodea la tierra. Acometen la casi infinita aventura; superan siete valles, o mares; el nombre del penúltimo es Vértigo; el último se llama Aniquilación. Muchos peregrinos desertan; otros perecen. Treinta, purificados por los trabajos, pisan la montaña del Simurg. Lo contemplan al fin: perciben que ellos son el Simurg y que el Simurg es cada uno de ellos y todos. [. . .] Pueden significar la identidad del buscado y del buscador; pueden también significar que éste influye en aquél. Otro capítulo insinúa que Almotásim es el ‘hindu’ que el estudiante cree haber matado. (‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’, 45) This Persian tale by the Islamic mystic Farid’ud-din Attar features again in ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ (in Nueve ensayos dantescos). But Borges does more than recount this Sufi tale. He gives a subtle and peculiarly pantheistic rendering of what is a text which refers to the transcendental, as opposed to an immanent union with the divine. In Attar’s ‘Parliament of Birds’, the birds represent humanity. The seven valleys they traverse are stages in their mystical quest for union with the divine. The first valley is the Valley of the Quest which challenges the pilgrim to face and to overcome perils, and to denounce desires. The second valley is the Valley of Love where the pilgrim is consumed by a thirst for the beloved, symbolized by the rose. This thirst is a symbolic criticism of the mystic who indulges in ecstatic experience, out of touch with human life and who misses out God as the ultimate aim of his or her quest. The third valley is the Valley of Intuitive Knowledge where the pilgrim’s heart receives directly the illumination of ultimate truth and an experience of God. The fourth valley is the Valley of Detachment where the traveller becomes liberated from desires and dependences. The fifth valley is the Valley of Unification, the seeker understands that what seemed different things and ideas are really one. The sixth valley is the Valley of Astonishment where the traveller faces bewilderment and finds love. And lastly, in the Valley of Death,

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the seeker understands the mystery, the paradox, of how an individual drop can be merged with an ocean, and still remain meaningful. The individual, without losing personal significance or singularity, has found her ‘place’ within a larger whole. Borges’ rendering focuses largely on the last stage, the Valley of Death, which proposes unity in distinction. The omitted stages of the quest are those which put forward the divine as the primary and underlying focus of the quest itself and also include the direct experience of God. They emphasize the unity of all that is diverse. In his own phrasing of the seventh valley, Borges omits the continued singularity of the individual, the meaningfulness of the ‘one drop’ in the ocean. But not only does he miss out vital stages in the mystical quest; there is no mention of the divine, who, in Attar’s tale, is the ultimate aim and purpose of the quest in the first place. The tale, in Borges’ rendering, acquires a quality of pantheistic immanence. The search of the many pilgrim birds for the Simurgh, their king and God, reveals the total identity of the searchers and the one searched for. This echoes Borges’ suggestion in the main story that the searching student might be identical to Almotásim, who, it is suggested, is the one he searches for: God. In ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ (in Nueve ensayos dantescos of 1982), Borges is to comment that ‘detrás del mágico Simurgh está el panteísmo’. But Attar’s tale is not about pantheism. It is about the transcendent God. With ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ and its sub-tale, ‘El coloquio de los pájaros’, Borges branches out towards an apprehension of a notion of God by writing texts which have mystical undercurrents. The themes introduced in this period of writing are those of salvation, knowledge, faith, enlightenment and godhood. Although his bias remains initially gnostic, he had moved towards a fuller embrace of notions of godhood, especially those put forward by pantheism, which is defined as ‘a non-theistic concept of deity’ (Levine 1994, 641). Yet pantheism, though non-transcendental, is not atheistic (Levine 1994, 2–3): With some exceptions, pantheism is non-theistic, but it is not atheistic. It is a form of non-theistic monotheism, or non-personal theism. It is the belief in one God, a God identical to the all-inclusive unity, but it does not believe God is a person or anything like a person. It identifies the material universe with a divinity and thus denies the radical distinction between God and creatures drawn in monotheistic religions.

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Mysticism, by contrast, is a theistic concept, and according to Silesius, for instance, holds that, in relation to nature, it is not identical to, but rather a mere medium for the transmission of the higher, divine reality.3 Sufi mystics like Al-Ghazzali warn that the pursuit of union and enlightenment must not occur for the sake of the ecstatic union alone, but must arise from one’s dedication and submission to nothing but God. In Borges’ rendering of this tale, vital aspects of the mystical quest are bracketed out. The misapprehension of God lies at the heart of the unresolved quests of the stories which are result-driven and as such self-focused. They do not allow for the divine to fully enter into the equation. We had seen how the essays feature a variety of religious traditions. The stories, in turn, are marked by frequent and direct references to God. What would the existence of God mean for the individual in metaphysical terms? The union with the divine would confer cohesion and meaning and the release from the solitude of the individuated identity. The cycle of eternally recurring selves and lives would be broken. In Buddhism, this breaking of the cycle could be achieved through moksa, that is, the release from the cycle of suffering and rebirth brought on by karma. In Hinduism, the cycle is broken by the realization of the oneness of the soul (atman) and the Brahman. In the monotheistic religions, as expressed in the cabbalistic wisdom of Judaic tradition, exclusive knowledge confers salvation; in Islam, the recognition of the unity of all being in God; in Christianity, by the recognition of the salvific life of Christ by means of which the individual is redeemed. In the monotheistic religions, as well as in Hinduism, (yet not in Buddhism as it denies the concept of an individual soul), the individual partakes in God and in eternity through the soul as a manifestation of the divine. Boethius defines eternity as ‘the total, simultaneous and absolute possession of unlimited life’. We can juxtapose this with the Borgesian theme of infinity and the abhorred notion of perpetuity, which he articulates in his fictions in the guise of immortality (as in ‘El immortal’, for example).

Belief and Faith The distinction between belief and faith might yield an insight into Borges’ search for spiritual union. Let us proceed from a neutral definition of God. Is proof needed in order to proceed to belief? Is it possible to proceed from evidence of God to God himself? Definitions of God state that he is not an object among objects, nor the conclusion of an argument. In attempting to experience the divine like an object, that is, with the senses, or by reason

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alone means putting certain stumbling blocks in the way. There is no object God to be experienced, nor a conclusion as to the existence of God to be reached: The absolute and real who is, than which nothing greater can be conceived, the unproduced Producer of all that is, without whom nothing that is could be or could remain in being; or, alternatively, the projection into supposed reality of human fears, neurosis, and abject needs (Freud), or of human ideals which can never be realized (Feuerbach), or of the requirements to perpetuate the conditions of alienation in the interests of some party (Marx) [. . .]. The possibility of so wide a contrast between theistic realism and psychological unrealism arises because God (supposing God is) is not an object among objects in a universe, able to be discovered and/or explored, as are atoms, [. . .]. Nor is God the conclusion of an argument, although argument points to the probability of God at least in the sense that the universe makes more sense if it exists as a consequence of one who produces and sustains it, than otherwise. [. . .] Since God cannot be produced as an object among objects, and since God is, whether this or any other universe happens to exist, it follows that God cannot be described in language, since God is far apart from humanly apprehended categories in time and space (i.e. is transcendent). [. . .] Theistic religions have always been aware of the inadequacy of human language about God, and of the way in which people are prone to project onto God their own ideas and programmes. When people worship as God that which is less than God, this issues in idolatry. (Bowker 1997, 378) The characters in stories such as ‘La biblioteca de Babel’, ‘El Aleph’, ‘La escritura del Dios’ get lost in a result-oriented approach which relies on some kind of magical revelation. But because God is all, a purely human vision can certainly penetrate some aspects of the divine; by being purely an observer of concepts, however, it is impossible to penetrate a reality which by its very nature goes beyond the human. What is needed is an infusion of concepts by life, so that being is informed by participation. Therefore, the main stumbling block is that this series of beautifully explored concepts and ideas needs to be informed by an experiential sense of relationship with a divine. Otherwise, explorations like birds flying around in the ruins of a castle, remain concept, musings, suppositions, aspirations, ultimately sterile and closed in on themselves. In these texts, the quest ensues as a result of the apparent evidence of a divine design. To try and apprehend

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the divine, or divine attributes such as ultimate knowledge (‘La biblioteca de Babel’), eternity (‘Sentirse en muerte’), omnipotence (‘La escritura del Dios’), or omniscience (‘El Aleph’) has consequences for the self not only in an abstract, philosophical sense, but also for the personal sense of self. In the absence of a spiritual dimension, and striving for the ‘benefits’ alone, means continual individuation and fragmentation. Some of the tension in the characters echoes the distinction drawn between belief and faith, between the seeming evidence and the divine itself. Most of all, it is rooted in the goal-oriented approach itself which excludes the actual relationship with God. The evidence which Borges and his characters come upon (in ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ or ‘La lotería en Babilonia’) is fraught with insurpassable obstacles, insufficient, elusive, malign or simply misunderstood. See the following excerpt from Tennant’s ‘The Nature of Belief’ (quoted in Penelhum 1989, 99–100): The word ‘faith’ [. . .] has been used down the ages to the present day [. . .] as a synonym for religious belief. In other words, faith and belief have been regarded almost universally as identical. There is a need, however, for the term ‘faith’ in addition to ‘belief’, in order to give a name to an attitude of mind which is akin to belief yet distinct from it. Both terms signify mental states or acts belonging to the cognitive side of experience, but while ‘belief’ emphasises almost exclusively the intellectual element in assent, and has reference to an objective situation, ‘faith’ rather lays stress on the conative factor of the subjective attitude. Belief is more or less constrained by fact or actuality which already exists in complete independence of any desiring or striving on our part, and which in some degree compels our assent. Faith, as it is here conceived, is, on the other hand, not concerned with actuality that is or was, but with the possible, which may or may not prove to be actual. Belief is assent to data, faith, in the first instance, is not confronted with data, but creates its objects, which are ideas [. . .]. By practical activity, or living as if its ideal creations were also real, faith may go on to discover their actuality. Though not knowledge, it is possibly, and often actually, a step toward knowledge, and to knowledge otherwise unattainable. In the stories there are a variety of God figures: the leveller, the obliterator, the avenger, the magician, the one bringing on madness. This is one of the paradigms which Borges works in slightly different ways. Where God is explicitly present, he is often, and fatally so, contained and thus identical

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with a material object (a coin, the aleph, a labyrinth; etc.). God also features as the leveller of opposites. We see this in ‘Los teólogos’, yet the question is whether Borges points to more than the futility of mere human ambition. I think he does. Paoli (1992, 202–203 and 207–208) considered Borges’ theological stance and his leaning towards pantheism, as well as atheism and Gnosticism. Arana (1994, 83 and 97), in turn, acknowledges a quest for a God whom Borges cannot find because of the notion of infinity. In his view, Borges blames God for the existence of evil and therefore banishes him into non-existence. In the stories, the unfulfilled spiritual dimension finds another expression in the chaos of fragmentation, whereby identity proliferates, multiplies and disintegrates. This affects the identity of a given text within the story, and may indeed challenge the (personal) identity (of the character, narrator and author) through the multiplicity of fragmented texts. This process of fragmentation occurs in time, worldly and illusory in nature, and infinite in Borges’ particular understanding. The familiar Borgesian preoccupation of the non-fixity of identity finds an expression in the stories with the obliteration or the fragmentation of identity into an array of textual and personal identities.

Self, God and the Paradigm of Time The God which emerges from the stories is damaged, as is Borges’ notion of self. The visions of a cruel and arbitrary God reflect a self-understanding which is in need of wholeness. Yates’ reference to the unpublished account in ‘Boletín de una noche’ serves as his focus for what he calls Borges’ idealism (1973). From this account of being and of dissolving into blackness, it is clear that the nothingness of identity was a reality for Borges and desperately personal, and that the bleak nothingness of selfhood was more than an interesting philosophical speculation. It was abhorrent to him not only on an intellectual level, but also on an emotional one. In those personal accounts of Borges’, both in ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ as well as in ‘Boletín de una noche’, the self can be seen not so much to fragment, but rather to be utterly annihilated.4 The nothingness of selfhood, and the unease this entails for Borges, is only in words akin to the Buddhist notion of the liberating nothingness of self. For Borges, nothingness of selfhood is terrifying and threatening.

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This, in turn, is different from the Christian notion of emptiness which allows for the true self to emerge: the self which is in the presence of God within. In the tragically futile quest for the transcendence of time and perpetuity into the forever elusive realm of the eternal and divine, it is the attribute of infinity which is crucial to Borges. Infinite time is perpetual, either linearly or cyclically (recurrently) so. Coupled with what he had borrowed from Nietzsche, it leads to the repetition of all things past and present.5 The circularity and perpetuity in many of his stories bear echoes of this doctrine. It is the aspect of similarity of the same which is crucial here, for it accounts for the Borgesian theme of the version which pervades much of his fictional work: versions of both the text itself (note: the multiple, varying ‘editions’ in stories such as ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’); versions of the identity of the author-narrator (note: the predominance of first-person narrations to that effect with their multiple, embedded narratorial voices6); and versions of the personal self of the protagonist, who often appropriates the notion of the ‘version’ to alter his own past, death, or life; in other words, his identity. In many of the stories, Borges exposes different ways of blurring personal identity in an attempt to redeem a sin, guilt or failure. But redemption, in the absence of a redeeming figure, is not attained. In ‘La otra muerte’, ‘La forma de la espada’ and ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’, for example, the focus is on the fragmentation and the nullification of the self. In the absence of a spiritual reality, the fragmentary process wielded by time is depicted as knowing no bounds. Whatever gets subjected to it, be it the text, character or author, undergoes a potentially endless process of variations, multiplications, nullifications. The fragmentation (chaos, flux, multiplicity) of the text itself has implications for the identity of the author-character within the story. It also poses questions concerning the identity of the authornarrator of the story, often a ‘Borges’ figure of sorts (see for example ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, ‘El inmortal’, ‘El fin’). This kaleidoscope of roles and assignations is a manifestation of fragmented identities, both personal and textual. The obliterating process of selfhood, authorship and textual integrity occurs in infinite time, linear or cyclical. Another way in which he works the paradigm of time is the branching past model. In ‘Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain’ (p. 84), the Borges-narrator evokes Bradley’s inverse universe in which the effect precedes the cause: ‘[. . .] aquel inverso mundo de Bradley, en que la muerte precede al nacimiento y la cicatriz a la herida y la herida al golpe (Appearance and

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Reality, 1897, página 215)’. And in ‘Historia de la eternidad’ (p. 12) Borges had proposed the following, regressionary concept of time: Bradley [. . .] adelanta una hipótesis personal: excluir el porvenir, que es una mera construcción de nuestra esperanza, y reducir lo ‘actual’ a la agonía del momento presente desintegrándose en el pasado. [. . .] Bradley niega el futuro [. . .]. Yet another creative reworking of temporality is that encountered in earlier essays in which Borges had explored the flux of time. This is supported by our own intuitive sense of time which is that of a passage from aspiration to achievement, from potentiality to actuality, from uncertainty to knowledge, insinuating a flow from a present to an open future, with memory of the (fixed) past to ensure and preserve knowledge. This ‘direction’ of memory is seen as the determining psychological factor for the perception of time as from the past into the future. In ‘La otra muerte’ of 1949, Borges fictionalizes a then revolutionary model of the universe, the so-called ‘Branching Pasts Model’. Branching toward the past occurs when, relative to any instantaneous state of the universe, there are a number of alternative past states from which that state might have come which allows for two historically incompatible accounts of the past to be equally correct by abandoning the principle of the past’s uniqueness.7

Reality, Dream and Fragmentation The fate which Tzinacán suffers in ‘La escritura del Dios’ is reminiscent of a particularly distressing model to Borges, put forward in his essay ‘La duracion del infierno’: waking from the illusory empirical world into a reality where we realize that we have been dreaming is useless, affirms Borges, because the underlying reality, even if there was one, is inaccessible as we cannot experience it. We are in a no-man’s-land, somehow worse off than before: woken up from the dream, yet left outside reality. Similarly in ‘Las ruinas circulares’, the fire which does not consume the god-creature dreamed up by the protagonist, suggests to him that he himself is the product of another man’s dream, who himself had been dreamed up by a dreamer, and so on in a regressing, infinite spiral of ‘linear circularity’. With the poem ‘El Golem’ of 1958 (in El otro, el mismo), Borges is to rework the notion of our being fashioned from inferior material by an inferior

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god, the demiurge. A year earlier he had taken up the very theme in an essay entitled ‘El Golem’ of 1958 (in Manual de zoología fantástica), where, unlike the rabbi of the poem, the dreamer becomes cruelly self-conscious of the condition of his being dreamed up by another dreamer. ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ introduces the enticing certainty of a total book which would reveal the meaning of life itself, yet cruelly also confronts the searcher with the next to zero chance of ever finding it. The flux and change of supposedly stable entities like author, text and personal identity are indicative of a universe where anything and anyone may undergo alterations to their identity, due to the temporal frame in the Silesian sense. Time, worldly and illusory as the mystics understand it, gives rise to the fragmentary and unreal, and Borges takes it to its logical extremes. Time bears the illusion of an individuated self, cut loose from its eternal and uniting origin. Borges puts a twist on this process of individuation and takes it to yet another level: the individuation which his texts, the characters and the very concept of authorship itself (or origin) undergo, culminate in almost literal fragmentation as we encounter multiple authors to one and the same text (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’); endless versions of anyone’s life written down in elusive tomes (‘La biblioteca de Babel’); potentially infinite variations to any piece of literature (‘El fin’); countless twists on personal destinies by a random lottery system (‘La lotería en Babilonia’); and creative reinterpretations of personal lives and pasts (‘La otra muerte’, ‘Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto’, and ‘El Sur’). But his preoccupation with notions of self and identity is more than an expression of philosophical or intellectual interest. It also expresses a personal need. Infinity, which for Borges entails not so much an attribute of the divine as the fragmentation of self, coupled with the static God vision as he understands it, are expressions of a broken sense of self. Mysticism and the exploration of religious-spiritual ideas are metaphors for a desire to make whole an incomplete or damaged personal self. His writing indicates that Borges yearns for a sense of wholeness. It seems to me that rather than be anybody but himself, he wants to be more truly himself. I return to Yates who points out the split of persona within Borges, the duplication of identity into the literary and public figure on the one hand, and the librarian and civilian on the other, a division of more or less public roles which Borges himself is orchestrating. Perhaps we can take this further and add that what the division is really about is a sense of self which is deeply divided in its innermost being: a being who is not at one, neither with himself nor with a higher being. This, in turn, is at the heart of the unstable and multiple identities of his characters. Yet I do not think that

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Borges yearned for the absence of self altogether but rather for the healing of the self, which is why he cannot reconcile himself to the Buddhist notion of the no-self. What he does do is sublimate the wounded sense of personal self onto an intellectual plane.

The God Figure God corresponds to the possibility of healing, but none of the stories offer this healing vision: the God of ‘La lotería en Babilonia’ is an arbitrary, random and potentially non-existing force; the objectified God of ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ is forever elusive; the God’s eye vision of ‘El Aleph’ is unfulfilling; the glimpse of the divine in ‘El Zahir’ is maddening; the deciphered name and, as Tzinacán had hoped, the power of the almighty in ‘La escritura del Dios’ is self-destroying and numbing, leaving the high priest indifferent both to himself and to that which he had glimpsed; the God which levels out all antagonisms in ‘Los teólogos’ is unconcerned with the agonies of the two priests; the God of the city of the immortals in ‘El inmortal’ is one of a creator who has excused himself of his creation, having abandoned his world and leaving chaos in the wake. Worse still than the annihilating God figures of other stories, this particular divine existence adds misery to knowledge as his stance towards creation is one of indifference and desertion. But there is also the God image of Borges’ stories which could be equated with a woman’s love (‘El Aleph’ and ‘El Zahir’). The women correspond to the objects in his stories, in that the unrequited love for them is externalized. God is also equated with magic (‘El Zahir’); the writing or privileged knowledge (‘La escritura del Dios’). The tragedy of Borges’ model of fulfilment is that it seems to be frozen in a vision of what can be attained, rather than a journey of continuously searching for and meeting God in an ongoing relationship.

Dialogue Many of Borges’ ficciones are marked by the themes of manhood, honour and the duel. These themes are linked to his characters’ quests for a higher, spiritual reality. The tension between immanence and transcendence, between pantheism and mysticism is at the heart of Borges’ particular rendering of mystical concepts, which also accounts for his characters’

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difficulty in reaching spiritual fulfilment. Why is this? One explanation is that the unfulfilled spiritual quest which the characters embark on in the stories corresponds to a very particular, Borgesian sense of self, defined as being in tension between denial of the notion of self (nothingness), resignation into its inescapability, instability and fragmentation (solitude) on the one hand, and the longing for a union of the self with the divine (plenitude) on the other. We saw that in their quest for God, the characters engage in a process whereby the divine is often searched for, or apprehended, in the form of a quasi-magical object, which the story shows is ineffective, incomplete and at times injurious. This objectification of the divine accounts for the failure to achieve permanent or fulfilling union or salvation. His characters, and Borges himself, thus abdicate both spiritual and personal power to objects or unreachable entities, the jaguar, the aleph, the very process of writing, a woman’s love. In themselves, these do not bring about the desired salvation and healing. This abdication is at once a flaw, but it also serves as a pointer, by means of which Borges’ own approach becomes transparent. The reader consequently is in a position to engage with the author’s quest, enabled and indirectly prompted to uncover the flawed approach. A tacit dialogue commences which communicates pointers from the author to the receptive reader, who, in turn, assists in the unfolding of the unnamed motives. Another obstacle to spiritual fulfilment is the tension between knowledge and experience, which corresponds to a tension between intellect and intuition. The objectification of the divine, the omission of the true nature of God as love in both his own essayistic explorations and in his characters’ mystical quests are pointers which Borges weaves in to his own approach. As they are deliberate fissures in his construct, they can be unveiled. These pointers can be equated with the paradox, another favourite Borgesian theme and which, in itself, is a means by which the fissures of logic are uncovered.

