Borges versus Proust: Towards a combative literature

Comparative Literature, Winter 2003 by Conley, Tim

In other words, the Proustian moment (I will return to this false-bottomed phrase shortly) is measured by desire's intensity, but the Borgesian moment is not truly measured at all, or at least not in this excruciatingly subjective manner. Time for Proust, in the justly famous formulation of Paul de Man, is "truth's inability to coincide with itself" (78), and this is why "Le passe nest pas fugace, il reste sur place" (R 2:418; "The past is not fugitive, it stays put" [M-K 2:433]), and the future is the impossible cradle of all the present's anxieties.

One of Borges's best-known stories, "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" ("The Garden of Forking Paths") advances the notion of faith "en infinitas series de tiempos, en una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes y paralelos. Esa trama de tiempos que se aproximan, se bifurcan, se cortan o que secularmente se ignoran, abarca todas las posibilidades" (OC 5:109; "in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities" [CF 127]). The plurality is tempered, however, by a force of inflexible destiny: in Borges's universe it is of no real consequence how long the critical moment is in coming. As long as the wait may be, an undoing awaits every malingerer, mystery, and minotaur.

Proust, or rather Proust's aesthetic enterprise, cannot embrace all possibilities of time. Neither, to be sure, can Borges, but he locates vortices, centers of recurrence and coincidence, and in the act of approximation he articulates a knowing but modest respect for the otherwise unfathomable plenitude of alternate "forking paths." I have an unknown degree of freedom, or a serviceable illusion of the same, when I select a path, and yet I never select one but many simultaneously. Proust's route, by contrast, is habitual and, as I shall address in the next round, assimilative (toujours du cote de chez quelqu'un autre). Borges's route is one of escape, albeit unworkable because every site in time and space is (after Giordano Bruno) the center of the universe, and this place and moment are ever and again this moment and place. Neither strategy is entirely effective-in and after modernism all aesthetics fail or dissolve in spite of themselves-for Proust cannot contain even himself (he does not, if you will, have time enough to do so) in his "search," and Borges has not the time to escape, negate, or transcend himself because he is time:

And yet, and yet . . . Negar la sucesion temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronomico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro El tiempo es un rio que me arrebata, pero yo soy el rio; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges. (OC 8:256) And yet, and yet ... To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, appears to be acts of desperation and are secret consolations... Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. (SNF 332)