BORGES: 'THE READER' IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Romanic Review, Mar-May 2007 by Levine, Suzanne Jill

I gladly accepted Dominique Jullien's invitation last year to edit an homage to Borges on the twentieth anniversary of his death, June 14 1986. I first entered the Borgesian labyrinth via One Hundred Years of Solitude, in the late sixties, guided by one of Borges's most important readers, the Uruguayan Emir Rodriguez Monegal, who introduced to Latin American criticism the useful notion of 'Borges: the Reader as Writer.' Like a number of Borges's friends and acquaintances, Emir ended up in one of the maestro's 'ficciones,' a gaucho tale that takes place in Uruguay called "The Other Death" (1949).x Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, also inhabited by some of its author's friends, turned me into a writing reader, particularly when I saw, through the eyes of Emir, that it was a progeny of Borges's fictions, notably "The Circular Ruins" (1940) and his early "imaginary biographies" A Universal History of Infamy (1935). Borges wrote his best known works between 1935 and 1960, and continues to be the most significant writer Spanish America and perhaps the twentieth century (he was born on the cusp in August 1899) has engendered.

He's the one we return to, again and again, to find yet another metaphysical nugget shining back at us from its jolly corner, yet another textual palimpsest to incite literary treasure seekers, yet another fundamental truth or ironic boutade on any page in his whirling books of sand. Everything he wrote was brief-from his innovative "ficciones" to his essays, reviews, prefaces, "condensed biographies" and poetry-but the sheer number of these pieces, approximately 3000 (some lost to us forever), leaves in our hands something close to infinitude. The physical man died over twenty years ago but his spirit endures as long as his readers remember him. And they evidently do, hence the necessity for this volume: When I asked a colleague to compile a bibliography of only the last ten years of Borges editions and scholarship, after scouring the web and principal libraries, she reported: "There are 1336 entries for Borges's bibliography (1996-2006). Would you like me to include all works, or would you prefer a selected bibliography?" A veritable industry persists, and one has no choice but to continue "selecting" . . .

The eleven essays and articles selected here not only confirm the ongoing discussions that Borges's work provokes but also share the rich pleasure of the revisited passage as well as the illumination of obscure allusions. Their topics range from aesthetics to ethics (he was passionately committed to both); from the early poetry to the final fiction. We encounter new inquisitions-to coin his own term-of Borges's attraction to the Orient as well as to Western thought, to dueling philosophies and favorite philosophers as well as his extended literary relations with the likes of Poe and Joyce. We see how the arguably central oeuvre, Ficciones (1941) and El aleph (1949)-and such ambiguous inventions as the memorious Funes, the impossible Pierre Menard, and the disquieting Emma Zunz-can continue to yield plausible new and paradoxical readings.

Michael Bell (the essays are presented in alphabetical order according to the author's name) opens the issue with a meditation on Borges as a reader of modernity's prophet Nietzsche. Funes the memorious, the rustic insomniac who can neither forget nor think-elsewhere considered (mockingly) the ideal reader of the most impossible of modernist novels, Finnegan's Wake2-is introduced by Borges, with his usual understated wit, as a vernacular Argentine precursor to the Nietzschean Superman. Taking off from the German philosopher's nihilistic ruminations on history as a fatal record of man's forgetfulness, as well as Borges's magnificently mischievous essay "A New Refutation of Time" Professor Bell discusses how the Borgesian presence in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude illuminates the novel's Nietzchean dialogue between history and myth, and the ultimately tragic limitations of man's and philosophy's rational attempts to order the universe.

Bruno Bosteels continues the examination of philosophy in Borges, focusing on the writer's links to American pragmatism, especially the writings of William James. Here we're dealing not only with direct influences (of which there is an extensive example in Borges's early essays, Inquisiciones) but a more deep-running kinship, which Professor Bosteels elaborates through Borges's preface to the Argentine translation of Pragmatism, as well as through a more boldly speculative move, connecting Borges's conception of pragmatism's ethical superiority, as the only philosophy in which humans have something to do, with the logic of abduction. This last notion, from C.S. Peirce, applied to Borges by Umberto Eco and others, suggests a more complex picture of Borges's possible impact on contemporary thinking.

Jorge Luis Castillo's close reading in "A Poetics of the Interstice: the Mundane and the Metaphysical" of Borges's early poetry in Fervor de Buenos Aires, illuminates the young poet's intense and intricate relationship with his native city as an "emblematic space." Here we can witness, in the interstice between day and night, pampas and the city, then and now, the transition from Romantic poetics to the fragmented experience of postmodernity. Unmasking the subtle connections between metaphysics and poetics, this essay reveals the birth of the mature Borges's "skeptical suspension of judgment" in his confrontations with reality and the idea of transcendence; this is the Borges who contends with the illusory nature of the self, and with the inevitable fact that 'Literature is but the repetition of a few metaphors.' Within a rich context that encompasses Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida and Borges's early essay on metaphor titled "Las kenningar" (1933), Patrick Dove sees Borges as a subversively peripheral figure and complements Castillo's work on the metaphysics of Borges's poetics. In his analysis of "El zahir" (from the 1949 collection El aleph) Dove examines the very nature of the literary in Borges, showing us how "just as the . . . production of metaphor is always on the verge of becoming image, so the literary vindication of the image as what signification excludes is always subject to being captured and reinscribed as metaphor."