The Pointers Borges, therefore, sets up his own intersticios de sinrazón, a metaphor for separation and ever-spiralling fragmentation. Like Nolan in ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’, he has devised, consciously or not, his own ‘paradox’ as a pointer to himself and to his approach in that the omission of God and of relationship become obvious. In his own way, he points the reader to the fact that without a spiritual journey, the self will remain fragmented and ultimately unfulfilled.

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In the stories, the transcendence into or union with the divine remains to be fulfilled in a true form as relationship. It is in the extra-fictional texts, however, in particular the mystics’ epigrams, that the presence of God, and the union in him, is present and accomplished. This underscores what Silesius had urged the reader to do: abandon reading and writing and begin to live life which mirrors and includes the risen Christ.

Chapter 5

Beyond the Mirror of Self

Flux and non-fixity are the constants in Ficciones and El Aleph. Yet far from creating a disparate, disjointed picture, the stories, manifold and diverse as they may be, form a whole which, while evolving linearly, individually return to their point of departure. The relation between the fictions is the oscillation between desire for union with an absolute on the one hand, and nullification or fragmentation of the self on the other. The chronology, however, is less linear than in the essays. The stories form a continuum with the essays where Borges explored selfaffirmation, notions of godhood, and time. He leans towards the notion of a divine (wholeness of the self) and eternity (temporality undone) precisely because he intuits that to reach a spiritual dimension would curb inner disunity.1 The following definition of eternity clarifies the link between time and eternity, the divine, and the soul (Bowker 1997, 320): Not a long time, since ‘eternity’ does not enter into the dimension of time. Brahman and God have been thought of as ‘being’ of that eternal state, where there is no passing of time, although the passing of time is simultaneously present to Brahman/God. Thus Boethius defined eternity as [. . .] ‘the total, simultaneous and absolute possession of unlimited life’. Although this is the definitional truth of Brahman/God, it is also the possible perfection of the human atman/soul, because already it participates in eternity – atman because it is no other than Brahman, the soul because the expression of the human mind is outside spatial and temporal definition, however much at present (i.e. in time) it is correlated with both. Time, then, brings with it infinity, and, in the case of Borges, multiplicity or fragmentation of identity. Eternity, in turn, is equated with the soul and with God. Borges attempts to approximate this in his exploration of different

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types of God. Although it does not lead his characters to transcendence, the experiment does offer glimpses or possibilities, even though they may remain elusive. In metaphysical terms, Christianity postulates faith in the redeeming work of Christ as effecting a release from individuation or temporality other than in the finality of death. From an Islamic perspective, fulfilment and salvation lie in embracing the unity of all being in God, and in the submission of one’s life to the service of the divine. Hinduism puts forward the total oneness and inseparability of the self, atman, and the divine, brahman. From a Buddhist point of view, it is the renunciation of the very self, that is, of the erroneous notion of the atman which offers liberation and release (moksa) from the cycle of suffering and rebirth (samsara). What takes God’s place is the supreme emptiness, nothingness, the no-self, also called anatta. Many of Borges’ stories are marked by the presence of or the desire for a higher being. The many ways in which Borges puts forward these God figures is one of his most striking paradigms. The God figure which emerges from these stories is a punishing, maddening, frustrating, annihilating force. This kind of divinity is not unlike that envisaged by the gnostic who views the Judeo-Christian God as a demiurge, a lesser god, responsible for evil and for suffering. Borges delineates a God who castigates man for possessing knowledge of him or of his name (‘El Aleph’, ‘La busca de Averroes’); who punishes Abenjacán for the transgression of appropriating the divine attribute of the labyrinth; while Tzinacán (‘La escritura del Dios’), who had deciphered the sacred writing in the jaguar’s coat, is graced with a fleeting glimpse of the divine, and as a consequence suffers the loss of his personal identity while being unable to utter the life-saving formula. The objectified presence in the coin of ‘El Zahir’ brings on insanity, while the sphere of ‘El Aleph’ is ultimately unsatisfying. The prospect of God contained in or identical to the library in ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ leads not to salvation but to frustration. The God which is likened to the company in ‘La lotería en Babilonia’ is a random force; the God sought for in ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ is possibly himself in search of another. ‘El inmortal’ poses the prospect of divinities who have died or absented themselves from the ensuing insanity of the ciudad de los inmortales. In the early 1940s, Borges explores the theme of the versions in stories such ‘La biblioteca de Babel’, ‘La lotería en Babilonia’, ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’, and ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’. These stories serve as the vehicle for the impossibility of God. They threaten the identity of the text and, by extension, that of the author. In the absence of an underlying, definitive authority, in the absence of any absolutes, one’s own life, or death, may be

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creatively reconstructed in inconclusive versions of texts and narrations. ‘La otra muerte’ (1949), ‘La forma de la espada’ (1942), ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’ (1944) and, albeit to a slightly lesser degree, ‘Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto’ (1951) as well as ‘El Sur’ (1953) are cases in point.2

Objectification of the Divine The stories show the consequences of a quest for attributes alone, such as ultimate knowledge (‘La biblioteca de Babel’), omnipotence (‘La escritura del Dios’), or omniscience (‘El Aleph’) in the absence of seeking a relationship with the divine. These objects and attributes, as Borges infers, are in themselves flawed and incomplete, because as models they are impossible to reconcile with what is needed: complete human involvement and participation to be fully functioning. Even if this were acted upon, they could not be true substitutes for what they represent and symbolise. The fact that Borges should chronicle the very lacking in these ‘quasi-perfections’ shows his yearning for authenticity. Why is there a quest for God in the stories, for redemption? And why is there the desire for God’s knowledge, for a God’s eye view? For the characters, there seems to be evidence of a design, a structure, and so a purpose; a pattern and an order, such as the library promises, which suggests the presence or at least the possibility of God. The character embarks on the quest but either fails to find or access the design or else gets lost in the structure. Borges’ enduring theme of the labyrinth can be seen as an expression of that very failure to find God. In the face of the unaccomplished quest, he explores the consequences to the notion of self. I would go further and suggest that the real question is not so much the nature of evidence, but this: why does Borges keep coming back to this quest, despite the apparent lack of resolution? I believe that it is because he intuits the existence of the divine, not only as a concept, but with the possibility of relationship. His persistence points to a sincere search by someone who was gifted with an immense intellect but who was not able, or who was denied to make a living, spiritual passage of the self in an act of saying: ‘I need you to make me whole.’ Borges, in this sense, can be likened to his character Funes who perceives all but who is unable to do anything meaningful with it. And yet, even though this fulfilment was denied him on the level of his writing, he can be seen to be drawing ever closer to such

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a self-giving. The tragedy for Borges is that he did not believe that it is the very woundedness of the self and its incompleteness which are the doorway to the divine who can make whole and fill what is incomplete. This raises some fascinating questions: does Borges’ self-perception of the futility of this kind of search imply a greater knowledge, or at any rate an intuition, and at the same time a fearful denial as to the real search for relationship? Is this not an intuition which he communicates with the reader? The fact that the reader is able to pinpoint Borges’ omissions is the starting point of our dialogue with the author: we are invited to look at what is missing every bit as much, if not more, at what is there. And what is missing is the relationship of love between the I and the You, the self and God. The text therefore becomes a place of encounter between author and reader, whereby the reader ‘completes’ the journey embarked on by the character. This dialogue is made possible with anyone who is open to the possibility of faith. The paradox lies in the fact that Borges plants evidence of a divine design and which as such points to a divine creator. Once the possibility of God has been established, however, closer search or analysis reveals the impossibility of that very divinity which had been set up in the first place. The reader, alongside the character therefore, is taken along a journey based on certain evidence, which is the very basis on which the evidence is thrown into doubt. And this, incidentally, parallels the very essence of life to which Silesius had pointed: not to apprehend it, but to live it. The question of identity is markedly present in ‘La escritura del Dios’, which poses the difference between identification and individuation. Western philosophers and Eastern spiritual sources who have sought to fathom our place as individuals within a larger cosmos agree on the illusion of the separateness, if not the very existence, of the self, or ego. But what is the self? It is our internal awareness of ourselves; our centre of consciousness embodying what we think of as ‘personality’ and ‘conscience’; it is capable of rationality: it is the seat of our identity. The term ‘identity’ thus denotes two different meanings: individuality on the one hand, and sameness on the other. Individuality indicates the notion of a separated, individuated self. Sameness indicates the identification, or unity of the self and the world. Borges is concerned with, longs for, yet does not fully accomplish placing the individual within a larger cosmos on a harmonious and lasting basis. Identifying with the other does not necessarily bring loss of personal identity but rather enriches it. Paoli (1992, 184) sees in these stories the manifestations of a rare assertion of self-will over predetermination (1992, 191), a view which recapitulates Erika Lorenz’s conviction that it is in these

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instances that the veil of mâyâ is torn and the liberation of the self achieved. But these experiences are few in Borges’ tales. Where union with God is aspired to, such as in ‘La escritura del Dios’, man, in his temporary union with the godhead, recognizes and simultaneously loses his own personal identity as well as that of the divine.

The Paradox: ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ In this story, Borges has created a universe which is unfulfilling because it is the product of a profound though incomplete vision. He employs the paradox in order to create a tension between aspiration and potentiality. Just as ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ questions the notion of a supreme God, ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ and ‘La lotería en Babilonia’ (1941), though tantalizingly giving the impression of a supreme design, imply at the same time the impossibility of a divine existence altogether. The library houses an endlessly spiralling array of books containing countless versions (and versions of the versions) of each and everyone’s life, actual and potential. But this, as the narrator tells us, is what eludes the searchers, as every ‘true’ book has also a multitude of versions. The possibility of finding the book of books lures them into a cruelly unfullfillable quest, forever on the seeming brink of an elusive revelation. This book, or catalogue, in order to be fully inclusive, is said to contain all other books. The hombre del Libro is equalled to God and said to possess knowledge of the total book. As it would contain all possible as well as all potential books, and all versions of all of these, this makes it a near-infinite work. Not only does the sheer infinite quantity of works make the discovery impossible, but the very existence of such a book is, in fact, an impossibility, a mere theoretical possibility as it, paradoxically, would contain itself. Although the sense of God, of a pattern and of order are alluded to in the seeming purpose of the world’s design, the problem or rather the impossibility for Borges’ characters remains of accessing or following that pattern. The source of the pattern remains teasingly imminent yet inaccessible; the logic of the pattern, the order and the structure remain elusive. God is seen as an unresolved paradox at best, and a mere theoretical possibility at worst. Borges had explored three kinds of paradoxes in the course of his essay writing: paradoxes of the infinite, such as posed by Zeno of Elea (see ‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’, 1929, and ‘Avatares de la tortuga’, 1932); semantic paradoxes, such as the famous saying by Epimenides the Cretan who says that all Cretans are always liars; and paradoxes of set

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theory, such as posed by Russell, and by Borges in ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ when he proposes the impossible, though logical total catalogue.

The Many-Layered Onion: ‘La lotería en Babilonia’ In this ficción, the narrator is a Babylonian and as such subject to the same, ever-changing, erratic kaleidoscope of personal fates and identities at each draw of the lottery, which affects players and non-players alike. The Compañía, like an omnipotent and wilful God, confers fate and destiny onto the individual. The story serves also as the vehicle for the ‘heretic’s’ (Borges?) speculation that the god-like corporation is not real or, if real, that it is subject to another higher, random force. It is the visions of a temporal abyss and that of an impossible or impotent God which Borges allows to emanate towards the end of the story. Through this absence of any underlying higher order, the fragmentation and questioning of reality occur: Otra [conjetura], por boca de heresiarcas enmascarados, que [la Compañía] no ha existido nunca y no existirá. Otra, no menos vil, razona que es indiferente afirmar o negar la realidad de la tenebrosa corporación, porque Babilonia no es otra cosa que un infinito juego de azares. (‘La lotería en Babilonia’, Borges 1941, 79) This parallel between life and religion again shows a paradigm predicated by a reality which closes in on itself.

The Poisoned Chalice: ‘La escritura del Dios’ In ‘La duración del infierno’, Borges had equated the dream of his own infinity with the abhorred regressus or progressus ad infinitum. He fictionalizes this theme 20 years later with ‘La escritura del Dios’. Tzinacán dreams of sand which piles up on and suffocates him, until he ‘awakenes’ into another dream and so on until he dies. He calls out that one cannot die of grains of sand, and that there are no dreams within dreams. It is at this point that he truly awakens and welcomes his fate as prisoner. ‘La escritura del Dios’ of 1949 is a story which on one level appears to be about a mystical path towards union with the divine. It is, however, fraught with frustration as a sustained union is denied the central character: the taste of God’s knowledge is temporary and ultimately self-annihilating. It is the story of Tzinacán, high temple priest, who, imprisoned and having

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resisted being tormented into denouncing his supreme god, invokes the existence of a secret, divine inscription conferring almighty powers. He recalls the existence of this eternal inscription, which can only be deciphered by the chosen one. But: which object could contain such writing, and in which language would it reveal itself? And is not all creation subject to change or cessation? An inspiration reveals to him that the jaguar which paces outside his cell might carry on its coat, encoded in its pattern, the very writing. After long years of studying the animal’s coat from within his cell, Tzinacán experiences union with the divinity, during which the why and how of the universe and of all existence are revealed to him, and also the message: 14 words, which, upon utterance, would make him divine and almighty himself. Yet utterance is impossible, is meaningless, because he has lost all notion of himself and of his self-worth. He will not, he cannot utter the words, and so resigns himself to perish in his cell. Although Tzinacán does decipher the divine writing on the jaguar’s coat and does indeed experience a union with his god, this union is not life-transforming in any positive or lasting sense, nor salvific, as he is subsequently being stripped of and no longer cares for his individuality: Quien ha entrevisto el universo [. . .] no puede pensar en un hombre, en sus triviales dichas o desventuras, aunque ese hombre sea él. Ese hombre ha sido él y ahora no le importa. Qué le importa la suerte de aquel otro, qué le importa la nación de aquel otro, si él, ahora es nadie. Por eso no pronuncio la fórmula, por eso dejo que me olviden los días, acostado en la oscuridad. The consequence of seeing the world from God’s perspective, in his case, is the total and utter indifference to the personal self and to life.3 ‘La escritura del Dios’ offers a narrative expression of spiritual-philosophical speculations. We return briefly to Schopenhauer, who, as an admirer of the Hindu scriptures known as Upanishads, was among the first to introduce Eastern cosmology into Western philosophical thought. We recall that his view is of the material world (which is the world as we seem to know it) as nothing but a system of illusions governed by, among others, the illusory principle of individuation. Individuation is the false notion of a separate, individual identity (individuality).4 Only by transcending the system of illusions can man experience the unity with the world as a whole. This unity of the self with the world is identification (sameness). The cosmology of the Upanishads holds that the multiplicity of the universe is a game played by

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a supreme consciousness (Brahman), forming and sustaining the universe. Originally a holistic unity, Brahman chose to break itself apart into individual beings – to decompose itself into separate things and beings: that is, into the world as we know it. The divine one became the many, and thus all individual beings and things share in the divinity of the one. Only Brahman and the self-as-Brahman (that is, the self who realizes its unity with or sameness as the whole, the one, the underlying unity and ultimate reality) are the true self. It is distinct from and greater than the self-as-ego (the many, which is the illusion of the separateness of the self). The true self is self-asBrahman, which realizes its unity with the whole. The story told by Borges is an experience of the loss of identity as Tzinacán loses his place as an individual within the cosmos. He loses his self as well as the unity with the divine and experiences neither individuation (as a separate self) nor identification (with the unity). His union with the divinity (the whole) is not sustainable, and neither does he retain his sense of individuality, suffering the worst of both worlds. In addition, the very loss of self prevents him from reaching the final unity with the cosmos which he had fleetingly glimpsed. Union, for Tzinacán, is not salvation but a worse state of isolation than before. Worse because he has glimpsed union and is now aware of the impossibility to sustain it, and also because he has lost his self-worth. For Tzinacán to reach lasting union (or identification) with his divinity, he must assert his self and utter the formula. Salvation seems a possibility: ‘Me bastaría decirla [. . .] para ser joven, para ser inmortal, para que el tigre destrozara a Alvarado [his arch enemy], para sumir el santo cuchillo en pechos españoles. (‘La escritura del Dios’, Borges 1949, 123). But the experience is one of exclusion: both from his individuality and also from unity with the whole. Borges also delineates the relationship between experience and language (the utterance of the sacred formula), which Tzinacán, however, cannot transcend. His initial experience of the union with the divinity is not enough to reach salvation: he has to speak the 14 words. Speech requires consciousness and self-awareness, and this is what the union has robbed him of. Zen Buddhism holds that ‘words are the frames of mâyâ [illusion], the meshes of its net, and the experience is of the water which slips through’ (Watts 1957, 64).5 For Tzinacán to pronounce the formula is doomed from the outset because the very utterance is made impossible. Inbuilt in the (seeming) salvation is therefore its failure. The divinity mocks its priest with the promise of unity only to deprive him of the very means to attain this unity: his individuality. He is both unable and disinterested in uttering the divine words. On the one hand, this definition of thwarted possibilities

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shows Borges’ specific understanding of God. It also shows, however, an understanding of the limits of this particular vision. What is left of Tzinacán is a self devoid of self-worth yet aware of its own oblivion. For him, the union of the self with the cosmic whole is precluded by the oblivion of the self: ‘Pero yo sé que nunca diré esas palabras, porque ya no me acuerdo de Tzinacán’ (‘La escritura del Dios’, p. 123).

Fragmented Vision: ‘El Aleph’ The main character in ‘El Aleph’, ‘Borges’ (once again in first-person narration), is in search of a divine perspective to enter, via the magical aleph, a vision of the universe which, in its comprehensiveness and simultaneity, is a God’s eye view of the creation. The detested Carlos Daneri, upon repeatedly using the aleph, had acquired such a total vision of the world on which he based his odiously bad poem, much to the aesthetic chagrin of the character Borges. Ironically, it is that very hideous poem which gains Daneri the literary prize which Borges had aspired to himself. The God’s-eye vision does not bring excellence nor beauty to the beholder’s writing; it is experienced as arbitrary, random, granting favour to the seemingly undeserving. It is a vision and usurpation of that which no man has seen, nor should be seeing.6 Ultimately, just as in Tzinacán’s case of divine knowledge, the sphere symbolizes the objectification of the divine and as such precludes the possibility of actual encounter or relationship: Y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo. Sentí una infinita veneración, infinita lástima. (‘El Aleph’, p. 171) The quest this time is prompted by the death of Beatriz, adored from afar by Borges, and by his desire to share in what had been her world, which, as becomes apparent to him on beholding the aleph, included her love affair with Daneri. The vision, a union of sorts, is an usurpation of divine vision. The consequences incurred are indifference, frustration and doubt as to the ‘truthfulness’ of the aleph, which, as Borges speculates, might well be an imitation, an inferior replica which covers the real one. Again, we find a gnostic vision of a hierarchy of divine objects or beings where each one reflects, in ever-increasing degrees of inferiority, the divine reality whose perfection, however, is not accessible. The seeker has to be content with

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mere versions, with tantalizing yet ultimately inferior glimpses of that which the divine could be, and of what it might confer.

The Symbolic Pathway: ‘El Zahir’ We meet several destructive God figures in the ficciones: the God in ‘Abenjacán, muerto en su laberinto’ deals punishment for the transgression of appropriating divine attributes, whereas ‘La busca de Averroes’ explores the tension between the desire for and existence of absolute knowledge (the absolute or sacred text) on the one hand, and relative, contingent knowledge on the other. Insanity in ‘El Zahir’ is the consequence of, albeit unwittingly, apprehending the objectified presence of God in the physical encounter with the magical coin. This immanence of the divine in an object is analogous to magic. In relation to the zahir, Alazraki (1988, 45) comments that ‘[t]he coin is no longer a fortuitous object and becomes a form of mystical illumination.’ I would say in response to Alazraki’s observation that the ‘illumination’, ultimately, leads nowhere. It is as if Borges in this story accepts certain limits, which in turn define the parameters of his explorations. In both ‘El Aleph’, ‘El Zahir’, and ‘La escritura del Dios’, the God images are linked to a woman’s love, the decoded writing, privileged knowledge, etc. These are seen by Borges as a panacea, an outside, externalized cure. In objectifying and externalizing the divine, Borges confers the power to an arbitrary, material object to whose authority he submits himself. He thus relinquishes personal power, and, more significantly so, divine power, and ultimately relinquishes the possibility of healing the self. Despite the irony deployed in delineating what at first glance appear absurdly vain and self-obsessed characters of both Teodelina and her admirer in ‘El Zahir’, Borges, in a deceptively and typically casual manner, introduces profoundly philosophical and theological themes when he asserts that Teodelina searches for the absolute in the ephemeral. Teodelina, although outwardly seeking to establish ever-increasing facets of herself, as if in an attempt to assert her seeming instability of (external) self, appears to be driven by an obsession for perfection, and as such displays a yearning for something more than her obvious superficiality. For her to seek perfection is to seek an essence, an absolute. The mystical undercurrents in Borges’ writing are linked to the story’s female (co-) protagonist and to the theme of selfhood, a notion which is in flux in both Borges’ male and female characters. The externalization of perfection in Teodelina is in relation to the externalization and objectification

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of the divine. Madness as a consequence can be seen as a creative, spiritual crisis with the potential for true knowledge of a spiritual reality. In Borges’ stories, the union is not with the supreme God, but with the demiurge, which he had explored in the essays of the early 1930s. The God vision is destructive as the gods of ‘El Zahir’ and of ‘El Aleph’ are linked to material things. ‘La escritura del Dios’ speaks of gods, or rather demiurgs, from whom stem evil and suffering, as opposed to the supreme God of salvation, who is, however, an unattainable supreme being. It seems that Borges has his characters reach for the highest of spiritual goals: the union or encounter with God, and yet, a relationship with the divine is precluded. The ‘seeker’ in the stories glimpses an object, has an inkling of a design and therefore assumes that there must be a ‘designer’. But God cannot be apprehended like an object; nor is he ‘in’ any object. How indeed does one connect or unite with God, a higher self or reach an emptiness to allow the divine to enter? Depending on one’s spiritual outlook and experience, this connection could be mediated through prayer, meditation, revelation, a (direct or indirect) experience or intuition of God, through a mystical act of faith or a spiritual disposition to accept the reality of God. In Sufism, for instance, it is held that the quest must arise from dedication and submission to God alone, because ‘while the experience of the unity of all being in God is real, it is neither the whole nor the end of religion: moral and virtuous life are as important’ (Bowker 1997, 334). Does Borges, obliquely so through his stories, utter a warning as it were, against a materialistic interpretation of mystic pursuits as a means to self-improvement? His characters, therefore, do not succeed in their quest because they miss out the journey as such, and because God amounts to a means to an end. God, and total vision or knowledge are seen as miracle cures by the characters, a goal by means of which one attains omniscience, etc.7 They correspond to a desire for wholeness. Union, if at all it occurs in Borges’ stories, is with the material and is therefore on the surface. The consequences for the self of a quest for God in the absence of faith are that the self remains forever self only, tied to the temporary, the individual, the contingent. It will not be one with the other, neither on an individual nor on a spiritual level.

Salvation and Identity: ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ This is a strangely subversive story. With its theme of traitor-saviour, it plays with the consequences of there not being a God, consequently no ultimate judge, and no absolutes. Paradoxically, in the absence of God, the very

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notion of God is directly affected in that Christ is identified with his own traitor. There is no overt distinction drawn between the saviour and the traitor, they are identical in that they are equally valid: Jesus the saviour cannot be distinguished from his moral counterpart, the traitor. The story unfolds with Nils Runeberg’s work of 1904, entitled Kristus och Judas. Runeberg, a deeply religious man, elaborates De Quincey’s heresy which declares that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot was part of God’s plan. Since the Scriptures are a sacred book, there can be nothing erroneous or casual about them: ‘El orden inferior es un espejo del orden superior [. . .] Judas refleja de algún modo a Jesús’ (‘Tres versiones de Judas’ (Borges 1956, 177)). The story proposes that Judas is at the very least divine himself, having consciously foregone happiness and righteousness in order to fulfil the divine plan. In Den hemlige Frälsaren of 1909, Runeberg argues that God lowered himself to the ‘lowest human form’ in order to redeem the world: the divine became Judas, and since this fact went by unnoticed, this too has been destined. Runeberg then concludes that Judas therefore is (identical with) the saviour. The narrator suggests that Runeberg’s contribution to the catalogue of heresies is to add evil and mishap to the notion of the Son. The fascination for Borges of this heresy is that he seems to perceive the inevitability of the scriptural fulfilment through God’s total control of this drama, rather than God allowing the interaction of Judas’ human freedom. What the heresy explored in ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ puts forward is that the salvific act of the sacrifice of Christ was an inevitable result of Judas’ betrayal alone. But the real heresy goes deeper in that individual freedom is taken out of the equation by the ‘performance’ of Judas as a mere chess piece. It denies the fundamental freedom which humans have been invested with by God. The tragedy of Judas’ act, more so than his betrayal, is his despair which led him to take his own life. There is a disquieting, yet strangely seductive logic here, a seductive madness which recalls the distorted reasoning of Otto zur Linde in ‘Deutsches Requiem’. Good and evil are put across as relative. This relativity accounts for not only the blurring of the very definitions of good and evil, but for the interchangeability of the two. What the story delineates is not so much the grey which inhabits the spectrum between black and white, but the total redundancy of such concepts as black and white, good and evil. But there is also an obvious flaw in the relativism which ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ encapsulates. The good that comes of evil is good because it transforms evil by the power of love, which is the essence of the Christian mystery of love and

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salvation. What Borges explores in this text is more than an intellectual game drawing on theology and heresy; it is more also than a game of logic. Borges invites the reader to explore with him questions of profound, moral and spiritual significance.

The Question of Redemption: ‘La otra muerte’, ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’, ‘La forma de la espada’ In the absence of an absolute, redemption is effected through narration. Borges explores different ways of blurring personal identity when the characters attempt to change or hide a shameful past in stories such as ‘La otra muerte’ (1949), ‘La forma de la espada’ (1942) and ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’ (1944). The secondary narratives in these stories involve protagonists who wilfully alter their identities by swapping roles with their opposites in order to alter their past. The desire for redemption is brought on by guilt at a grave sin or by failure. I would first of all like to look at a definition of the term redemption (Bowker 1997, 805): In Christian theology the term is inherited from the New Testament, where it is associated with the death of Christ [. . .]. More generally and loosely, the term is now used of the process whereby the human race is restored to that communion with God, for which it was created, through the salvific work of Christ. [. . .] More loosely still, redemption is then applied to salvific processes and achievements in other religions. In their desire to redeem themselves, the characters attempt to annul their guilt by changing the past, which results in ever-changing, unstable identities, both personal and textual. The protagonists in ‘La forma de la espada’ and ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’ adopt their counterparts’ identity in a deliberate attempt to obliterate identity. In ‘La otra muerte’, the first-person narrator of the ficción possesses knowledge of Damian’s story and elaborates on the conflicting versions by Coronel Tabares and Doctor Amaro. The reference to Monegal identifies him, as in the other two stories, as a Borges-character of sorts. Damián redeems himself of his cowardice by dying ‘another’ death. This is brought about by a God figure who, like a magician, juggles skilfully with time. The twist in the story is that Damian’s version of his heroic death grafts itself

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onto ‘reality’, which renders both versions true. A fictitious destiny imposes itself on the Coronel’s memory and hence on reality. This bears echoes of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1940), where Borges foregrounds the impact of a fictitious text on reality. Each version of the (imaginary) text, in the guise of various encyclopaedias, corresponds to a different phase of intrusion into this world by another, initially ‘fantastic’ or fictitious reality. In a Borgesian twist on authorship, there is no ‘author’ to the first text within the story, in that the very first article had been brought into existence by Bioy Casares’ memory alone. The first-person narratorcharacter is, again, a ‘Borges’ of sorts and plays a crucial role in the discovery of Uqbar. He is a translator and as such, by definition, creates versions of existing texts. A slightly different working of self-inventing personal identity can be found in ‘El milagro secreto’ (1943). Hladík identifies himself as being, in essence, the author of Los enemigos. This work would redeem previous literary failures through the process of writing, or, in his case, of mental composition.

Failure and Guilt: ‘La forma de la espada’ Revisited Deception, guilt and confession are the cornerstones in this story of betrayal. Redemption is hoped for through narration. El inglés – who is ironically named so as he is really Irish, had fought the English and subsequently changed over to the enemy’s side in an act of treason – is the protagonist not only of the story itself, but also of his own narration. He is known as a scrupulously just, albeit severe man. Borges, the character-narrator of the story, stops over at his estancia and is granted the privilege of hearing the story of the scar first hand, on condition that he retell the story without omitting a single villainy, a single trespass. The story is of how el inglés encountered John Vincent Moon, a singularly cowardly man in the course of the Irish revolution he fought for. The Borges-narrator reflects on the theme of the trespass in the guise of original sin, and also of salvation through Christ: Lo que hace un hombre es como si lo hicieran todos los hombres. Por eso no es injusto que una desobediencia en un jardín contamine al género humano; por eso no es injusto que la crucifixión de un sólo judío baste para salvarlo. Acaso Schopenhauer tiene razón: yo soy los otros, cualquier hombre es todos los hombres [. . .]. (‘La forma de la espada’ (Borges 1956, 138))

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What Borges expresses here is his belief that there is an essence shared by all of humanity. This would seem to answer his quandary over the separation of the self from the other. The trespass thus alluded to early on in the story foreshadows the personal guilt on the part of the Irishman, who is to reveal himself as the very traitor, John Vincent Moon. In a reversal of roles, he had presented himself to his visitor, Borges, as the other, the one betrayed. From his confessor he expects neither understanding nor forgiveness, but only contempt. Precisely what kind of redemption is this? He excludes any possibility of forgiveness as he makes his confession, cathartic as it might be, to one he now begs to despise him: Borges: a usted que es un desconocido, le he hecho esta confesión. No me duele tanto su menosprecio. [. . .] ¿Usted no me cree? – balbuceó – ¿No ve que llevo escrita en la cara la marca de mi infamia? Le he narrado la historia de este modo para que usted la oyera hasta el fin. Yo he denunciado al hombre que me amparó: yo soy Vincent Moon. Ahora desprécieme. (‘La forma de la espada’, p. 139, my emphasis) In this story, the character Borges is being placed in the confessor role. What Moon expects of his confessor is the same as what Borges expects from God: condemnation. For Moon, the very purpose of inverting the identities of traitor and betrayed is to be seen in all his villainy. This shows a great need to be recognized for what he is, or sees himself to be. Underneath the wish to be seen for what he is, there is also the unspoken need for forgiveness and acceptance, for which Moon dares not hope.

‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’ Our first-person narrator in this fiicción has conceived the story of Ryan and his grandfather Kilpatrick; references to Chesterton and Leibniz identify him as another ‘Borges’ of sorts. As in ‘La forma de la espada’, narration serves as a means not so much to redeem a heinous act of betrayal, as to witness it. It is narration with a twist. In the absence of a loving and merciful God, there is no escape from guilt. This in turn allows for the deliberate manipulation of truth which prevents the restoration of oneness. Nolan is entrusted by Kilpatrick, the heroic leader of the Irish cause, to uncover the identity of the traitor in their midst. He discovers that this traitor is Kilpatrick himself. In order to preserve the image of Kilpatrick, and so as not to jeopardize the revolutionary cause, Nolan, with the assent of

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Kilpatrick and inspired by several famous plays (ironically, by Shakespeare), stages the traitor’s ‘assassination’ (which is really his execution) in a crowded theatre, thus turning him into a public hero. But although Nolan fabricates the ‘play’ (the lie) of Kilpatrick’s assassination, he also weaves in the means by which that very fabrication can be uncovered. These are his very own intersticios de sinrazón which will eventually, decades or centuries later, lead to the truth. The truth, however, although revealed, will not be publically disclosed as Ryan suppresses the true events in a decision to perpetuate the lie. This, in turn, as Ryan suspects, was also part of Nolan’s plan, along with the very pointers towards uncovering the staged plot.

Authorship and textual fragmentation: ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ and ‘El fin’ Time and time again, Borges tries to grasp an anchor of solidity and of endurance. These very anchors, however, prove to be volatile. In the absence or impossibility of an underlying reality, fragmentation of the personal identity of both character and author ensues. This also threatens textual identity. In this absence, Borges shows how the identity of the text and of the author can be undermined.8 On the surface, the writing in ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ and ‘El inmortal’ confers personal justification and authorial identity, thereby defining personal identity. The story of Pierre Menard challenges the notion of singular authorship; it questions the fixed identity of the text, and so the fixed identity of the author. It also challenges narratorial and personal identity. Menard not only rewrites but writes anew (and better) a section of the Quijote, identical to the letter with the original, yet not identical in meaning (context and historical time being crucial here). In a creative reworking of Leibniz’ principle of the indiscernibility of identicals, Borges enables Menard to re-create one of potentially many ‘same’, yet not identical texts. In several of his essays of Discusión and Historia de la eternidad, he had explored sameness vs. identity when he discussed translation, intertextuality, and the version (see for instance ‘La supersticiosa ética del lector’ and ‘Las versiones homéricas’). In ‘Las versiones homéricas’, he had argued that the non-absolute nature of literary texts implies that there can be no one true translation; they are all valid, be they literal or not, ‘realistic’ or otherwise. Herein lies the cornerstone for his assessment of literary precursors and of the erroneous attribution of texts as outlined in ‘La poesía

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gauchesca’. This is the foundation for the subsequent discussion of authorship and originality in ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’. It anticipates the ongoing ontological debate as to the conclusions to be drawn from indiscernible yet non-identical works of literature whose essence is constituted by relations to authors and places in literary history. Here, it is crucial to recall Borges’ views on Platonic Forms which inform his view on the originality of the text. These views, as we saw, had undergone considerable evolution from his first voicing of his conviction in ‘Historia de la eternidad’ of 1936 to the Prólogo of 1952 to the same essay where he calls Platonic Forms vivas, poderosas y orgánicas. The infinite aspect of time suggests that there may well be a cyclical ‘recurrence’ of the text, again same yet different. ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ is a variant of the idea of the repetition of similar, non-identical experiences which Borges had formulated with ‘El tiempo circular’. The similar, non-identical experience in this case is that of reading the selfsame text in the light of different temporal frames. The implication for the text is that it will never be finished or final, subject to endless variations through context rather than content. It is not the text itself which undergoes variations, as happens in ‘El fin’. Rather, it is the author in his temporal context which will determine the differentness of the very same text. The implications for the author are these: if Cervantes is defined as the author of the (one and only) Quijote, this very authorial identity is threatened by the temporal flux which changes textual identity. If any given work can be rewritten, written anew and even better, by another, the author can no longer be defined, nor indeed define himself, through his work. By the same token, any writer, and any text, including his own, as Borges would have been aware of with a twinkle in his eyes, are potentially subject to the same reworking of his or her hitherto unique text, irrespective of whether that rewritten text actually is or is not: the potentiality of this scenario has implications for actuality.9 In Genette’s reading of the story, the multiplicity of authors (and of texts) converges back into singularity: ‘Todos los autores son un solo autor porque todos los libros son un solo libro’ (1970, p. 105). This concept suggests that we are trapped in the circularity of time. The unique act of creation is potentially and paradoxically repeated, which invalidates uniqueness itself. Borges poses, and at the same time questions his own enterprise of justification or redemption through writing. If the self is defined and made stable through the writing and the text, then a text in

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flux with varying authorships implies that the self is in flux and can no longer secure the stability of selfhood.

Personality in Flux: ‘El inmortal’ ‘El inmortal’ (1949) is a fictional rendering of ‘La nadería de la personalidad’, where Borges had denied that personal identity resides in memory. Taking this further in his fiction, Borges challenges textual and authorial identities. This occurs against the backdrop of a cosmology in which the creator has absented himself from the created. Homer’s loss of memory (having forgotten that he is Homer and as such the creator of the Iliad ) invalidates the notion of the unique author. In a process of un-defining authorial identity similar to that we saw in ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, Borges un-defines Homer who, in the absence of personal memory, is no longer the author of the Iliad. Memory, one of the anchors of self-identity, no longer serves to secure the fixity of identity, neither personal, nor authorial. Homer’s loss of memory, combined with his persistence in infinite time through his immortality, result in a multiplicity of selves. He is, or was Homer, the author of the Iliad; he is also Marco Flaminio Rufo, who in turn is identical to Argos the troglodyte, that is, the immortal. Existentially, memory is therefore inextricably linked to identity. Yet memory betrays identity, as we saw in ‘La otra muerte’, where the Coronel’s memory ‘confirmed’ the false, the adopted identity of Damián. These multiple selves (Homer, Rufo, Argos) unfold in linear, infinite time, and immortality is its metaphor. The individual ‘I’ is nullified, and authorial as well as personal identity are wiped out by that most abhorrent of notions for Borges, infinity. This is mirrored in the multiplicity of first-person narrators and in the maze of narratorial voices which unfold, rather like Russian dolls, into what Genette (1982, 119) had termed ‘secondary narratives’ within the story, threatening textual identity and fixedness: the first of the first-person narrators is ‘Borges’. He publishes the manuscript contained within Pope’s Iliad. The second yo is the writer of the manuscript calling himself Marco Flaminio Rufo who, after many travails, discovers that the troglodyte Argos is really Homer. The third yo is Homer, (or still ‘Rufo’), who by now, however, had realized that he himself is (or was) Homer: ‘Yo he sido Homero; en breve, seré Nadie, como Ulises; en breve, seré todos: estaré muerto’ (‘El inmortal’, p. 27). To be Nadie can be read as a reference to the clever name Ulysses gave himself in order to confuse the Cyclops, but it can also be interpreted as

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a reference to his fictional status, that is, to be nobody in some sense dead despite his immortality. This brings to mind again the title of one of Borges’ own experiences, ‘Sentirse en muerte’. Not ‘Sentirse muerto’, but feeling within death itself. What he had experienced then was a death of the individuated self, at one for a while with a timeless whole, an intimation of something approximating the soul. The death of the self in ‘El inmortal’, on the other hand, is another kind of death: it is the oblivion, the annihilation of self. There is in this story no communion of selves through which the individual’s uniqueness might be more truly and more fully affirmed.

A Twenty First Century Answer to the Crisis of Self In the modern Christian spirituality of Chiara Lubich (2007, 210–211), this existential crisis of self is squarely tackled: The awareness human beings have had of themselves from the very beginnings of philosophical reflection, especially if enlightened by faith, is the acknowledgement of being. This being is a light and, at the same time, a confession of the Absolute Being, of the most pure Light which knows neither shadow nor error, and which is invoked and sought by the very light that shines forth in the consciousness of human beings, as its guarantee, certainty, and final destination. So for human beings to say ‘I’ is equivalent to opening oneself to being able to say, in communion with the being of all things, that the Absolute Being is. Lubich continues on the role which Western philosophy has played in this respect: And yet, the course of philosophy in the West has witnessed the clouding over of these initial certainties. Consciousness of self has been – and is – lived as negating the objectivity of being. And it has closed itself off from the Absolute Being. This has led to the great crisis that has marked recent centuries. Now we could ask ourselves: is it true that consciousness of self and being – as the affirmation of reality in itself to the point of acknowledging the Absolute Being – cannot co-exist? Or rather, are we not called by this very crisis to examine in depth both the concept of the conscious subject and that of being in all its breadth? And in this way to understand that ultimately the difficulty of our times lies in a reluctance to call upon a new, more fully developed solution, in which the specific gift of Christianity shines forth in all its power?

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In this context we can understand the importance of the role which Lubich assigns to one of the pillars of her spirituality, which is suffering embraced and transformed: And precisely here Jesus Forsaken presents himself as the master of light, of thought, and – I would to say – of philosophy. There may be those who think that to affirm self implies a struggle against all that is not self, because what is not self is perceived as a limit and, what is more, as a threat to the integrity of self. But in that terrible moment of his passion, Jesus Forsaken tells us that though the consciousness of his subjectivity appears to be diminishing as he is, as it were, made nothing, in that very moment it reaches its fullness. With his being reduced to nothing, accepted out of love for the Father to whom he re-abandons himself (‘Into your hands I commend my spirit’ [LK 23.46]), Jesus shows us that I am myself, not when I close myself off from the other, but rather when I give myself, when out of love I lose myself in the other. It seems to me that this contemporary spirituality gives a philosophical as well as a spiritual answer to the pressing questions asked by Borges along the decades and throughout the genres.

The Non-Fixity of the Text: ‘El fin’ ‘El fin’ of 1953 is the third of the stories which postulate the non-fixity of the text, challenging its uniqueness and with it its creator. In reworking Hernandez’ poem and giving it an alternative ‘ending’, Borges postulates the vertiginous possibility of more ‘endings’ and reworkings. The (one) author unfolds into one of potentially many authors, as does the text which becomes a text; the ending becomes a possible ending, one of potentially many. Authorship no longer holds a monopoly on the text, just as the text itself is no longer inviolable. Rather, it is a mirror image of another text, the same and yet, as a mirror image, inverted. The ending of ‘El fin’ echoes the ending of ‘El inmortal’: ‘cumplida su tarea de justiciero, [. . .] él será nadie’ (‘El fin’, Ficciones: Artificios, pp. 183–187). Changing identity brings the potential of a cycle of identities. ‘El fin’ is a story where the heroes’ personal identities get dissolved and cloned, where meaning is at once conferred (the killing, being killed) and stripped away: ‘Ya no tenía destino sobre la tierra’.

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One man is then any man, or his enemy, or no-one in a simulacrum of identity which renders him either the same or null. Paoli (1992, 197) comments on the nullification of multiple identities: ‘Detrás de las conjeturas, detrás de las mudables imágenes que los otros se hacen [. . .] no hay posiblemente nadie’. In this story, the theme of one being another can be understood as one man being the other man, or a version of the other. This cannot be compared to the mystical notion of being (in) God and vice versa; nor does it express the pantheistic notion of identity and presence of the divine in the immanent. Because the spiritual dimension is not yet fully defined, fulfilment – which would render the self in its union with God, who is the other, more truly ‘I’ – cannot be found. With ‘El fin’ Borges had reached a turning point in his story writing, after which he writes no more stories for over a decade. Fiction, we might say, had been a way for him to shift gear from the analysis and speculation of the essays to acting out a search in his narratives, which in turn are to lead him, with his poetry, to a more intimate exploration of relationship.

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Part Three

The Long Quest

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Chapter 6

Bridging the Divide: Self and Divinity

In his biography on Borges, Edwin Williamson identifies Borges’ Dantean vision of salvation through writing, a vision which, in Dante, is inspired by the love of Beatrice. Borges repeatedly called this work, which is profoundly Christian in its nature, ‘the highest work of literature, of all literatures’ (quoted in Williamson, 2004, p. 241). In an epic quest which ultimately saves his soul, the author of the Divine Comedy journeys through hell, purgatory and paradise. The final meeting of Dante and Beatrice goes beyond death and leads him directly to the presence of God. Beatrice’s part in the unfolding of the epic is her intercession on Dante’s behalf. She also provides the inspiration for the composition of the epic itself which reveals the meaning of man’s life on earth. Williamson observes that: There was a difference between Dante and Borges. Dante was a Christian and could therefore draw inspiration from the belief that Beatrice could bring him to salvation. Borges was a sceptic, if not an atheist. (Williamson, 2004, p. 242) I would like to add this: the ultimate agent in Dante’s salvation, albeit through Beatrice’s intercession and selfless love, was God, which is understood by Dante. And this is where Borges departs from Dante, not because he was an atheist, but because he interprets the Divine Comedy in human, and therefore incomplete terms. The crux of his reading of Dante, and indeed of most of the mystical writings that he recourses to is that he searches for the ultimate experience of plenitude while struggling to embrace a personal relationship with God which underlies the ultimate oneness longed for. The quest for spiritual unity, for God, for salvation and increasingly for the redeeming face of Christ is an abiding theme and preoccupation for Borges, and one which spans the whole of his creative life. He carries through this quest in the face of a shifting and fragmenting self, a dual self at times (see for example ‘Borges y yo’ of 1960 in El Hacedor).

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From the mid-1950s onwards, he uses the medium of the poem in order to express more openly the spiritual search. In contrast to his work of the previous decades, Borges now adopts a self-revealing voice as he is leaving the labyrinth. In many of his later poems, his focus is on the Christ figure, and in particular on Christ crucified. His poems show us that Borges intuits the divine, and one way of articulating this is by fusing self-voice and divine voice.

Self-Voice and Divine Voice: ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ Although the ultimate word, the absolute reality and the perfect union of the self with the divine cannot be fully articulated, it may be somewhat apprehended through art. In the course of his writing, Borges often hints at the notion of the absolute word, the word which encapsulates all and everything, and which he professes to have attempted to ‘translate’. For him, this elusive, unutterable word holds beauty and mystery beyond finiteness, and which he associates with the divine. But there speaks also a selfcastigating voice, accusatory of his failures and shortcomings. With ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ (written in 1953, published in El otro, el mismo in 1964) we initially encounter the poet in first person as Judgement Day arrives: El primer puente de Constitución y a mis pies fragor de trenes que tejían laberintos de hierro. humo y silbatos escalaban la noche, que de golpe fue el Juicio Universal. He hears a voice which speaks to him directly, and which comes from deep within his own being: Desde el invisible horizonte y desde el centro de mi ser, una voz infinita dijo estas cosas (estas cosas, no estas palabras, que son mi pobre traducción temporal de una sola palabra): [. . .] With the lines ‘desde el invisible horizonte’ and ‘desde el centro de mi ser’ he expresses an intuition as to the fundamental oneness between the

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external, el invisible horizonte (God), and the internal, desde el centro de mi ser (the soul). Borges’ palabra is the word incarnate, and it has for him both a saving and a condemning power. It is the ineffable word. This is how Navarro (1997, 716) puts the relationship between Borges and the word: Borges siempre aspiró a una Palabra, vedada a los hombres, que sólo pueden aludirla, capaz de contener y pronunciar la totalidad de la realidad y de su forma bella. Cristo, más de una vez, es asociado por Borges a esta palabra. In the last part of the poem, he is confronted with the voice of God who accuses him of having wasted the gifts bestowed on him. Despite all that has been given to him, the poet hasn’t written el poema: Todo eso te fue dado, y también el antiguo alimento de los héroes: la falsía, la derrota, la humillación. En vano te hemos prodigado el océano, en vano el sol, que vieron los maravillados ojos de Whitman; has gastado los años y te han gastado, y todavía no has escrito el poema. Borges relates these intuitions with an affinity to his own life, but also with a sense of personal failure as evidenced in the self-castigating poetic voice (‘has gastado los años, y te han gastado’). His translation of the divine word is self-accusatory in that the voice of God is really a projection of the self-castigating voice of the poet. In this fusion of the voice of self and that of God, Borges’ ambivalence towards the divine becomes apparent. He speaks of personal failure, the futility of his striving, of judgment and damnation. He looks to his own writing, el poema, as a means of redemption and salvation, yet it is the very poem he feels he has ultimately failed at. On this basis, he perceives his life as a futile attempt at salvation through writing. The poet’s, indeed any poet’s translation of the word cannot, however, do it justice. Not because the ‘translation’ is inadequate, but because the word and its essence are ineffable and surpass anything that can be apprehended in language. Again, Borges puts the responsibility of salvation solely on himself, without allowing God to intervene. This is a lonely burden, having to conform to what is perceived as God’s will, while unable to fully believe in God in the first place, nor in God’s love.

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On that very point of love, Borges’ choice of this particular Gospel text as title deserves closer attention. Matthew 25.30 reads as follows: And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.1 This much-quoted, though at times misinterpreted passage in Scripture is indeed about failure and the consequences. But it is most of all a call to love. The parable told by Matthew is the one of the talents. These are the property of the master and entrusted to the servants by him, to each according to their ability. One of the servants put the money to work and gained double, and so did the second. The third, however, dug a hole, put his talent into it and returned the very same one to the master upon his return, on which occasion the master says: So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.2 This passage, in its outward starkness, may need a little ‘unpacking’. The talents represent the love of Christ. The servants are endowed with love, which finds its origin in Christ. They are asked to be not only custodians of this gift, but to multiply it. But how can love be multiplied? The answer lies in the New Commandment which Christ gave on the eve of his passion: ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, you must also love one another’ (John 13.34). It is by loving, therefore, that the talents are being invested. By loving one’s neighbour, man is given more love. So love is at once a gift, but it is also a call to give it, not to hoard it. Only in mutual love, which in its essence is trinitarian: continuously dynamic, self-giving, unconditional and reciprocal, can the call be fulfilled in its truest form. Conversely, whoever does not love revokes the free and unbidded love given by Christ, and ultimately loses it. The failure lies therefore in not responding to divine love, in not acting in love towards the other. Borges may not have been fully aware of the parable’s true meaning, and on evidence of the poem, it looks like he, as many others of his generation, took it rather literally. His choice is nonetheless interesting in that he chose a text which goes to the very heart of the Christian spirituality: the

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unconditional love of God for man, and the answer of mankind in loving not only God but one another. Borges, consciously or not, seems to take us to the threshold of a mystical reality, intangible in mere human description.

Separation and Forsakenness: ‘No eres los otros’ ‘No eres los otros’ of 1976 reveals a desire for salvation and redemption, and yet it also expresses a resignation into the impossibility of any such salvation, neither the saviour of Christianity, nor the Greek/Platonic gods and godlike figures of philosophy, nor though the Buddha himself. There is no eternity, only unending instances of time, forever fragmenting the individual into smaller and smaller, into more and more individual instances. The self is thereby individuated and solitary, imprisoned in its own solitude and fashioned relentlessly by time; eternity is conceived of as infinity, the ultimate consequence of time in the worldly sense. And finally, the divine is perceived as an unattainable God, separated from Christ as in his poem, a fundamental separation between Father and Son is foregrounded. The last line of ‘No eres los otros’ echoes Borges’ resignation into his own self as only body in time and space: No te salva la agonía de Jesús o de Sócrates ni el fuerte Siddharta de oro [. . .] [. . .] No hay lástima en el Hado y la noche de Dios es infinita. Tu materia es el tiempo, el incesante tiempo. Eres cada solitario instante. The focus is on the abandonment and solitude of self, likened to Christ’s own forsakenness. Borges’ vision is one of God who has severed himself from Christ, and so from humanity. The relationship between Father and Son in Borges is one of actual abandonment. Christianity, however, understands Christ’s forsakenness not as actual abandonment by the Father. Rather, it is a profound suffering, which is not only the total feeling of forsakenness but is also experienced as a loss of Christ’s very essence, which is divine in nature and is in a complete, reciprocal union with the Father.

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In the vision put forward by Borges’ poem, God is unattainable because the Son is not seen as in a trinitarian unity with the Father. The noche de Dios of the poem can be understood as the absence of God, which is the actual and ultimate forsakenness. Absence of God is a state of torment, a kind of hell: ‘No hay lástima en el Hado.’ Borges’ noche de Dios corresponds to the night of the soul, which John of the Cross speaks of in Dark Night of the Soul (quoted in Bowker 1997, 507). St John’s night of the soul is the profound desolation of no longer sensing the presence of God. The night of the soul, however, is also part of the advanced spiritual journey. We may never know conclusively whether the total severance of God from Christ in Borges is a sign of a limited spiritual vision, or rather an intuitive step towards faith.

Elusive Salvation: ‘La larga busca’ In a short prose entitled ‘La larga busca’ (Los Conjurados, 1985), Borges speaks of the impossibility, the improbability, the elusiveness of a convergence between the ‘I’ (nosotros los hombres) and el animal (the Simurgh): Anterior al tiempo o fuera del tiempo (ambas locuciones son vanas) o en un lugar que no es del espacio, hay un animal invisible, y acaso diáfano, que los hombres buscamos y que nos busca. [. . .] Hay quienes lo han buscado en un pájaro, que está hecho de pájaros; hay quienes lo han buscado en una palabra o en las letras de esa palabra; hay quienes lo han buscado, y lo buscan, en un libro anterior al árabe en que fue escrito, y aún a todas las cosas; hay quien lo busca en la sentencia Soy El Que Soy. [. . .] Nos elude de segundo en segundo. La sentencia del romano se gasta, las noches roen el mármol. In this text, the poet is the universal seeker who speaks of the search for a pantheistic being which is in each and every one of us and we in it. This search, this being recalls the bird alluded to in ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ and in ‘El coloquio de los pájaros’. It bears echoes of the cabbalistic search for God in the letters; of the paradoxical book which precedes the language in which it is written; of the words of the Bible. This is a direct parallel with the concepts of an immediate, though ultimately unfulfilling spiritual

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gratification in some of Borges’ ficciones. There, as in this case here, a powerful, hidden presence is unleashed via a trigger or some kind of catalyst.

Brotherhood and Dysfunction The process of fragmenting identities in Borges’ earlier work gives way to a vision of brotherhood and unity in the later poems which suggest an underlying unity between opposites, such as that which characterizes the fundamental unity between Cain and Abel in ‘Juan López y John Ward’. With these poems, Borges develops further his theme of the identity of two antagonists that we had encountered in stories such as ‘Los teólogos’, ‘El fin’, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ and many more. With his later work, he reconciles the fragmentation we witnessed in his stories of the 1930s and 1940s.

‘Los Conjurados’ In this poem of 1985, for example, there is ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity and division between the conspirators, yet also unity and universal brotherhood between that which might easily have become fragmented, but which is in its essence one. It speaks of the potential of universal and ecumenical brotherhood in what Borges professes to be a prophetic vision: ‘Acaso lo que digo no es verdadero; ojalá sea profético’.

‘Milonga del forastero’ In some cases, Borges takes the theme of brotherhood to another level. The duel persists in his later poems as a deadly encounter which confirms identity through the killing of the opponent. In ‘Milonga del forastero’ (Historia de la noche, 1977), the opponent’s identity seems to assert itself, paradoxically, in annihilation: [. . .] Sólo esa tarde se vieron. No se volverán a ver; no los movió la codicia ni el amor de una mujer.

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No vale ser el más diestro, no vale ser el más fuerte; siempre el que muere es aquel que vino a buscar la muerte. Para esa prueba vivieron toda su vida esos hombres; ya se han borrado las caras, ya se borrarán los nombres.

‘Juan López y John Ward’ The two protagonists of ‘Juan López y John Ward’ (Los Conjurados, 1985) are enacting a deadly, biblical rivalry: [López y Ward, los dos antagonistas accidentales] Hubieran sido amigos, pero se vieron una sola vez cara a cara, en unas islas demasiado famosas, y cada uno de los dos fue Caín, y cada uno, Abel. [. . .]

‘Milonga de dos hermanos’ The face is for Borges an external seat of identity. Its obliteration strangely confirms the identity of the other, the brother, the opponent intent on murder. In ‘Milonga de dos hermanos’ (Para las seis cuerdas, 1965), Juan Ibarra shoots dead his younger brother and hurls his body under an approaching train which, as the elder had intended, destroys the younger brother’s face: [. . .] El tren lo dejó sin cara, que es lo que el mayor quería. Así de manera fiel conté la historia hasta el fin; es la historia de Caín que sigue matando a Abel.

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What had brought on Juan’s jealousy is the higher score of killings that his brother had to his name. But although this is a poem about betrayal and fratricide, it also speaks of an underlying, fundamental union: the brotherhood between Cain and Abel before Abel’s murder, which had brought on an extreme and fatal sense of individuality when Cain severed this link. In their case, God looked more kindly on Abel’s produce, that is, his sacrifice. Borges takes the notion of the biblical sacrifice itself to a murderous extreme in that the decisive factor of jealousy lies in who proves himself more of a man through blood sacrifices of a distorted kind. Navarro (1997, 714) foregrounds this fundamental solidarity or ‘communion’ of all humanity when he stresses the bond between Cain and Abel: [Los poemas de Borges] afirman una solidaridad (‘comunión’, diríamos en términos cristianos) de la humanidad a partir de un vínculo que se entiende como real (Caín y Abel eran hermanos). ‘El espejo’ In this poem of 1976 (in Historia de la noche, 1977), the fear of the child who dreads the mask, which, the child is sure, hides something hideous, is juxtaposed against the now old man’s fear of the mirror which reveals his true face to God: Yo, de niño, temía que el espejo me mostrara otra cara o una ciega máscara impersonal que ocultaría algo sin duda atroz. Temí asimismo que el silencioso tiempo del espejo se desviara del curso cotidiano de las horas del hombre y hospedara en su vago confín imaginario seres y formas y colores nuevos. (A nadie se lo dije; el niño es tímido.) Yo temo ahora que el espejo encierre el verdadero rostro de mi alma, lastimada de sombras y de culpas, el que Dios ve y acaso ven los hombres. This fear of being seen can also be related to Adam and Eve whose fear of God came about through an ill-conceived search for knowledge. So afraid

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were they of being seen that they hid their bodies. This is the ultimate example of acknowledgement of the other (God); however it is through fear and not yet through loving relationship. In this context, we can see the ‘I’ and ‘You’ in stark relief and distinction, as opposed to a reciprocal relationship, based on the ‘You’ being the answer to and fulfilment of ‘I’, and vice versa. Prayer, incidentally, by its very nature establishes a personal relationship with the divine, an exchange between the ‘I’ and the ‘You’, as for instance the Lord’s Prayer does when it invites us to speak directly to God as father. This very dynamic is what Borges searches for without fully experiencing its reality.

‘La moneda de hierro’ The tension in Borges between individuality and union finds yet another expression in ‘La moneda de hierro’ of 1976 (in La moneda de hierro). It takes us back to ‘Historia de la eternidad’ of 1936 where he wrote of ‘aquel terrible pasaje de Lucrecio sobre la falacia del coito’ with respect to the impossibility to reach true communion with the other, not even in the most intimate moment of sexual union. Borges concludes with these words of resignation: ‘del todo en vano, ya que no alcanzan a perderse en el otro ni a ser un mismo ser’. The individual self which is not in communion with the other, yet also not fully completed in its own individuality, had concerned him for many years. In ‘La moneda de hierro’, he asks why a man needs a woman’s love and gives an inconclusive answer: that we seek affirmation in seeing our own reflection in that of the other, our own shadow in the shadow of the other: ‘En la sombra del otro buscamos nuestra sombra.’ With the Christian vision of love, on the other hand, there can be a true union of two selves. When two people meet who are in union with God, they are one in the divine. This is how there can be fulfilment and perfect unity in distinction.

‘Para una versión del I King’ It is the God figure in ‘Para una versión del I King’ of 1976 (in La moneda de hierro) which unites this poem to the Scripture passage on which the title is based. The first book of Kings is about King David, Solomon and various other kings who have broken their agreement with God, who as a result

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shows his power. This Old Testament God is one who, although he does have immense love, makes it clear that there will be an accounting. It is also a poetic rendering of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. It puts forward the fatalism as to all our actions, the inescapability of a pre-determined destiny, and the lack of free will. Life is likened to a book already written, to the inexorable prison of the unending recurrence of the same. The divine is an inscrutable, incomprehensible figure, sinister and threatening. Any choice that there might be is barred by God lying in wait in the fissures of the prison floor: El porvenir es tan irrevocable como el rígido ayer. No hay una cosa que no sea una letra silenciosa de la eterna escritura indescifrable cuyo libro es el tiempo. Quien se aleja de su casa ya ha vuelto. Nuestra vida es la senda futura y recorrida. Nada nos dice adiós. Nada nos deja. No te rindas. La ergástula es oscura, la firme trama es de incesante hierro, pero en algún recodo de tu encierro puede haber un descuido, una hendidura. El camino es fatal como la flecha pero en las grietas está Dios, que acecha. With its themes of temporal irrevocability, ‘Para una version del I King’ seems to be putting forward a kind of spiritual and metaphysical hell. In the Christian spirituality of unity as defined by the twentieth-century mystic Chiara Lubich, hell is visualized as the ultimate disunity where ‘The three sources of pain [past, present, future] will be separate so that they will be increased and horribly confused among themselves’ (Lubich, cited in Blaumeiser 2002, 81). Fundamental also to this vision is that until the very end, man can make the conscious choice of redemption. Although hell exists, so does heaven, and both start on earth.

‘Eclesiastés, I, 9’ With ‘Eclesiastés, I, 9’ of 1981 (in La cifra) Borges takes up the Eternal Return, but this time not in an embracing of the concept as he had done in

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the essays of the 1930s and 40s, but with dread. As the Scriptures passage does, ‘Eclesiastés, I, 9’ speaks of futility: Si me paso la mano por la frente, si acaricio los lomos de los libros, [. . .] si la memoria me devuelve un verso, repito lo cumplido innumerables veces en mi camino señalado. No puedo ejecutar un acto nuevo, tejo y torno a tejer la misma fábula, repito un repetido endecasílabo, digo lo que los otros me dijeron, siento las mismas cosas en la misma hora del día o de la abstracta noche. Cada noche la misma pesadilla, cada noche el rigor del laberinto. Soy la fatiga de un espejo inmóvil o el polvo de un museo. Sólo una cosa no gustada espero, una dádiva, un oro de la sombra, esa virgen, la muerte. (El castellano permite esta metáfora.) It is an interesting choice for a title. It refers to the early Old Testament text where Qoheleth the preacher, laments the futility of everything and asserts the return of the same in the last line of the Gospel passage which gives the poem its reference: Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full;

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to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.3 This passage speaks of the futility of being outside of God’s plan, of the fact that man is made simple, but that his complex problems are of his own making. But what the text also shows is the need for a revelation, for something more. In its austerity, it foreshadows the advent of Christ. The choice of this particular Scripture passage is indicative of Borges’ intuition as to the ‘something more’ which is needed not only in mankind’s, but in his own searching. Only four years later, with ‘Cristo en la cruz’ Borges is to seek an answer as to the meaning of suffering as he relates his own pain to that of the crucified Christ.

Chapter 7

Towards Relationship

The Incarnate Christ: ‘Juan, I, 14’ (1964 and 1969) Borges wrote two poems bearing the same title, ‘Juan, I, 14’, first in 1964 (El otro, el mismo) and again in 1969 (in Elogio de la sombra). As in ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’, there is a correlation between the word, Christ, and the translation of that word by the poet. Christ is the word, la palabra made flesh. To start with, John 1.14 reads as follows: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.1 Both poems display a strong sense of the incarnation, of Christ’s humanity and his human experiences. In the 1964 version, the emphasis is on Christ becoming man and on his suffering. It is an account of his sensory impressions and of human love: Refieren las historias orientales la de aquel rey del tiempo, que sujeto a tedio y esplendor, sale en secreto y solo, a recorrer los arrabales y a perderse en la turba de las gentes de rudas manos y de oscuros nombres; hoy, como aquel Emir de los Creyentes, Harún, Dios quiere andar entre los hombres y nace de una madre, como nacen los linajes que en polvo se deshacen,

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y le será entregado el orbe entero, aire, agua, pan, mañanas, piedra y lirio, The poem ends not with the resurrection, but the passion: pero después la sangre del martirio, el escarnio, los clavos y el madero. In the 1969 version, the first person voice of Christ speaks to an unnamed amanuense, the author of the poem who, in Christ’s view ineptly so, attempts to transcribe his words, el poema. The castigating self-voice and the projected divine voice are fused. ‘Juan, I, 14’ of 1969, like ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ before it, speaks of the writing, the word as translated or created by the poet: No será menos un enigma esta hoja que las de Mis libros sagrados ni aquellas otras que repiten las bocas ignorantes, creyéndolas de un hombre, no espejos oscuros del Espíritu. The divine then speaks in first person, revealing his divinity and desire to become one with humankind, and relays his human joys and sufferings: Yo que soy el Es, el Fue y el Será, vuelvo a condescender al lenguaje, que es tiempo sucesivo y emblema. Quien juega con un niño juega con algo cercano y misterioso; yo quise jugar con Mis hijos. Estuve entre ellos con asombro y ternura. Por obra de una magia nací curiosamente de un vientre. [. . .] Fui amado, comprendido, alabado y pendí de una cruz. Bebí la copa hasta las heces. [. . .] Conocí también la amargura.

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Christ consequently entrusts the writing to man, who will, however, never be able to truly represent this ineffable word: He encomendado esta escritura a un hombre cualquiera; no será nunca lo que quiero decir, no dejará de ser su reflejo. Desde Mi eternidad caen estos signos. As ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ before it, this poem is about a sense of unworthiness. Towards the closing lines, Christ’s voice exhorts the poet, his scribe, to let another attempt to write el poema. This is the work that would justify the poet, which would be the culmination, the expression of all there is to be said. This work, however, cannot be written by the poet or anyone else, but has been entrusted to another, even though the task remains impossible: Que otro, no el que es ahora su amanuense, escriba el poema. [. . .] The word and its essence are ineffable and as such impossible to apprehend in mere language. Therefore, the poet’s translation will never fully do it justice.

The Radicality of Faith: ‘Lucas, XXIII’ In ‘Lucas, XXIII’ (El Hacedor, 1960), the good thief displays unquestioning faith in the man hanging on a cross next to him. With this poem, we see how Borges is drawn to the idea of the trespasser asking for and receiving the gift of salvation. Luke 23 refers to the passion of Jesus, from the judgement by Pilate to his crucifixion. But this time, unlike in the 1964 version of ‘Juan, I, 14’, the vision of Borges is not only of the crucifixion (death), but also of the resurrection (paradise, eternal life): the faith of the thief in Christ’s divinity meets an answer as Christ promises him a place in paradise. It is a faith which goes against all appearances as the man nailed to the cross next to him is, outwardly, another outcast, another failure. This New Testament passage of the good thief which Borges models his poem on, is one of immense hope. It speaks of the possibility of starting again at the very last. The thief, a wretched figure of humanity, touched by the presence of the divine, understood not only who Christ is but who Christ is for him:

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Gentil o hebreo o simplemente un hombre cuya cara en el tiempo se ha perdido; ya no rescataremos del olvido las silenciosas letras de su nombre. Supo de la clemencia lo que puede saber un bandolero que Judea clava a una cruz. Del tiempo que antecede nada alcanzamos hoy. En su tarea última de morir crucificado, oyó, entre los escarnios de la gente, que el que estaba muriéndose a su lado era Dios y le dijo ciegamente: Acuérdate de mí cuando vinieres A tu reino, y la voz inconcebible que un día juzgará a todos los seres le prometió desde la Cruz terrible el Paraíso. Nada más dijeron hasta que vino el fin, pero la historia no dejará que muera la memoria de aquella tarde en que los dos murieron. The supplication of the good thief to remember him meets a response from Christ on the cross. This, in turn, engenders an interjection from the poet and is followed by an astounding, spiritually intuitive insight: Oh amigos, la inocencia de este amigo de Jesucristo, ese candor que hizo que pidiera y ganara el Paraíso desde las ignominias del castigo, era el que tantas veces al pecado lo arrojó y al azar ensangrentado. Interestingly, Borges highlights the thief’s audacious act. In the emotional call, oh amigos, he emphasizes the audacity in daring to ask for mercy and for favour despite his broken state. But Borges states that it is not so much

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despite as because of his broken human nature, that the thief is enabled to ask for the gift of Christ’s pardon and love. In this poem, which Borges published in 1960, his intuitive understanding of a personal relationship with God is evident and for the first time overtly manifest in his writing. His focus is on the thief’s innocence, trust and faith beyond merit, knowledge or reason, which open up the possibility of salvation because of his very human failings. The same inocencia and candor which the thief displays in asking for salvation are also at the heart of his trespasses, the all-toohuman. Conversely, however, they are also at the heart of his redemption. Through the character of the good thief, Borges hints strongly at the possibility of salvation by turning to God in all one’s humanity, and against all apparent reason in a radical act of faith. This points to an identification with his own characters, be they Christ or the sinner. In a passage quoted by Navarro (1997, 713), Borges offers his view on the relationship between the author and his characters. He expresses his conviction that the author’s most noble side, in his most privileged moments, reveals itself in his characters’ most noble aspects. Any created character, therefore, he says, cannot supersede his author, his creator: ¿Puede un autor crear personajes superiores a él? Yo respondería que no y en esa negación abarcaría lo intelectual y lo moral. Pienso que de nosotros no saldrán criaturas más lúcidas o más nobles que nuestros mejores momentos. (Borges, cited in Navarro 1997, 713) This is an extraordinary statement of faith both in himself and in human mankind as a whole. The author’s created beings are made in his image in an act which can be compared to God and his human creation. This then, in a certain sense, mirrors the idea of the creator and the created.

The Search for Christ’s Face: ‘Cristo en la cruz’ With ‘Cristo en la cruz’ (written in 1984 and published in Los Conjurados, 1985), Borges takes us to the foot of the cross on Calvary. It is among the poems which he wrote in the last two years before his death in 1986. The first line reiterates the title of the poem: Cristo en la cruz. Los pies tocan la tierra.

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But there are two more crosses, and Christ is not on the middle one, but on the third, in the place of the good thief who is saved by the radicality of his faith. There is a continuity between ‘Lucas, XXIII’ and this poem, but there is also a difference. ‘Lucas, XXIII’ focused on the thief, whereas ‘Cristo en la cruz’ focuses on Christ in the thief’s place: Los tres maderos son de igual altura. Cristo no está en el medio. Es el tercero. La negra barba pende sobre el pecho. El rostro no es el rostro de las láminas. Es áspero y judío. In first person voice, the poet, although he stands right in front of the crosses, admits to not being able to see the face of the crucified Christ and makes an astounding promise to keep searching for it until the very end of his days: No lo veo y seguiré buscándolo hasta el día último de mis pasos por la tierra. The next eight lines take us to the fractured man, his suffering and forsakenness: El hombre quebrantado sufre y calla. La corona de espinas lo lastima. No lo alcanza la befa de la plebe que ha visto su agonía tantas veces. La suya o la de otro. Da lo mismo. Cristo en la cruz. Desordenadamente piensa en el reino que tal vez lo espera, piensa en una mujer que no fue suya. The focus is on Christ’s humanity and on the extent of his physical and spiritual suffering, which include the mistakes of the Church in the course of history. As in ‘Juan, I, 14’, Borges empathizes with the incarnation which accounts for the reality of suffering and for the acute sense of being abandoned by the Father; of both a physical and a spiritual death: Sabe que no es un dios y que es un hombre que muere con el día. No le importa.

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Le importa el duro hierro de los clavos. No es un romano. No es un griego. Gime. With the following three lines, Borges’ theme in the fictions of the annulment of the past is echoed. But by this stage in his life, he has gone beyond the concept of a changed past being a concept of convenience or necessity, as was the case in the fictional world of his stories. He voices the extraordinary possibility of annulling the past through Christ’s doctrine of mercy: Nos ha dejado espléndidas metáforas y una doctrina del perdón que puede anular el pasado. (Esa sentencia la escribió un irlandés en una cárcel.) The second last stanza affirms the finality of death in all its human and forsaken nature: El alma busca el fin, apresurada. Ha oscurecido un poco. Ya se ha muerto. Anda una mosca por la carne quieta. But it would be incomplete to say that the poem is solely about the crucifixion. It is also, and more importantly, about a desire and a promise to keep searching for that personal encounter with the divine, emblematic in the poet’s search of Christ’s face. This takes us right back to the begnning of the poem. Although there is no overt indication of the resurrection to come, the final call, which closes the poem, is a fundamental, spiritual question asked by Borges in trying to relate to his own suffering the full meaning of Christ’s sacrifice: ¿De qué puede servirme que aquel hombre haya sufrido, si yo sufro ahora?

Slippage in ‘Cristo en la cruz’ We had encountered the theme of elusive salvation in ‘No eres los otros’ of 1976, and in the short prose ‘La larga busca’ of 1985. In ‘Cristo en la cruz’, Borges identifies Christ, the saviour, with el tercero, that is, with the good thief. What characterizes the good thief is the fact that he, the outcast, the

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reviled, had recognized in the man next to him more than another outcast, another one held worthless, another man suffering. More so, he recognized, beyond apparent reason, that he was also in the presence of a saviour. His request to be saved flies therefore in the face of appearances. Navarro (1997, 714) points to Christ’s third place in the poem: Por eso, cuando Borges sitúa a Cristo en una cruz lateral, ¿hace mal en entender que Jesús puede estar en el lugar del otro, al que entiende, y con el que se identifica? In these later years, the self-concealment which had characterized Borges’ earlier writings gives way to self-revelation. In his desire to be seen – which is at the heart of the reciprocal relationship of mutual self-giving – Borges seems to intuit a way to fulfillment and plenitude. The promise to keep searching for the face of Christ encapsulates the desire to encounter the man on the cross. I turn again to Navarro (1997, 713–714, my emphasis) who suggests that his deepest desire goes beyond seeing and towards being seen: El brusco paso al tono confidencial de un hombre que no ve (en los dos sentidos) y declara su decisión irrevocable de seguir buscando [. . .] hasta la muerte [. . .]. ¿Buscando qué? Un rostro que él no conoce (aunque puede imaginarlo) y que no es el rostro que quizás muchos otros suponen. [. . .] Sólo un amor absoluto, absolutamente libre, puede llegar sin menoscabo de sí hasta la posibilidad de absoluta ausencia de amor (infierno) y des-figurarse, permaneciendo sin embargo idéntico a sí mismo como forma que se revela y ofrece a todo hombre, a cualquier hombre. Sólo quien pueda ver cualitativamente será capaz de percibir la luz de gloria que tanta oscuridad irradia. Y si, simultáneamente, sabe que eso ocurre ‘por mí y por todos’ no podrá apartar la vista. Es más, anhelará, más que ver ser visto, sin que ya importe qué pueda venir y qué pueda ser de la propia figura. He also highlights the link between individual suffering and the universal aspect of suffering as fundamental to its identity. Likewise, the theme also embraces the potential of the individual being a part of a universal brotherhood with a possibility of entering into universal communion. We had seen this to some extent in ‘La forma de la espada’2: A lo largo de toda la obra de Borges hay un raro equilibrio entre la idea de que cada hombre puede ser todos, de que cada vida puede ser vivida en nombre

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de otro, de que ‘un hombre puede ser todos los hombres’ o ‘todo para todos, como el Apóstol’, y la idea de que esto no desdibuja, sobre todo en el momento del sufrimiento, la identidad. Es la idea de que los individuos no pueden ser ‘sumados’, de que el dolor de cada uno es único porque ‘el dolor no es acumulable’. Esto le permitió escribir: ‘Por eso no es injusto que una desobediencia en un jardín contamine al género humano; por eso no es injusto que la crucifixión de un judío baste para salvarlo.’ In an interview with Osvaldo Ferrari, Borges comments on his relationship with the Scriptures. Navarro (1997, 712), in my view rightly so, suggests that the pertinence of Scripture was more than a literary concern to Borges: Charlando acerca de algunos comentarios de Nietzche referidos al cristianismo, Borges dijo: ‘Todo eso parece tan acartonado y tan viejo comparado con los evangelios, que son contemporáneos, o mejor dicho, futuros todavía.’ Para Borges lo más importante del mundo y de la vida fue la literatura. Allí sí sabía ver cualitativamente, y es allí donde sintió que un texto literario llamado Evangelio era más que literario, sobre todo en el momento en el que crucifican a su personaje. With ‘Cristo en la cruz’ there seems to occur a slippage from saviour (Cristo en el medio) to saved (el tercero, the good thief). The saving figure, and thus salvation, seem to pass Borges by. And yet, in this intuitive apprehension of the oneness of Christ and sinner, he, perhaps unwittingly, understands a fundamental truth of Christian spirituality. When he asks what this man’s suffering is to him in the face of his own pain, then Borges voices a deeply spiritual question as he stands somewhat forlorn in front of the crosses. Rather than professing what a large portion of the critical body have perceived as melancholic agnosticism or even atheism, Borges poses in personal, intimate fashion a question which is, and must, continuously be pertinent to all seekers of the spiritual truth in Christianity. What he really does is attempt to relate to himself the full meaning of Christ’s sacrifice. It is not a rejection nor dismissal, but a cry which indicates a deep, spiritual though anguished question. In its intensity and pertinence it is close to a crisis of faith. The slippage which occurs from saviour to the one saved, points on one level to an unstable identity; on another level, however, it points the way towards the final question. Williamson (2004, 468) identifies in Borges’ closing years ‘a hunger for faith’. And he continues ‘[Borges] could not

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bring himself to accept the truth of redemption’. I would like to add that this, on one level seems to confirm that while Borges draws ever nearer to exploring the core of Christian spirituality, he nonetheless seems to remain at a certain distance to fully experiencing a faith reality. Borges cannot see, and in his despair seeks to establish the reason for Christ’s sacrifice to whose redeeming deed he remains an outsider. This is the culmination of his unending search for someone whom he, on some level of understanding, knows to exist but does not experience. It speaks of the painful gap between this knowledge and experience, a physical and spiritual gap, which, as he intuits, can be filled by Christ. It is at this point in his writing that Borges displays an open search for a personal encounter with God. The pronouncement of the poet, seguiré buscándolo, is a sincere though stark promise. Faced with spiritual barrenness and an absence of a faith experience, it is all the more authentic. It is, in fact, a radical act of love and of hope. Borges’ question at the very end of the poem meets an inspiring reference to Hans Urs von Balthasar in the work of Navarro (1997, 714–716). Von Balthasar, in essence, says that the answer is not once and for all, but must be a constant life-search and therefore dynamic. Von Balthasar asserts that there is a constant necessity for Christians to ask the question in relation to the divine answer in Christ: Cito a von Balthasar: ‘La realidad de hecho de que un ser humano [. . .] ha sido crucificado dos mil años atrás (con otros miles de hombres), por amor de mí, ¿cómo podría motivarme a cambiar de vida? ¿Por ternura hacia este amor, que nadie me puede demostrar? Se habla de sustitución vicaria, pero una sustitución tal es válida, ruego que entiendan, únicamente si me ha implicado.’ With his final lines, Borges asks a question which is fundamental to Christians: Borges no sólo pregunta bien, sino que sitúa correctamente una interrogación que plantea uno de los pocos problemas que la teología, y los cristianos con su propia existencia, debieran no abandonar jamás en su búsqueda, si quieren que la respuesta sea real: o mi dolor y mi sufrimiento están verdaderamente asociados a la pasión de Cristo, y sus contemporáneos con ella, o la fe, como respuesta y sentido, se torna insuficiente, porque no confiere al que padece la vitalidad que procede de la Pascua de Cristo, ya que el vínculo con ella es difuso, cuando debiera ser configurador. En otras palabras: al asumir Dios (y al asumir de un modo

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determinado) la condición humana y al ascenderla (en Cristo) yo soy hecho forma de Cristo al descender la condición divina a mí por su Espíritu. La pregunta de Borges [. . .] es una pregunta que debiera hacerse todo cristiano [. . .]. The relationship between human question and divine answer is therefore at once dynamic and simultaneous; it operates between ‘I’ and ’You’ and is mirrored in the dynamic between the assent and the descent of Christ. In God’s descent to earth as man, he has been made human, which means the divinization of human suffering. Conversely, it also means that the divine has become humanized. In that mankind is assumed by Christ in all its humanity, it and all its individual sufferings have been integrated into the divine and the Trinity. If the search for Christ and the question as to the meaning of his passion disappear, the answer becomes superfluous: Por eso hay que buscarlo [lo divino] siempre, preguntar siempre . . . No se entiende la revelación si no es como respuesta a la pregunta de la humanidad. Si la pregunta desaparece, se sustituye o se disminuye, resulta superflua la respuesta [. . .]. Seguridad que destruye la respuesta al olvidar la búsqueda. [. . .]. Balthasar recuerda la frase insistente de Agustín: ‘Si has entendido, no es Dios.’ ‘Sufro ahora’; ‘¿de qué me sirve?’. Drama y pregunta ante Cristo, otro sufriente, del que no todos parecen dar razón, pero cuyo rostro hay que seguir buscando. In line with von Balthasar, the question which Borges asks as to the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice to his own suffering is the very question which every Christian has to keep asking. It is a question which Borges himself gravitates towards ever more in the course of his creative life. I would like to end on this note: in Christianity, Christ’s very suffering is understood as the crux: the redemptive quality of it lies in sharing in his suffering and resurrection. Borges, rather than denying or shrugging his shoulders in resignation, continues his searching, which is the cornerstone for a genuine relationship with God. This is a question of authenticity; not of blind faith but of a real, spiritual struggle.

Conclusion

Throughout the chronology of his work, Borges keeps redefining the nature of his search. It is as if he can see a crack of light under a door but is struggling to find a way of opening it. His attempts at finding an entry are initially intellectual, and in the end they do not give a complete answer. And yet, the persistence of his quest attests to an intuition and sense of the spiritual which could not be quelled by intellectual analysis and exploration alone. In time, his approach becomes ever more personal and spiritual. This final stage of his quest recalls Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World. The painting depicts Christ with a lantern knocking at an unused and overgrown door with no handle. The allegorical meaning of the painting, which draws its inspiration from John 8.12 and Revelation 3.19–21, is that we who are on the other side of the door must turn the handle. Hunt, when asked about the significance of the fact that it had no outside handle, explained that only by participating in Christ’s invitation, by turning the door from the inside can man share in the divine plan: ‘The closed door was the obstinately shut mind [. . .]. It is the door of the human heart, and that can only be opened from the inside’.1 Borges’ persistent attempts at finding a spiritual core to existence, however fraught and incomplete they may appear, do not point to resignation. They are evidence of both the sincerity as well as the quiet passion with which he pursued this quest. The journey, it is said, is every bit as important as the arrival. In the case of Borges, this is all the more extraordinary because an ultimate resolution did not come to him easily.

Appendix

Chronology of Selected Poems and Short Proses ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ ‘El Golem’ ‘Lucas, XXIII’ ‘Juan, I, 14’ ‘Milonga de dos hermanos’ ‘Juan, I, 14’ ‘No eres los otros’ ‘Para una versión del I King’ ‘La moneda de hierro’ ‘El espejo’ ‘Milonga del forastero’ ‘La cábala’ ‘Eclesiastés, I, 9’ ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ ‘La larga busca’ ‘Doomsday’ ‘Los Conjurados’ ‘Juan López y John Ward’ ‘Cristo en la cruz’

(written 1953, El otro, el mismo, 1964) (written 1958, El otro, el mismo, 1964) (El Hacedor, 1960) (El otro, el mismo, 1964) (Para las seis cuerdas, 1965) (Elogio de la sombra, 1969) (La moneda de hierro, 1976) (La moneda de hierro, 1976) (La moneda de hierro, 1976) (written 1976, Historia de la noche, 1977) (Historia de la noche, 1977) (written 1977, Siete noches, 1980) (La cifra, 1981) (Nueve ensayos dantescos, 1982) (Los Conjurados, 1985) (Los Conjurados, 1985) (Los Conjurados, 1985) (Los Conjurados, 1985) (Los Conjurados, 1985)

Appendix

Selected Poems and Short Proses Mateo, XXV, 30 (written 1953, El otro, el mismo, 1964) El primer puente de Constitución y a mis pies fragor de trenes que tejían laberintos de hierro. Humo y silbatos escalaban la noche, que de golpe fue el Juicio Universal. Desde el invisible horizonte y desde el centro de mi ser, una voz infinita dijo estas cosas (estas cosas, no estas palabras, que son mi pobre traducción temporal de una sola palabra): — Estrellas, pan, bibliotecas orientales y occidentales, naipes, tableros de ajedrez, galerías, claraboyas y sótanos un cuerpo humano para andar por la tierra, uñas que crecen en la noche, en la muerte, sombra que olvida, atareados espejos que multiplican, declives de la música, la más dócil de las formas del tiempo, fronteras del Brasil y del Uruguay, caballos y mañanas, una pesa de bronce y un ejemplar de la Saga de Grettir, álgebra y fuego, la carga de Junín en tu sangre, días más populosos que Balzac, el olor de la madreselva, amor y víspera de amor y recuerdos intolerables el sueño como un tesoro enterrado, el dadivoso azar y la memoria, que el hombre no mira sin vértigo, todo eso te fue dado, y también el antiguo alimento de los héroes: la falsía, la derrota, la humillación. En vano te hemos prodigado el océano; en vano el sol, que vieron los maravillados ojos de Whitman; has gastado los años y te han gastado, y todavía no has escrito el poema.

El Golem (written 1958, El otro, el mismo, 1964) Si (como el griego afirma en el Cratilo) el nombre es arquetipo de la cosa en las letras de rosa está la rosa y todo el Nilo en la palabra Nilo.

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Y, hecho de consonantes y vocales, habrá un terrible Nombre, que la esencia cifre de Dios y que la Omnipotencia guarde en letras y sílabas cabales. Adán y las estrellas lo supieron en el jardín. La herrumbre del pecado (dicen los cabalistas) lo ha borrado y las generaciones lo perdieron. Los artificios y el candor del hombre no tienen fin. Sabemos que hubo un día en que el pueblo de Dios buscaba el Nombre en las vigilias de la judería. No a la manera de otras que una vaga sombra insinúan en la vaga historia, aún está verde y viva la memoria de Judá León, que era rabino en Praga. Sediento de saber lo que Dios sabe, Judá León se dio a permutaciones de letras y a complejas variaciones y al fin pronunció el Nombre que es la Clave, la Puerta, el Eco, el Huésped y el Palacio, sobre un muñeco que con torpes manos labró, para enseñarle los arcanos de las Letras, del Tiempo y del Espacio. El simulacro alzó los soñolientos párpados y vio formas y colores que no entendió, perdidos en rumores y ensayó temerosos movimientos. Gradualmente se vio (como nosotros) aprisionado en esta red sonora de Antes, Después, Ayer, Mientras, Ahora, Derecha, Izquierda, Yo, Tú, Aquellos, Otros. (El cabalista que ofició de numen a la vasta criatura apodó Golem;

Appendix estas verdades las refiere Scholem en un docto lugar de su volumen.) El rabí le explicaba el universo Esto es mi pie; esto el tuyo; esto la soga y logró, al cabo de años, que el perverso barriera bien o mal la sinagoga. Tal vez hubo un error en la grafía o en la articulación del Sacro Nombre; a pesar de tan alta hechicería, no aprendió a hablar el aprendiz de hombre. Sus ojos, menos de hombre que de perro y harto menos de perro que de cosa, seguían al rabí por la dudosa penumbra de las piezas del encierro. Algo anormal y tosco hubo en el Golem, ya que a su paso el gato del rabino se escondía. (Ese gato no está en Scholem pero, a través del tiempo, lo adivino.) Elevando a su Dios manos filiales, las devociones de su Dios copiaba o, estúpido y sonriente, se ahuecaba en cóncavas zalemas orientales. El rabí lo miraba con ternura y con algún horror. ¿Cómo se dijo pude engendrar este penoso hijo y la inacción dejé, que es la cordura? ¿Por qué di en agregar a la infinita serie un símbolo más? ¿Por qué a la vana madeja que en lo eterno se devana, di otra causa, otro efecto y otra cuita? En la hora de angustia y de luz vaga, en su Golem los ojos detenía. ¿Quién nos dirá las cosas que sentía Dios, al mirar a su rabino en Praga? 1958

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Lucas, XXIII (El Hacedor, 1960) Gentil o hebreo o simplemente un hombre cuya cara en el tiempo se ha perdido; ya no rescataremos del olvido las silenciosas letras de su nombre. Supo de la clemencia lo que puede saber un bandolero que Judea clava a una cruz. Del tiempo que antecede nada alcanzamos hoy. En su tarea última de morir crucificado, oyó, entre los escarnios de la gente, que el que estaba muriéndose a su lado era Dios y le dijo ciegamente: Acuérdate de mí cuando vinieres a tu reino, y la voz inconcebible que un día juzgará a todos los seres le prometió desde la Cruz terrible el Paraíso. Nada más dijeron hasta que vino el fin, pero la historia no dejará que muera la memoria de aquella tarde en que los dos murieron. Oh amigos, la inocencia de este amigo de Jesucristo, ese candor que hizo que pidiera y ganara el Paraíso desde las ignominias del castigo, era el que tantas veces al pecado lo arrojó y al azar ensangrentado. Juan I, 14 (El otro, el mismo, 1964) Refieren las historias orientales la de aquel rey del tiempo, que sujeto

Appendix a tedio y esplendor, sale en secreto y solo, a recorrer los arrabales y a perderse en la turba de las gentes de rudas manos y de oscuros nombres; hoy, como aquel Emir de los Creyentes, Harún, Dios quiere andar entre los hombres y nace de una madre, como nacen los linajes que en polvo se deshacen, y le será entregado el orbe entero, aire, agua, pan, mañanas, piedra y lirio, pero después la sangre del martirio, el escarnio, los clavos y el madero.

Milonga de dos hermanos (Para las seis cuerdas, 1965) Traiga cuentos la guitarra de cuando el fierro brillaba, cuentos de truco y de taba, de cuadreras y de copas, cuentos de la Costa Brava y el Camino de las Tropas. Venga una historia de ayer que apreciarán los más lerdos; el destino no hace acuerdos y nadie se lo reproche — ya estoy viendo que esta noche vienen del Sur los recuerdos. Velay, señores, la historia de los hermanos Iberra, hombres de amor y de guerra y en el peligro primeros, la flor de los cuchilleros y ahora los tapa la tierra.

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Suelen al hombre perder la soberbia o la codicia; también el coraje envicia a quien le da noche y día — el que era menor debía más muertes a la justicia. Cuando Juan Iberra vio que el menor lo aventajaba, la paciencia se le acaba y le armó no sé qué lazo — le dio muerte de un balazo, allá por la Costa Brava. Sin demora y sin apuro lo fue tendiendo en la vía para que el tren lo pisara. El tren lo dejó sin cara, que es lo que el mayor quería. Así de manera fiel conté la historia hasta el fin; es la historia de Caín que sigue matando a Abel.

Juan I, 14 (Elogio de la sombra, 1969) No será menos un enigma esta hoja que las de Mis libros sagrados ni aquellas otras que repiten las bocas ignorantes, creyéndolas de un hombre, no espejos oscuros del Espíritu. Yo que soy el Es, el Fue y el Será, vuelvo a condescender al lenguaje, que es tiempo sucesivo y emblema. Quien juega con un niño juega con algo cercano y misterioso; yo quise jugar con Mis hijos. Estuve entre ellos con asombro y ternura.

Appendix Por obra de una magia nací curiosamente de un vientre. Viví hechizado, encarcelado en un cuerpo y en la humildad de un alma. Conocí la memoria, esa moneda que no es nunca la misma. Conocí la esperanza y el temor, esos dos rostros del incierto futuro. Conocí la vigilia, el sueño, los sueños, la ignorancia, la carne, los torpes laberintos de la razón, la amistad de los hombres, la misteriosa devoción de los perros. Fui amado, comprendido, alabado y pendí de una cruz. Bebí la copa hasta las heces. Vi por Mis ojos lo que nunca había visto: la noche y sus estrellas. Conocí lo pulido, lo arenoso, lo desparejo, lo áspero, el sabor de la miel y de la manzana, el agua en la garganta de la sed, el peso de un metal en la palma, la voz humana, el rumor de unos pasos sobre la hierba, el olor de la lluvia en Galilea, el alto grito de los pájaros. Conocí también la amargura. He encomendado esta escritura a un hombre cualquiera; no será nunca lo que quiero decir, no dejará de ser su reflejo. Desde Mi eternidad caen estos signos. Que otro, no el que es ahora su amanuense, escriba el poema. Mañana seré un tigre entre los tigres y predicaré Mi ley a su selva, a un gran árbol en Asia. A veces pienso con nostalgia en el olor de esa carpintería. No eres los otros (La moneda de hierro, 1976) No te habrá de salvar lo que dejaron escrito aquellos que tu miedo implora; no eres los otros y te ves ahora

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centro del laberinto que tramaron tus pasos. No te salva la agonía de Jesús o de Sócrates ni el fuerte Siddharta de oro que aceptó la muerte en un jardín, al declinar el día. Polvo también es la palabra escrita por tu mano o el verbo pronunciado por tu boca. No hay lástima en el Hado y la noche de Dios es infinita. Tu materia es el tiempo, el incesante tiempo. Eres cada solitario instante.

Para una versión del I King (La moneda de hierro, 1976) El porvenir es tan irrevocable como el rígido ayer. No hay una cosa que no sea una letra silenciosa de la eterna escritura indescifrable cuyo libro es el tiempo. Quien se aleja de su casa ya ha vuelto. Nuestra vida es la senda futura y recorrida. Nada nos dice adiós. Nada nos deja. No te rindas. La ergástula es oscura, la firme trama es de incesante hierro, pero en algún recodo de tu encierro puede haber un descuido, una hendidura. El camino es fatal como la flecha pero en las grietas está Dios, que acecha.

El espejo (written 1976, Historia de la noche, 1977) Yo, de niño, temía que el espejo me mostrara otra cara o una ciega máscara impersonal que ocultaría algo sin duda atroz. Temí asimismo que el silencioso tiempo del espejo se desviara del curso cotidiano de las horas del hombre y hospedara en su vago confín imaginario

Appendix seres y formas y colores nuevos. (A nadie se lo dije; el niño es tímido.) Yo temo ahora que el espejo encierre el verdadero rostro de mi alma, lastimada de sombras y de culpas, el que Dios ve y acaso ven los hombres.

Milonga del forastero (Historia de la noche, 1977) La historia corre pareja, la historia siempre es igual; la cuentan en Buenos Aires y en la campaña oriental. Siempre son dos los que tallan, un propio y un forastero; siempre es de tarde. En la tarde está luciendo el lucero. Nunca se han visto la cara, no se volverán a ver; no se disputan haberes ni el favor de una mujer. Al forastero le han dicho que en el pago hay un valiente. Para probarlo ha venido y lo busca entre la gente. Lo convida de buen modo, no alza la voz ni amenaza; se entienden y van saliendo para no ofender la casa. Ya se cruzan los puñales, ya se enredó la madeja, ya quedó tendido un hombre que muere y que no se queja.

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Sólo esa tarde se vieron. No se volverán a ver; no los movió la codicia ni el amor de una mujer. No vale ser el más diestro, no vale ser el más fuerte; siempre el que muere es aquel que vino a buscar la muerte. Para esa prueba vivieron toda su vida esos hombres; ya se han borrado las caras, ya se borrarán los nombres.

Eclesiastés, I, 9 (La cifra, 1981) Si me paso la mano por la frente, si acaricio los lomos de los libros, si reconozco el Libro de las Noches, si hago girar la terca cerradura, si me demoro en el umbral incierto, si el dolor increíble me anonada, si recuerdo la Máquina del Tiempo, si recuerdo el tapiz del unicornio, si cambio de postura mientras duermo, si la memoria me devuelve un verso, repito lo cumplido innumerables veces en mi camino señalado. No puedo ejecutar un acto nuevo, tejo y torno a tejer la misma fábula, repito un repetido endecasílabo, digo lo que los otros me dijeron, siento las mismas cosas en la misma hora del dia o de la abstracta noche. Cada noche la misma pesadilla, cada noche el rigor del laberinto. Soy la fatiga de un espejo inmóvil o el polvo de un museo.

Appendix

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Sólo una cosa no gustada espero, una dádiva, un oro de la sombra, esa virgen, la muerte. (El castellano permite esta metáfora.)

La larga busca (Los Conjurados, 1985) Anterior al tiempo o fuera del tiempo (ambas locuciones son vanas) o en un lugar que no es del espacio, hay un animal invisible, y acaso diáfano, que los hombres buscamos y que nos busca. Sabemos que no puede medirse. Sabemos que no puede contarse, porque las formas que lo suman son infinitas. Hay quienes lo han buscado en un pájaro, que está hecho de pájaros; hay quienes lo han buscado en una palabra o en las letras de esa palabra; hay quienes lo han buscado, y lo buscan, en un libro anterior al árabe en que fue escrito, y aún a todas las cosas; hay quien lo busca en la sentencia Soy El Que Soy. Como las formas universales de la escolástica o los arquetipos de Whitehead, suele descender fugazmente. Dicen que habita los espejos, y que quien se mira Lo mira. Hay quienes lo ven o entrevén en la hermosa memoria de una batalla o en cada paraíso perdido. Se conjetura que su sangre late en tu sangre, que todos los seres lo engendran y fueron engendrados por él y que basta invertir una clepsidra para medir su eternidad. Acecha en los crepúsculos de Turner, en la mirada de una mujer, en la antigua cadencia del hexámetro, en la ignorante aurora, en la luna del horizonte o de la metáfora. Nos elude de segundo en segundo. La sentencia del romano se gasta, las noches roen el mármol.

Juan López y John Ward (Los Conjurados, 1985) Les tocó en suerte una época extraña. El planeta había sido parcelado en distintos países, cada uno provisto de lealtades, de queridas memorias, de un pasado sin duda heroico, de derechos, de agravios, de una mitología peculiar, de próceres de bronce, de aniversarios, de demagogos y de símbolos. Esa división, cara a los cartógrafos, auspiciaba las guerras.

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López había nacido en la ciudad junto al río inmóvil; Ward, en las afueras de la ciudad por la que caminó Father Brown. Había estudiado castellano para leer el Quijote. El otro profesaba el amor de Conrad, que le había sido revelado en una aula de la calle Viamonte. Hubieran sido amigos, pero se vieron una sola vez cara a cara, en unas islas demasiado famosas, y cada uno de los dos fue Caín, y cada uno, Abel. Los enterraron juntos. La nieve y la corrupción los conocen. El hecho que refiero pasó en un tiempo que no podemos entender.

Cristo en la cruz (Los Conjurados, 1985) Cristo en la cruz. Los pies tocan la tierra. Los tres maderos son de igual altura. Cristo no está en el medio. Es el tercero. La negra barba pende sobre el pecho. El rostro no es el rostro de las láminas. Es áspero y judío. No lo veo y seguiré buscándolo hasta el día último de mis pasos por la tierra. El hombre quebrantado sufre y calla. La corona de espinas lo lastima. No lo alcanza la befa de la plebe que ha visto su agonía tantas veces. La suya o la de otro. Da lo mismo. Cristo en la cruz. Desordenadamente piensa en el reino que tal vez lo espera, piensa en una mujer que no fue suya. No le está dado ver la teología, la indescifrable Trinidad, los gnósticos, las catedrales, la navaja de Occam, la púrpura, la mitra, la liturgia, la conversión de Guthrum por la espada, la Inquisición, la sangre de los mártires, las atroces Cruzadas, Juana de Arco, el Vaticano que bendice ejércitos. Sabe que no es un dios y que es un hombre que muere con el día. No le importa.

Appendix Le importa el duro hierro de los clavos. No es un romano. No es un griego. Gime. Nos ha dejado espléndidas metáforas y una doctrina del perdón que puede anular el pasado. (Esa sentencia la escribió un irlandés en una cárcel.) El alma busca el fin, apresurada. Ha oscurecido un poco. Ya se ha muerto. Anda una mosca por la carne quieta. ¿De qué puede servirme que aquel hombre haya sufrido, si yo sufro ahora? Kyoto, 1984

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Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11

12

13

I have borrowed this term from the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, who espoused the notion of philosophies as fictions in The Philosophy of ‘As If ’, translated by C. K. Ogden, London: Routledge, 1934. For further philosophical explanation of Vaihinger’s concept of ‘as if’ in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ see Bossart (2003), p. 39. Borges in a 1984 interview with Amelia Barili, published 13 July 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk Byline. See bibliography for full citations of biographies and memoirs: Manguel (2006, these are personal reminiscences of his reader in the time of his blindness), Vaccaro (2005), Torre Borges (2004), Williamson (2004), Uveda de Robledo (2004, these are the memoirs of Borges’ housekeeper, written by Vaccaro), Teitelboim (2003), Savater (2002), Vaccaro (1996), Woodall (1996), Vázquez (1999), Barnatán (1995), and Salas (1994). Williamson’s biography has been published in both English and in Spanish: Borges: A Life, Penguin Viking, 2004; Borges: una vida, Seix Barral, 2006. For readings which address the question of spirituality see first and foremost Bossart (2003), Navarro (1997) and Williams (2007); also Muñoz Rengel (2000) and Zagal (1999). Williams (2007), p. 6, footnote 11. Quotation in Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 25. For notable exceptions to this trend see Bossart (2003), Navarro (1997), and Williams (2007). See chapter 31 of Williamson’s Borges: A Life (2004, 443–447). On the notion of literature as a confluence of ideas with respect to the relation between any one piece of literature to another, see Gérard Genette (1970, 104). ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ is a cross-over between essay and story. It features both as an essay and as a ficción. Apostola, Nicholas K., ‘Mutual accountability and the quest for unity. (Common Understanding and Vision: Continuing the Discussion)’, The Ecumenical Review, 01-07-1998 http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-21152525.html (accessed at 18.12.2008). Bossart, W. H., 2003. Borges and Philosophy: Self, Time and Metaphysics, New York: Peter Lang. Navarro, Ignacio (1997). ‘El más extraño de los hombres’, in Criterio, 18/12/97, 712–716.

Notes 14

15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22

23

189

Amongst those were Adolfo Prieto (1954); Manuel Blanco González (1963); John Sturrock (1977); Gabriela Massuh (1980) and Arturo Echevarría (1983), cited in Arana (1994, 17). For further excellent bibliographical references see Nuño (1986). For a positive evaluation of Borges see Serge Champeau (1994), Diva Gomes (1991), Roberto Paoli (1992), Juan Arana (1994), Ana Sierra (1997), and Bossart (2003). Lorenz’s ‘Literatura fantástica y metafísica: Consideraciones sobre Jorge Luis Borges y Arthur Schopenhauer’ is an early acknowledgement of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in Borges’ writing. She stresses the link between the concepts of time and identity in his work, but it is her view, shared by many critics up to the mid1980s, that Borges uses philosophical ideas mainly for narratorial reasons. However, like Juan Nuño is to do in 1986 in more depth, Lorenz validates and discusses those philosophical ideas rather than treating them as mere catalysts or loops for his fictions. For further discussion see Arana (1994, 71 and 77). Honderich, T., ed. (1995). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: OUP, 766. Ibid. 794–798. Ibid. In the Christian framework, time is understood as a measure of finite existence, and God, although co-existing with it, transcends time rather than exist in it. For a debate on transtextuality and texts which exist only in relation to other texts, see also Saussure in linguistics, and Bakhtin in literature. This engagement is an extension to the realm of abstract ideas of what Genette (Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré, 1982) had termed ‘transtextuality’ with reference to the text: anything that is in manifest or hidden relation to other texts, or ideas, irrespective of chronology, contemporariness or causality. The ‘devaluation’ of the world of appearances to illusions or dreams can be traced back to Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Indian mythology alike. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism account for the deficient and abominable aspect which Borges perceives in the deceptive nature of reality (Paoli 1992, 180). As Bossart is to do in 2003, Paoli vindicates Buddhism as central to Borges’ worldview, in which originates the idea of emptiness as underlying the universe. The notion of the world as an empty mirror goes back to Plotinus. It is Paoli’s view that Borges’ adherence to idealism is primarily shaped by Schopenhauer and encompasses all of his precursors (Plato, Plotinus, the gnostics, Scoto Erigena, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant), whereas he holds that his denial of the self is more akin to the phenomenalism of Hume, favoured by Borges for its radicality and kinship to Buddhism (183). It seems to me that Borges, despite his countless references to Schopenhauer’s idealism, does not fully embrace his favourite philosopher’s doctrine. Paoli also connects Borges’ idealism and his view of history. By the same token which affects the world as a dream, history is infected, and here, too, Paoli (1992, 183) detects an echo of Schopenhauer’s view (as expounded in Parerga and Paralipomena). It is the disparaging views of history as illusory, repetitive (or worse still: unchanging) which is at the heart of Borges’ rejection of historicism and his

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belief in the contemporary and at once eternal nature of all things, a belief which Borges shares with Hindu philosophy. Paoli’s analysis of the German language, culture, and philosophy in Borges’ work may also be useful. He introduces the notions of individuation and identification; discusses questions of identity; the debate concerning the species vs the individual; Borges’ attitude towards death, and his theological outlook. But most importantly, he asserts the more than decorative use of Schopenhauer’s philosophy which significantly shapes the world which Borges creates. Another substantial work on the debt to philosopies in Borges is Ana Sierra’s El mundo como voluntad y representación: Borges y Schopenhauer (1997). She identifies and correlates the significance of Schopenhauer as a precursor and inspiration in Borges’ work, and discusses the narrative manifestations in his stories. Her excellent overview of Schopenhauer’s philosophy focuses on the notions of the will and representation; perception and causality. See also her analysis of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory which puts forward the possibility to transcend time, space, and individuation in a possibility to apprehend the Idea.

Chapter 1: 1922–1925: The Nothingness of Self and God 1

Sierra’s book is an excellent study on Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the writings of Borges. On Schopenhauer’s notion of the oneric nature of the empirical world, which, though dream, is nonetheless real (a view shared by Kant), she says: La filosofía de Schopenhauer también tiene en común con la literatura el tema de la distinción entre sueño y realidad. [. . .] Se sostiene que el espacio, el tiempo y la causalidad, son pre-condiciones necesarias para que el sujeto pueda representarse los objetos. Por ello, Schopenhauer afirma que entre el sujeto y los objetos se interpone una especie de velo [Mâyâ ] que no permite percibir claramente la realidad, por lo que los objetos aparecen como se representarían en un sueño.

2

In his philosophical analysis, Arana traces the thought of Berkely and Schopenhauer within Borges’ work and highlights Borges’ own conception of the world (1994, 39, my emphasis): Esse est percipi, dijo Berkeley; el mundo es voluntad y representación, afirmó Schopenhauer; más bien y ante todo es sueño, matiza Borges. [Arana concludes:] Lo propio del sueño es la falsedad. Si el mundo, el universo, la realidad son sueños, la ficción y el engaño constituyen su íntima esencia.

3 4 5 6

See also Janaway (1997, 232–234). For further explication on Lichtenberg see Honderich (1995, 838). For a succinct analysis of Schopenhauer see Sierra (1997, Chapter 1). For further discussion see Christopher Janaway (1997, 235–246). For an excellent discussion see Janaway (1997, 248–249).

Notes 7

191

See also Sierra (1997, 4): Schopenhauer define el sujeto como una especie de yo metafísico cuya función es sostener el mundo fenoménico, pero que no puede formar parte de él, por estar fuera del tiempo, el espacio y la causalidad. La relación del sujeto con el mundo es semejante a la del ojo [sujeto] con su campo de visión [mundo], es decir, el ojo que todo lo ve no puede verse a sí mismo. Estas ideas coinciden con la de David Hume [. . .] quien había negado la existencia del yo, basándose en el argumento de que si se busca el sujeto percibidor en la conciencia, solo se encuentran pensamientos, emociones, imágenes, pero no un ente que abarca todos estos objetos.

8

9

Does Schopenhauer therefore lay himself open to the question: how can the will be blind or purposeless if it is a striving towards something ? For a definition of teleology see Honderich (1995, 868): From the Greek word for goal, task, completion, or perfection. Teleological explanations attempt to account for things and features by appeal to their contribution to optimal states, or the normal functioning, or the attainment of goals, of wholes or systems they belong to.

10

11

See Arana (1994) and Nuño (1986) on Borges’ logic of the waking state applied to the world of dream and sleep. Sierra (1997, 143) points out that Schopenhauer’s view of time is that of an endless present: Para Schopenhauer el tiempo es también una falacia que forma parte de la ‘representación’. [Para Schopenhauer] Sólo existe el presente: [. . .] La forma de la vida es presente sin fin, del mismo modo que los individuos, imágenes de la idea, surgen y desaparecen en el tiempo, comparable a sueños evanescentes.

12

13

This begs the question whether, given that a predicate entails a process, Borges is contradicting himself when he poses the illusory nature of the concept of time? He may of course be referring to a process in a purely linear or grammatical sense. Borges (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, 1923) introduces the theme of the one being similar to the other and therefore being nobody. It foreshadows the theme of Whitman the author being the all readers and every reader: ‘soy semejante a todos los demás’ (p. 101). Says Borges about Torres Villarroel writing on Quevedo (pp. 97–98): Vio que era semejante a los otros, vale decir, que no era nadie, o que era apenas una algarada confusa, persistiendo en el tiempo y fatigándose en el espacio. This is one of the first formulations of the Borgesian theme of the one who is many and therefore nobody. With the later essay ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, Borges is to eliminate the applications for literature which he establishes in this essay.

192 14

Notes

Yet Borges takes issue with Spencer’s refutation of idealism in which there is nothing apart from consciousness (‘La nadería de la personalidad’, pp. 124–127). When he discusses the ‘infinity of consciousness’, he introduces the idea that infinity is an eternal present (p. 126): También los teólogos hubieron de traducir la eternidad de Dios en una duración sin principio ni fin, sin vicisitudes ni cambio, en un presente puro.

15

16

See ‘La postulación de la realidad’ where Borges introduces, as a form of literary backup, the distinction between the classics and the romantics in their respective emphasis of the concept of personality. See Urmson and Rée (1989, 75): The proof of Descartes’own existence in the cogito was, strictly speaking, only a proof that he existed so long as he was thinking. [. . .] The idea of God as a conserving principle may help to overcome this limitation.

17

Hesse in Der Steppenwolf (first published 1927, 27–28): [Der Steppenwolf] gehört zu jenen, [. . .] die aus aller Geborgenheit und Unschuld herausgefallen sind, zu denen, deren Schicksal es ist, alle Fragwürdigkeit des Menschenlebens gesteigert als persönliche Qual und Hölle zu erleben.

Chapter 2: 1928–1934: Time, Paradox and Heresy 1

2 3 4

The Platonic relation between the generic species and the individual being, put forward in ‘Historia de la eternidad’ (p.18) is this: ‘los individuos y las cosas existen en cuanto participan de la especie que los incluye, que es su realidad permanente’. Animals are therefore not separate individuals but part of the generic, the Form which is permanent reality. In Nietzsche’s mode of thinking, the Eternal Return is revealed to animals who are at one with the vicissitudes of change; they, unlike man, are an integral part of being. There is no aim and no direction, only the awareness of always and recurrently being the same. Bound within the cycle of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche’s animals lack any sense of teleology. For an excellent discussion on the generic and the species see Cartwright (1992, 14). For further discussion see Lorenz (1975, 144). Bradley appears several times in Borges’ writing: the first time in an epigraph to El idioma de los argentinos, the collection of essays which features ‘Sentirse en muerte’. It gives us Borges’ distilled version of the absolute moment: ‘Para el amor no satisfecho el mundo es misterio, un misterio que el amor satisfecho parece comprender.’ Bradley, Appearance and Reality, XV.

5

For a fictional rendering see Borges’ ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’. For Bradley’s own exposition of the relation between space, time and the absolute see Bradley (1946 edition, 181).

Notes 6

7

193

For a discussion of the relevance of infinity (understood by Borges as perpetuity) see Barrenechea (1957, chapter 1). In 1932 Borges is to declare: La duración del infierno declara mi afición incrédula y persistente por las dificultades teológicas. Digo lo mismo de La penúltima versión de la realidad. (‘Prólogo’, in Discusión, p. 9)

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15 16

For an analysis of the dream in Borges’ writing see Arana (1994, 57–64) and Nuño (1986, Part 9, and pp. 115–118, and 120). For further discussion of the paradox in Borges see Nuño (1986, Part 5, 17 and 78). For a detailed discussion of the Cabbala see Alazraki (1988, 44) and Monegal (1981, note 21). Interestingly, Borges does not discuss the Trinity in ‘La cábala’ of 1980, which otherwise adheres closely to the format of the 1931 version. Borges also discusses the Koran as one of the attributes of Allah, and as preceding the language in which it was written, which he develops further in the 1980 version ‘La cábala’. The impenetrable, infinite, absolute nature of the Scripture is, incidentally, the very justification for a haphazard approach to its deciphering (‘Una vindicación de la Cábala, p.60). Borges’ texts are not so much a vindication of the book, as of the reading techniques and of its hermeneutic value. The Jewish reading of the Cabbala includes vertical reading, reading from the bottom to the top, the substitution of some letters of the alphabet by others, the summing up of the numeric value of letters. For Borges, the absolute text is coded and does not require nor benefit from any logically accessible reading technique; it requires an approach which he calls absurdo. For later references to the sacred text see Borges’ ‘La cábala’ of (1980, in Siete noches, p. 126, 129, 131). Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence is firmly anchored within his four major thoughts: Übermensch, the death of God, the will to power, and the flow of time. Each is at once cause and effect of the other. For excellent discussion of Leibniz see Honderich (1995, 390). The contemporary discussion (espoused in Solomon 1993, Chapter 7 and in Lucas 1973, §25) is between the Identity Theorist J. J. C. Smart, and his opponent J. Shaffer. For excellent discussion of Leibniz see Honderich (1995, 390). If, as Shaw argues, there is no plurality (of identical yet numerically different moments or experiences), then catastrophes are but a single sorrow, illusorily multiplied in the many mirrors of more than one individual experiencing the same suffering. Borges agrees with Shaw that what one person suffers is the maximum that can be suffered on earth. It accords with his claims that the part is no less numerous than the whole (Discusión), that he rejects the whole to exalt each one of the parts (‘Nueva refutación del tiempo, B’). And it accords with his idealist conviction which denies the world its substance, thus leaving only a system of experience to which the principle of identity can then be applied. Substance had been denied to material things by Berkeley; to minds by Hume, to space by both Berkeley and Hume, and to time by Borges.

194 17

18 19

Notes

On memory and oblivion see Heller in The Importance of Nietzsche (1988, 177), and Allison’s The New Nietzsche (1977, 108). For an excellent discussion of time and thermodynamics see Peacock (1989). However, it should be pointed out that according to the Bolzmann paradox, increased entropy certainly does serve to distinguish one temporal direction from the other, yet does not indicate which is the direction of time.

Chapter 3: 1936–1953: Entries into Spirituality 1 2

3

4

5 6 7

8

9

10

11

For a detailed discussion of art in philosophy see Young (1992). For a succinct account of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in the work of Borges see Sierra (1997, 27). For an excellent philosophical analysis of time in ‘Historia de la eternidad’ see also Nuño (1986, 114–115). For a discussion of Platonic Forms in ‘Las ruinas circulares’ see Nuño (1986, Part 5, as well as 104, 114–115, and 138). For Aristotelian and Platonic Forms see Urmson and Rée (1989, 25); for Archetype see Honderich (1995, 288). For Plato’s ‘theory of recollection’ see Solomon (1988, 277). For a detailed discussion of art in philosophy see Young (1992). See Seddon (1987), for an incisive discussion of this dynamic view of time, which can be divided into two major branches: the ‘transient dynamic’ view and the ‘tensed dynamic view’. The former holds that events move through time by them passing us, or by us passing the events; we are either on the shore of that river of events, or we are on the river moving past the events on the shore. Time is thus fully dynamic in that temporal motion is an objective fact about reality, and in that events really do change with respect to being past, present, or future. Transient dynamic views of time deny that events really move but still hold that they change with respect to being past, present or future. This denies flux or motion, but does admit change. These dynamic modes are partially grounded in persisting linguistic images in which time flows, rushes, flies, stands still, moves forward, etc. Borges admits, in ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, and this bears echoes of ‘Sentirse en muerte’, that it is in the very nature of language to be successive and thereby temporal. It is therefore a somewhat ineffective tool for reasoning the eternal, the intemporal. Newton did not believe in what he himself had discovered because it did not accord with his belief in an absolute God: the proof that there was no unique standard of rest or position which was to refute the absoluteness of space. Einstein later concluded the same as to the absoluteness of time. Partial identity results from the relational approach to identity, in which nonoverlapping spatio-temporal properties are united to one and the same object by relations. This leaves open the possibility that they are distinct, but not wholly so. Where properties overlap or where they stand as the part stands to the whole, there is not total but merely partial identity. For further discussion see Armstrong 1980 in Inwagen (1980, 67–98). For further discussion of Aristotle’s cosmology see McCall (1994, 26).

Notes 12

13 14. 15

16 17

18

195

See Young (1992, 7) for a discussion of Schopenhauer’s reconciliation of experience in the phenomenal world against the oneness of the underlying metaphysical reality beyond plurality. For further discussion of von Czepko see Flitch (1932, 79–84). See ‘Nachwort’ (epilogue) in Gnädinger (1984, 366–367). This is a distinction which is mirrored in the distinction between the notion of ‘real’ (transcendental) and ordinary reality. See Flitch (1932, 88) for more on transcendental vs ordinary reality. For discussion on idealism and Platonism in Borges see Nuño (1986, 104). For a succinct exposition of the Buddhist notion of no-self see Markham and Ruparell (2001, 197–199). For an excellent discussion of Buddhism in Borges see Bossart (2003). For a good exposition on the nature of existence in Buddhism see Beckerlegge (2001, 349–350).

Chapter 4: Writing and New Direction 1

2

3

4 5

La obra sólo se lleva adelante en cuanto se la ama, esto quiere decir, cuando ella tiene preeminencia sobre nosotros, cuando, al constituirla, al formarla, somos por primera vez. [. . .] Sólo a partir de ese encuentro positivo con lo grande y limitado de la obra adquiere sentido ese ‘laborioso amor’ a que Borges alude. [. . .] Se trata, en primer lugar, de hallarse al servicio de algo mayor que uno mismo. [. . .] La escritura en sentido propio, no es una parte al margen de la propia vida: obra y vida coinciden (Murguía 1983, 86). For another take on the dual self image and on death see Donad A. Yates in an article of 1973 ‘Behind “Borges and I”’ (317–324). Yates traces the enduring preoccupation with a shifting personal identity back to the mid-1920s. His point of departure is the short prose ‘Borges y yo’ of 1957, together with unpublished material from Borges’ notebooks. From these he extracts an autobiographical account of bleak emptiness, entitled ‘Boletín de una noche’. It is a nightmarish account of a self which Borges feels is vanishing, stripped of all that is exterior or contingent, left in a state of nothingness. From another notebook of 1940, Yates extracts an account of the suicide of one of two semi-fictional Borges: ‘the other and real Borges who justifies me in a sufficient but secret way.’ The ‘other’ Borges is the librarian, the bookworm, who, in an unfinished and unpublished poem of 1940 exchanges the pen for the revólver in order ‘to find out + know who I am’, or, in another version: ‘to verify if I really exist’ (Yates 1973, 323). On selected readings from and interpretation of Silesius see J. E. C. Flitch, Angelus Silesius: Selections from The Cherubinic Wanderer, Allan and Unwin (1932). See Yates in note 2. The idea of Eternal Recurrence is based on the fact that if the number of atoms in the universe is finite, they must reach a configuration that they have been in before, and that will inevitably result in the history of the universe repeating itself. (Tanner 1997, 403)

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The dismay caused by this idea, apart from the horror of repeating every mistake and every pain infinitely over, lies, as Milan Kundera observes, in the absence of ‘the mitigating circumstance of the transitory nature of things’ (quoted in Tanner 1997, 405). There are a variety of first-person narrators: 1. He is a ‘Borges’ author-character and teller of a tale in which he himself is involved as a writer-character; 2. He is a ‘Borges’ author-character and the teller of someone else’s tale (to whom, in some cases, he then hands over the narration which is subsequently told in another first person voice), or the reviewer of someone else’s work; 3. The narrator is anonymous and refers someone else’s tale; 4. He is the protagonist of his own story (not a ‘Borges’ character). Then there are the two types of third person narrators: 1. The narrator is anonymous and recounts someone else’s tale, that character then taking over in first person narration; 2. The narrator is anonymous and tells a tale unrelated to himself. For an extensive discussion on the ‘Branching Pasts Model’ see Lucas 1973, A Treatise on Time and Space, and McCall 1994, A Model of the Universe Space-Time, Probability, and Decision.

Chapter 5: Beyond the Mirror of Self 1

See Lorenz (1975, 143–144) on the centre of the labyrinth and the connectivity in Borges of time and identity: Un conocimiento satisfactorio y liberador por parte del hombre, es identificado por Borges con la salida o centro del laberinto. El hecho de que salida y centro sean idénticos se explica no sólo por medio de la arquitectura, sino también por la mitología del laberinto. El pensamiento arcaico-mitológico contiene en su centro un lugar sagrado en el que el hombre puede unirse al ‘cielo’ o a la divinidad. El encuentro con este centro salvador está vinculado al problema del tiempo, de la identidad o individualidad del destino. Para Schopenhauer, el tiempo es también una falacia que forma parte de la ‘representación’. Sólo existe el presente: ‘La forma de la vida es presente sin fin, del mismo modo que los individuos, imágenes de la idea, surgen y desaparecen en el tiempo, comparable a sueños evanescentes’. [Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 54] Borges tuvo en su juventud una vivencia de la intemporalidad muy afectiva [‘Sentirse en muerte’], lo que le lleva a afirmar entusiasmado la supresión del tiempo de Schopenhauer. [. . .] En una entrevista en ‘Die Welt’ del 26 de junio de 1965 declaró Borges que el tema del tiempo en sentido metafísico está estrechamente unido al tema de la identidad de la persona.

2

In an ending reminiscent of the total annihilation of self in death in ‘El fin’, Unwin concludes the story of Abenjacán and Zaid: [Zaid] simuló ser Abenjacán, mató a Abenjacán, y finalmente fue Abenjacán. — Sí — confirmó Dunraven — fue un vagabundo que, antes de ser nadie en la

Notes

197

muerte, recordaría haber sido un rey o haber fingido ser un rey, algún día. (‘Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto’ (Borges 1949, 137)) 3 4

5

6 7

8

9

See Alazraki (1988, 144) on the secular nature of Tzinacan’s vision. Schopenhauer’s individual self is held illusory. It constrasts with the will which is a life-driving compulsion transcending both individuation and the will to attain identification (unity) of the self with the world. See also Freud’s distinction between the ego and the id. Although Watts (1957, 65) points out that: ‘What cannot be conveyed by speech can nevertheless be passed on by some non-verbal means of communication.’ For further discussion of ‘El Aleph’ see Alazraki (1988, 48–49). On the theme of knowledge in the stories see Andrew Hurley’s ‘Afterword’ in his translation of Borges (Hurley 1998, 189). Whereas Molloy (1994, Chapters 1–3) speaks of the fragmentation of Borges’ texts themselves, (what she calls the ‘non-fixity of text’), the discussion here refers to the text which the story proposes, that is, the text within the story. For a discussion of the ‘crisis of authorship’ (as well as the hybrid genre of the essay-story), which had been prefigured by Søren Kierkegaard, see Maciel’s interview with Lars Olsen in Maciel (1999, 112).

Chapter 6: Bridging the Divide: Self and Divinity 1 2 3

Ignatius The Holy Bible (1966, 26). Ignatius The Holy Bible (1966, 26). Ignatius The Holy Bible (1966, 601).

Chapter 7: Towards Relationship 1 2

Ignatius The Holy Bible (1966, 84). For further discussion of the relationship between Christ’s and Borges’ suffering see Eduardo Graham’s Conversión de la teología (unpublished, cited in Navarro 1996, 714).

Conclusion 1

In Maas, Holman Hunt and The Light of the World (1984, 40–41), London: Ashgate.

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Islamic Mysticism Idries, S. 1964. The Sufis: Introduction by Robert Graves, London: W. H. Allan Nicholson, R. A. 1998. Studies in Islamic Mysticism, vol.2, London: The Kegan Paul Arabia Library, first published 1921 Renard, J. 1996. Seventh Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims, London: University of California Press

Buddhism, Hinduism Flood, G. 1996. An Introduction to Hinduism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Mascaró, J, ed., 1965. The Upanishads, London: Penguin Olivelle, P., ed., 1996. Upanisads, Oxford: Oxford University Press Radcliff, B. and Radcliff, A., eds, 1993. Understanding Zen, Boston: Tuttle Watts, A. 1957. The Way of Zen, London: Penguin Zaehner, R. C. 1966. Hinduism, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Gnosticism and Pantheism Harris, J. G. 1999. Gnosticism: Beliefs and Practice, Brighton, Portland: Sussex Academic Press Levine, M. P. 1994. Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity, London: Routledge

Physics and Mathematics Time, Space and Identity Armstrong, D. M. 1980. ‘Identity Through Time’, in van Inwagen 1980, 67–98 Elias, N. 1992. Time: An Essay, Oxford: Blackwell Grünbaum, A. 1963. Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, New York: Borzoi Hawking, S. 1995. A Brief History of Time, Reading: Bantam Howson, A. G. 1972. Handbook of Terms Used in Algebra and Analysis, London: Cambridge University Press Inwagen, v. P. ed., 1980. Time and Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor, Dordrecht, Boston: Reidel Publishing Company Lucas, J. R. 1973. A Treatise on Time and Space, London: Methuen McCall, S. 1994. A Model of the Universe Space-Time, Probability, and Decision, Oxford: Clarendon Press Newton-Smith, W. H. 1980. The Structure of Time, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

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Oderberg, D. S. 1993. The Metaphysics of Identity over Time, London: MacMillan Peacock, R. E. 1989. A Brief History of Eternity: A Considered Response to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Sussex: Monarch Reichenbach, H. 1958. The Philosophy of Space and Time, New York: Dover Seddon, K. 1987. Time: A Philosophical Treatment, Kent: Croom Helm Sklar, L. 1974. Space, Time, and Spacetime, Berkeley: University of California Press

Literature, Art and Theory Barthes, R. 1977. ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana Press, 142–148 Fagundes, F. C. 1997. ‘Sou um homen de granito’, in Miguel Torga e seu compromiso; Selecção das comunicações apresentadas no Colóquio Internacional sobre Miguel Torga, realizado na Universidade de Massachusetts, em Amherst, em Outubro de 1992, Lisboa: Edições Salamandra 474–499 Genette, G. 1982. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré, Paris: Seuil Hesse, H. 1927. Der Steppenwolf, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1975 Kundera, M. 1984. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in Tanner 1997, 405 Maas, J. 1984. Holman Hunt and The Light of the World, London: Ashgate MHRA Style Book 1999. London: Modern Humanities Research Association

Index

abandonment by Father 167 ‘Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto’ 121, 127, 196n. 2 Abraxas, demiurge 72 absence of active participation 11 absence of God 21, 154 absolute being 21, 23, 70, 143 as sentient experience 56 absolute, notion of 111 eternity an attribute 18 search for 13 timelessness of 64 absolute reality 51, 52 Berkeley’s God 42 accountability, mutual 22 Achilles and the Tortoise paradox 67 Adam and Eve 157 seek divine knowledge 8 aesthetic consciousness 83, 84 aesthetic transcendence 95 Agassi, J. 25, 26 agnostic outlook 12 agnosticism 24 outlook of Borges 12 aleph 133 alienation, sense of 60 from God 71 Allah 14 Al-Mu’tasim, fictional character 112 Anatta, no-self (Buddhism) 100 anti-materialist position 41 anxiety 83 Arana, Juan, on philosophy of Borges 25, 190n. 2 philosophical inspirations of Borges 30 archetypes 88

Aristotle 24 cosmology 49 forms, immanent 84 necessary truths 49 Prime Mover 49 Arrow paradox, moving object is at rest 67 art redeemer of life 83 transcending consciousness 75 as if 2, 3, 188n. 1 assassination of traitor 140 astonishment 113 atheism 24, 42, 118 atheist 149 atoms as essence of world 39 number of, composing world 80 Attar, Farid’ud-din 113, 114 authenticity of his search ix, 171, 172 Augustine 80 time as created by God 88 authorial identity 141 autobiographical essay 61 autonomous labyrinth 9 ‘Avatares de la tortuga’ 68, 69 avenger, God as 117 awareness of life In-Between 60 awareness of self 128 Babylonian narrator 130 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 171, 172 Barrenechea, Ana Maria 25 Barthes, Roland 29 Beatrice (Dante) 149 Beatriz, death of (Dante) 133

210

Index

being and existence 48, 55, 59 acknowledgement of 143 belief and faith 115–18 belief system, institutional 7 belief system, question of Borges’ ix, 5 Berkeley, George 37, 54 A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 41 idea of God, Borges’ objection 43–4 Idealism 24, 39, 41, 54 betrayal story 138–9 Biblical titles of poems 33 Big Bang Theory 88 birds, allegory of, story 113 blame for God 118 bodies in space 41 Boethius 115, 125 ‘Boletín de una noche’ 118, 195n. 2 Book of Books 129 books about lives 129 ‘Borges’ 7, 133, 138, 142, 196n. 6 Borges, Jorge Luis agnostic outlook 12 authenticity of his search ix, 171, 172 and Bradley 64–6 denial of matter 54 as more than icon 1 intellectualisation of God 4 philosopher 30 reading of his work 1 search ix, x, 4, 13, 15, 23, 33, 114, 158, 166–8 search for authentic spiritual experience 6 sincerity of his quest 13, 127, 173 stories 20–1 voice of, through his work 2, 169 ‘Borges y yo’ 149, 195n. 2 Bossart, William 24, 25 Bradley, F.H. 22, 56 on absolute reality 50–1 Brahman, supreme consciousness 125, 131–2 brotherhood 34, 155–61 Buddhism 12, 99–101, 105–15, 126, 132 doctrine 22 karma 115

moksa 115 self negation 12 self-renunciation 126 teaching 100 Buddhist perspective of Borges 24 Buddhist tale, King Milinda (Menandro) 19 Cabbala emanations of a God 45 Gnosticism and 70–4 Cabbalistic wisdom 16 Cabbalistic work, Zohar 71 Cáceres, Rogelio Rodríguez, on Borges 25 Cain and Abel 157 Cantor’s definition of set 80 Cartesian philosophy, cogito ergo sum 28 causality Borges’ objection to 45, 47 Borges’ questioning 49 Borges’ vehement denial 49–50 non-causality 38 causation 47 Cervantes, Miguel de, Quijote 141 challenge to singular authorship 140 change perpetual 80 child who fears mask 157 Christ crucified 15, 34, 150 forsaken 153 personification of an age 73 relationship with 14 risen, life with 124 sacrificial love 99 and sinner, oneness 170 suffering, sharing of 172 Trinity and 22 as Word 151, 162 Christ, incarnate 151, 162–4 Christ, search for face 166–8 Christ figure 14, 22, 150 mystical 98 Christ in third place 169 Christian doctrine 22 Christian mysticism 94–9 Christian perspective on Borges’ poetry 24

Index Christian spirituality x, 33 Christianity 12, 22, 94, 115, 126, 153, 172 fundamental question 171–2 personal relationship with God 12, 149, 158, 166 recognition of Christ’s salvation 115 chronology of thought in essays 31 Clausius 82 coin, magical 134 coitus, fallacy of 158 coming of age 10 communion, true with another 158 consciousness 83, 128 prisoners of 52 continuity, absence of 53 conversion 96 creation and enlightenment 114 Creation, God’s eye view 133 creator, need for 49 ‘Cristo en la cruz’, poem 15, 33, 34, 166–8 cyclical time 16, 18 Czepko, Daniel von, German mystic 19, 95, 96 Daneri, Carlos, poem wins prize 133 Dante and Beatrice 149 Dante’s salvation by God 149 Dark Night of the Soul 154 death 114 of Christ 168 dedication and submission to God 135 definition of God 115–18 deity, impersonal 19 ‘Del culto de los libros’ 16, 70 Demiurge 72, 73 union with 135 world creator 72–3 denial of self and time 15, 61, 62 Descartes, René, ‘cogito ergo sum’ 48, 192n. 16 Borges on 47, 48 necessary truths 49 detachment, liberation from desires 113 determinism 61 ‘Deutsches Requiem’ 136, 155 Dichotomy paradox 67

211

difference between time and eternity 84 Discusión 32, 67, 68, 69, 106, 108, 140 divine challenge to Berkeley 58 communion with 94, 95 humanized 172 material and 73 objectification of 6, 115, 123 tormented longing for 33 wholeness of self 125 divine absolute 32 Divine Comedy (Dante), Borges’ interpretation 149 divine design 116 divine eternity 94 divine existence, empathy with 83 divine formula, in ‘La escritura del Dios’ 6 divine purpose for world 73 divinization of human suffering 172 door with no handle, Christ knocking 173 doorway to divine 128 ‘Dos notas’ 69, 71 dream 120–2 waking from 51, 52 world as a 37, 38 dreams within dreams 130 dual self-image 10, 32, 94, 109 Dualism, oriental 72 dysfunction 155–61 Ecclesiastes, Gospel passage, on knowledge 8 ‘Eclesiastés, I, 9’ 33, 159–61, 184–5 egocentricity 83 egotism, baring of soul 111 Einstein, Albert 49, 87 ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ 18, 21, 89, 97, 101, 111–15, 119, 126, 129, 188n. 10 ‘El Aleph’ 6, 7, 8, 116, 117, 122, 126, 127, 133–4, 135 El Aleph 2, 21, 32 ‘El cielo azul, es cielo y es azul’, aka ‘El cielo azul’ 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 50, 54, 57

212

Index

‘El coloquio de los pájaros’ 101, 111, 112–13, 114 ‘El espejo’ 21, 157–8 ‘El fin’ 10, 119, 121, 141, 144–5, 155, 196n. 2 ‘El Golem’ 16, 70, 120–1, 175–7 el inglés 138 ‘El inmortal’ 14, 55, 119, 122, 126, 140, 142–3, 144 ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’ 32, 192n. 5 ‘El milagro secreto’ 138 ‘El Simurgh y el águila’ 16, 70, 89, 112, 113, 114, 154 ‘El Sur’ 10, 121, 127 ‘El tiempo circular’ 18, 79, 89–90, 93 ‘El Zahir’ 122, 126, 134–5 elite, elect, in gnostics 73 energy lost 82 engagement with doctrines 23 entities, unreachable 123 entropy, useless energy 82 Epimenides on Cretans 69, 129–30 essays Borges 15–20 self, time and quest for God 31 eternal inscription, power of 131 Eternal Recurrence 76, 77, 86, 193n. 14, 195–6n. 5 Eternal Return of the Same (Nietszche) 17–19, 22–4, 62, 74, 82, 89–90 Borges’ approach 79–82 eternity 11, 51, 61, 63–4, 74–5, 83 Christian 75, 84 history of 57, 88 as infinity 153 longing for 20 notion of 16, 18 temporality undone 125 ethics of conflict 10 evil 136 evil, problem of 3, 17, 74 evil, responsibility of demiurge 126, 135 evil, transformed by love 136–7 evolution of Borges’ thought 30, 31

‘Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain’ 119 exclusion of God 21 existence, nature of 11 existential condition 109 experience 86 quest for 6–7 sentient 56 world of 49 experience outside consciousness 59 F/forms 84, 85 face of Christ, desire/search for 149, 169 failure, plan for 9 failure to find God 127 faith 1, 34, 114 in Christ as release from individuation 126 and religious belief 117 and resignation 18 and the thief on the cross 164–6 yearning for 4, 25, 170 fantastic events 2 Father, Son and Holy Spirit 88 fear of being seen 157 Ficciones 2, 4, 21, 125 fictional universes 3 fights and fatal duels 10 finiteness 64 flux 125 of reality/of text 2 forgiveness 139 form, Form 85 Forms, Plato see Plato, Forms fragmentation 118, 120–2 of self 125 Funes 7, 8, 81, 127 ‘Funes el memorioso’ 7 Gnostic nature of God 112 Gnosticism 16, 62, 70, 72–3, 74, 89, 118 mystical concepts 62 and presence of evil 74 and Sufism 89 God Borges’ lifelong quest for 4, 7, 94, 149–50

Index concept of 12–13, 71, 114 death of 75 denial of 33 disavowal and need for 4, 5 impersonal God, En-Sof of Cabbala 71 intellectualisation of 4 as love/loving 123 nature of 70 object 116 personal 12, 19 personal relationship with 12, 149, 158, 166 proof of existence 61 relationship with 10–11 God figure 126 of Borges’ poetry 21 as cruel and elusive 14–15 variety 117, 122 Gödel, Kurt 69 godhead 114 good and evil 73 good thief 164–7, 168, 170 request to be remembered 165 Gospels, titles of poems based on 4, 22 Hawking, Stephen 87, 88 heart’s door, man must open 173 Heidegger, Martin, Nietszche: The Will to Power as Art 76–7 hell and immortality 66 ultimate disunity 159 Heraclitus of Ephesus 90 heresy 16, 70 Hesse, Herman, Steppenwolf 60, 192n. 17 higher reality, pursuit of 4 Hinduism oneness of self and divine 40, 126 soul (atman) 115 Historia de la eternidad 18–22, 63, 84, 86, 99 ‘Historia de la eternidad’ 18, 19, 57, 63, 73, 74, 84–5, 86, 88, 91, 99, 120, 141, 158 Homer, loss of memory of Iliad 142 honour 122 human language about God 116

213

human suffering 167, 169, 172 humanity, birds as, questing union with divine 113 humanity and suffering of Christ 167, 172 humanization of the divine 172 Hume, David 27 Treatise of Human Nature 47 on cause and effect 46 hunger for faith, Borges 170 Hunt, Holman, The Light of the World 173 I, alas, am Borges 94 I and You/‘I’ and ‘You’, relationship between 111, 128, 158, 172 idealism 22, 23, 37–8, 59, 118 British 78–9 idealist position, Schopenhauer 40 idealists 50 Borges’ disagreement with 26 ideas, reader of, Borges 29 identical objects, numerically distinct 77 identity 3, 11–12, 23, 85, 128 confirmed by killing brother 155–7 denial of 20 memory and 28 multiple 145 nothingness of 57, 118 personal, blurring of 119 questions 17, 128 sense of, loss of 66 swapping 137 of two processes 91 Identity of Indiscernibles 74, 77–9 Iliad, Homer 142 illusion of separateness 128 world as 59 immanence 122 and transcendence, tension 99 Incarnation of Christ 162, 167 individual, cult of the 1 individuality lonely 94 sameness and 128

214 individuation 40, 83, 93, 121 transcendence of 65 infinite mind of God 41 infinity 61, 119 Borges’ abhorrence of 142 concept of 11, 16, 66–70 eternity and 21 innocence, loss of 8 Inquisiciones 23 insanity 134 intellectual game playing 26 intelligibility of universe 49 intertextuality 140 Islam 113, 115, 126 unity of all being in God 115, 126 Islamic doctrine 22 Islamic mystic, Farid’ud-din Attar 113 jaguar’s coat, inscription 131 Jesus Forsaken 144 ‘Juan, I, 14’ 22, 33, 162–4, 167, 178–9 ‘Juan López y John Ward’ 155, 156, 185–6 Judaic doctrine 22 Judaic mysticism 16 Judaism 62, 94, 115 knowledge confers salvation 115 mystical concepts 62 Judas’ betrayal as divine plan 136 Judeo-Christian God as demiurge 126 Kant, Immanuel 27, 40 Critique of Pure Reason 87 hallucinations 37 Idealism 39–40 killing of brother under train 156 Kilpatrick 139–40 King Milinda 100 knowing, for Borges 8 knowledge (Greek gnosis) 72, 114 and experience, tension 123 intuitive 113 poisoned chalice 8, 33 tree of 8 Koran, el Korán 14, 193n. 12 Kripke, Saul 69 Kundera, Milan 196n. 5

Index ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ 6, 7, 80, 116, 117, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129–30 ‘La busca de Averroes’ 126, 134 ‘La cábala’ 16, 70, 72, 73 ‘La doctrina de los ciclos’ 17, 18, 62, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93 ‘La duración del Infierno’ 16, 61, 66–7, 120, 130 ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ 38, 41, 43–4, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55, 58, 72, 91, 111 ‘La escritura del Dios’ 6, 7, 14, 21, 70, 116, 117, 120, 122, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130–3, 134, 135 ‘La flor de Coleridge’ 16, 70, 89, 98 ‘La forma de la espada’ 111, 119, 127, 137, 138–9, 169 ‘La larga busca’ 154–5, 168, 185 ‘La lotería en Babilonia’ 117, 121, 122, 126, 129, 130 ‘La metáfora’ 85, 86 ‘La moneda de hierro’ 158 ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ 3, 13, 38, 41, 43, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56–7, 58, 65, 66, 92, 109–10, 118, 142 la palabra, translation of 162 la palabra, word made flesh 162 ‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’ 16, 61, 67–70, 129 ‘La poesía’ 99 labyrinth, 9, 127 language and thought 49 and time 86 ‘Las ruinas circulares’ 3, 70, 120 leader of angels, Abraxas 73 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 17, 23, 74, 92 Principles of the Identity of Indiscernibles 17, 19 on worlds 69 leveller of opposites, God as 118 library 7, 96, 129 Lichtenberg 38, 48, 53

Index life and death, metaphors for passion 109 life as appearance 53 The Light of the World 173 linear circularity 120 literary relationship with Scriptures 170 literary texts 140 literary traditions 108 literary world of Borges 25 literature as autobiography 105 what is left unsaid 105 location in space and time 40 Locke, John materialism 41, 42 Lorenz, Erika 26, 189n. 15 ‘Los conjurados’ 33, 154, 155, 156, 166 ‘Los teólogos’ 93, 118, 122, 155 loss of identity 132 of what never possessed 92 lottery 121, 130 love 113, 128, 134 of Christ, and of others 152 Christian 136–7, 144, 158 difficulty to believe in divine 151 mutual and reciprocal 152 parable of talents as call to 152–3 poem about, ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ 164 unrequited, for women 122 trinitarian 7, 98, 152 love relationship missing 128 madness, as creative 135 magician, God as 117 man and divine, union 15 manhood 122 ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ 14, 22, 33, 150–3, 162, 163, 164, 175 material universe and divinity 115 materialism 38, 39 matter Berkeley’s denial of 53 denial of existence of 42 matter and mind 40, 45 mâyâ, veil of 46, 129

215

maze, way out of labyrinth 9 memory existence 28 identity and 55, 142 importance of, to Borges 27 time and 87 mental certainty of being 55 ‘metaphysical crutch’ 29 ‘Milonga de dos hermanos’ 10 ‘Milonga del forastero’ 10 mind existence by thinking 44 matter and 45 mind-dependency 43, 88 miracle cure, God’s knowledge 135 mirror fear of 157 image 37 prisoner of 59 modal logic 69 Molloy 23, 62, 197n. 8 Moon, John Vincent 10, 111, 138, 139 multiplication 39 music and unity with God 84 mystery of world 78 mystic, path of 111 mystical concepts 64, 97 mystical undercurrents in texts 114 mysticism 18, 21, 70, 98 pantheistic slant 89 prelude to 61 narratorial voices 142 narrators, variety of 196n. 6 natural cause or creator 49 nature of God 17 nature of reality 38 Navarro, Ignacio 24, 166, 169, 170, 171 New Commandment 152–3 Newton, Sir Isaac 49, 194n. 9 Newtonian mechanics 87 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 17, 22, 23, 27, 63 Letzte Mensch (Last Man) 75 Thus Spake Zarathustra 75 U"bermensch 75, 76, 81 Will to Power 75, 81

216

Index

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (Cont’d) Borges’critique of 79–82 death of God 75 and Eternal Return 74–9, 159 night of the senses see night of the soul night of the soul 154 nihilism 75 ‘No eres los otros’ 21, 153–4, 168 Nolan 123, 139–40 non-causality 47 non-existence of self 53, 100 non-fixity 125 no-self (anatta) Buddhism 126 ‘Nota sobre Walt Whitman’ 89 nothing new under the sun 158 nothingness 123 of existence 43 of God 32, 37 of personality 91 of self 32, 37 in Buddhism 101 ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’ 19, 63, 77, 78, 86, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101 nullification 14 of identity 17 of self 119 nullity of time, space and self 43 numbers, significance of 71 Nuño, Juan, on Borges’ philosophy 25, 26, 29–31 on Plato 39 objectification of the divine 6, 7–9, 14, 21, 33, 126, 127–9, 134 obliqueness of Borges’ writing/of literature x, 105 obliterator, God as 117 oblivion as trait of humankind 81 Old Testament God 21, 56, 159 order to existence 74 pain 83 pantheism 12, 14, 18, 21, 23, 89, 94, 98, 114, 118 belief in one God 114 divinity in all creation 12

pantheistic being, search for 154 pantheistic text, Silesius 98 Paoli, Roberto 25 on Borges’ worldview 30, 189n. 23 ‘Para una versión del I King’ 21, 33, 158–9 parable of the talents 152 paradox 16, 68, 69 definition of 67 of the infinite 129 ‘Parliament of Birds’ 113 partial identity 89 passion, of Borges’ writing 1, 4, 23, 106 past becoming future 76 branching towards 120 changing of 137 perception as mind-dependent 39 as ‘objective’ 84 permanence, absence of 53 Persian tale 113 personal encounter with divine/God 4, 23, 33, 168, 171 personal failure in writing 151 personal identity blurring 10, 16, 61 personal, refuge from, in intellectual 92 personal self, damaged sense of 18 personality non-existence 56–7 nullity of 65 triviality of 38 perspectivism 81 philosophers, preoccupation with 24 philosophical aspect of Borges’ work 26 philosophical scepticism 28 philosophies 12 as fiction, Borges 29 ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ 119, 121, 140–1, 142 pilgrim and God 7 Pitagoras, numerical principles 45 Planck, Max on mystery of nature 61 quantum physics 49, 87

Index Plato 23 necessary truths 49 universal Ideas 45 Platonic-absolutist conception of time 87 Platonic Archetypes 24 Platonic doctrine 58 Platonic Eternity 86 Platonic Forms 19, 24, 84–5, 141 Borges’ views 140 and Buddhism 99–101, 105–15 rejection of 84, 85 Platonic idea 38, 49 plenitude 123 plurality of time and self 33 poems El Hacedor, Los Conjurados, El otro, el mismo 33 of Borges, self-revealing 2, 4 postulation or refutation 62 predestination 88 presentismo 54, 57 probability 61 ‘Prólogo’ 85–6, 141 psychology and time 86 quantum mechanics 87 quest for God 33 random force 126 rationality 128 reading and reflection 96–7 reality 3, 120–4 correct view 86 denial of 20 dream or mirage 58 higher reality 42 illusory 58, 74 intelligible 49 of landscape, questioned 41 mirage 99 ultimate 21 reciprocity between Father and Son 22, 153 recurrence, perpetual 18 redemption 34, 127, 137–9, 141 rejection of Cartesian cogito 48

217

relational link between matter and mind 38 relationship with divine/Christ/God 7, 8, 9, 10, 14–15, 71, 99, 116, 127, 128, 149, 166, 172 religion/belief system ix, 7, 135, 137 religions 3 and literature, connection 24–5 parallel between life and 130 and philosophy, debate 24–31 religious scepticism 27 religious traditions 115 repetition without precision 90 representation and will 45 resemblance 47 Rest, Jaime 26 ‘revelation’ of Gnostics 72 rose, in Borges, love 99 rose, in Silesius, crucified Christ 99 Runeberg, Nils, Kristus och Judas 136 Ryan 139–40 saints, unity of all 98 salvation 34, 89, 126, 132, 135, 164, 166, 170 elusive 154–5, 168 redemption and 17 through spiritual enlightenment 70 same, return of 160 sameness and identity 77–9 Sarlo 16, 66, 68 scepticism24, 149 and doubt 27–8 in philosophy, Borges 27–8 Schopenhauer, Artur 22–4, 27, 40, 45 aesthetics of art 83 Borges’ divergence from 23–4, 30, 45–6, 189n. 23 debt to Idealism of Kant 39 on eastern cosmology 131 on hallucinations 37 influence of 25 on knowledge 8 maxims 30 will 38 Scriptures, dictation by Holy Spirit 72 search for order 37

218

Index

search for what is missing 5 Second Incompleteness theorem 69 Second Law of Thermodynamics 81, 82, 86 secular bias 1, 6 secularism 1 self accidental 94, 95 broken sense of 121 changeability of, in Buddhism 100 denial of 109–11 divinity and 149–61 essential 94, 95 extinction in Nirvana 97 fragile sense of 4 God and 118–20 illusory but necessary 74 individuated 109 logical necessity 57 mirror of 125–45 non-permanence in Buddhism 100 nullity of 65 soul and, bond 111 union with divine source 11, 14, 21, 123 wounded sense of 4, 70, 110, 128 self-concealment and self-revelation 167 self-constructed labyrinth 9 self-healing 20 selfhood denial of 13 inescapability from 100 nothingness of 118–19 self-image, dual 10 self-sufficiency and self isolation 10 self-worth loss 131 semantic paradoxes 129 sense of reverence 78 sense-organs of humans 41 sensory perception denial of 39 proof of existence 55 ‘Sentirse en muerte’ 15, 51, 61, 62–4, 65, 66, 77, 84, 91, 92, 93, 99, 101, 111, 143 Separation, metaphor for 123

set theory 80, 130 Shintoism 12 Sierra, Ana 25, 190nn. 1, 24, 191n. 7 Silesius, Angelus, medieval mystic 19, 94, 95, 101 The Cherubinic Wanderer 96, 97 Borges’ reading of 98 Simurgh, king and God, searched for 114 slower never passed by swifter 67 Solipsism 38, 58 solitude 123 Solomon and David, Kings 158 soul 57, 58, 125 denial of 109–11 soul-relationship 13 space and time and individuation 40 Special Theory of Relativity (STR) 87 speech, conscious and self-aware, loss of 132 spiritual dimension unattained 14 spiritual disposition towards faith 9 spiritual element in Borges’ work 25 spiritual reality and absolute reality 20 spiritual wisdom 70 spirituality lived ix, 33 of unity 159 St Augustine’s creator 49 St John of the Cross 11, 154 Stadium paradox 67 Steppenwolf (Herman Hesse) 60, 192n. 17 strangeness to world 60 subject and object 45 subject perceiving, object perceived 46 suffering 34 associated with passion of Christ 172 Sufi mystic Al-Ghazzali 115 Attar, on search for God 8 Sufi tale 113 Sufism 89, 135 pantheistic slant, identity of god and creature 12 supranatural mind of God 88

Index supreme God, absolute being 72 in gnostics 73 teleology 49, 87, 191n. 9 ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’ 10, 119, 123, 137, 139–40 temple priest invokes powers 130 text endless variations 140 inconclusive 1 non-fixity of 144 reworking 141 tension between intellect and intuition 4, 10, 123 between knowledge and experience 123 Teodelina 134–5 Textos Recobrados: 1919-1929 32 theistic realism 116 theological concepts 24 theologies 12 and metaphysics and 70 thief on cross asking pardon 166 recognition of saviour 169 thing in itself 40, 64 things as ideas in our minds 42 time 3, 4, 11–12, 23, 83 circularity of 62, 141 denial of 20 dynamic view of 86, 194nn. 7, 8 as enemy of man 28 and identity 18, 78–9 illusory 11, 74 and individuation 62, 83 inescapability from 100 as a matter of relation between events 50, 86 non-existent 53 paradigm of 119, 120 relation to eternity 65 and self, non-existence 17 static view of 86 transcendence of 65 timelessness 18, 51, 64, 93 ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ 126, 138

219

total identity, 63 traitor identity 139 traitor-saviour theme 135–6 trajectory of writing/thinking x, 23 transcendence 126 of consciousness 83 quest for 14 of time through art 51 of time through feeling 51 translation 140 ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ 72, 135–7 trinitarian love, giving and receiving 7, 98, 152 Trinitarian mystery 17 trinitarian unity between Christ and Father 154 Trinity 22, 172 ambivalence towards 98 Borges’ horror of 71–2 dialogue with 11, 22 as model for mutuality 98 truth 88 absolute 3, 4 Tzinacán 6, 7, 120, 122, 126, 130–1, 132–3 ‘Una vindicación de la Cábala’ 16, 62, 70, 71, 112 ‘Una vindicación del falso Basílides’ 16, 62, 70, 72, 73, 85 unfulfilment, ultimate 8 unification 113 union with absolute 125 desire for 12 union with divine 115 union with God 95 union with material universe 65 universal brotherhood 169 universe intelligibility of 87 purposefulness of 49 universes, multiple 42 unworthiness, poem about 164 Upanishads, Hindu scriptures 46, 131 self, atman 100

220

Index

Vaihinger 188n. 1 Vax, Louis 25 vida y muerte 109 vida y muerte le han faltado a mi vida 109 voice, self and divine, ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ 150 voice of Borges in texts, selfconcealing/self-revealing 2, 169 wasteful processes 82 Western civilization 1 wholeness with God 127 will both in success and failure 30 intelligent being, God 43 manipulation through 40, 41 non-teleological force 48 to power 75, 76 Williams, Stephen N. 5, 8, 24 Williamson, Edwin, biography of Borges 5–6, 12, 24, 25, 149 wisdom and revelation, pre-Christian 71

world appearances 59 illusion 68 parallel lives 2 real and possible 69 world religions/world spiritualities x, 3, 12, 109 worldviews 88 writing as autobiography 105, 106 as creation 108 as experience 106–9 as quest 108 Yates, Donald A. 109, 118, 121, 195n. 2 yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges 19, 100 Zarathustra 90 re-living everything 76 Zen Buddhism, on words 132 Zeno of Elea 129 Zeno’s paradox 67, 68, 69