Writing, above all fiction rather than fact, is never devoid of being a “beautiful cover,” a rather translucent mask or a polyhedral mirror, as Borges himself claims when appealing to the cabalists in “The Zahir”: “a symbolic mirror of the microcosm”. Perhaps that is why the author of “The Aleph” does not cease to rewrite his own history in his stories, through overlapped situations, interleaving contingent traits and sharpening emphases.
But beyond his biographical mistifications, his frustrations and veiled traumas, and his fearful and reverential attraction to knife‑men and ruffians,
the intellectual Borges is always visible
, as in “Juan Muraña” —“For years I have repeated that I was raised in Palermo. Now I know it was merely a literary boast; the truth is that I was raised on the other side of a long fence of spears, in a house with a garden and with my father’s and my grandparents’ library”—, where the intellectual Borges emerges, in his formative stage, in his Epicurean garden, crossing the pages of different literary traditions; and the somewhat timid child, fascinated by those gestures of manliness reflected accusingly in the weapons that proudly adorned the family walls.
These two dimensions that coexist in his narrative are well reflected in his tales, where he returns, though sometimes he repudiates it, again and again to distinctly Argentine themes, whose symbolic transfer universalizes beyond the localism or nationalism with which gauchesque literature has been treated, especially after José Hernández. But Borges also exhibits the development of certain essential themes that destemporalize and delocalize, many of them steeped in the influence of The Thousand and One Nights, in which an entire narrative poetics lies covertly embedded, continuing to fascinate writers and readers alike.
Borges makes a deliberate reference to his father, and to his early philosophical teachings, which prove fundamental for approaching his literature in “There Are More Things”: “One of the oranges on the dessert plate was his instrument for introducing me to Berkeley’s idealism; the chessboard was enough for the Eleatic paradoxes.” It can be said that Berkeley’s philosophy and the Eleatic paradoxes feed a large part of Borges’s most outstanding fictions; indeed, it seems he has done nothing but algebraically augment the latter.
Jorge Luis Borges is more Platonic than Aristotelian, at least for a large portion of his narrative poetics, which seems to transcend the very poetics of the Stagirite. Borges does not merely seek to establish a truth; he seeks to explore the possibilities that arise when reason and imagination cross each other. He is not content with mere plausibility; he seeks astonishment, which appears to be one of the leitmotifs of his writing; reformulating, in a sense, Horace’s docere et delectare. This is stated in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek truth nor even plausibility: they seek astonishment. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature.” Borges subjects, under his relentless logic, however fictional his premise may be, a wide range of theosophies and cosmogonies, because he knows that in his tale, in his epic, lies a theory and a formulation of the universe, an attempt to explain the unfathomable reality. His imagination is governed by a rigorous logic that rationalizes mystery to make it deeper and, at times, more clairvoyant. Hence he warns the reader, in “The Theologists,” about his ultimate intentions, which are not those of the heretic, but those of the insomniac decipherer of the dreams of the dreamers of our reality, of the secrets that configure the existential narrative; hence he cautions: “Heresies we should fear are those that can be mistaken for orthodoxy.” And perhaps, as the author states in the preface to The Brodie Mystery, literature is nothing other than a guided dream.
Jorge Luis Borges, even as he coyly proclaims himself a “decidedly monolithic” author, is an indefatigable reader of The Thousand and One Nights who continually turns to magical objects in his stories—as Vladimir Propp’s well-known terminology would have it—capable of transforming the course of history, giving it a transcendent meaning, acting as tools that operate beyond mere contingency. They are symbols and metaphors, instruments through which the opposing situations of his characters advance, and his gallery is varied: from the mirror to the dagger or knife, passing through the tiger’s stripes.
But, the more one delves into it, the more one sees that the magical object Borges returns to is always the same wondrous lamp, but with a different genius. Thus, though not exhaustively, we notice that “The Zahir” —“The time that dulls memories intensifies the Zahir […] I will no longer perceive the universe, I will perceive the Zahir”— becomes “The Aleph” —“a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”—, which metamorphoses again into the word “Undr” —“in its chord I saw my own works, the slave who gave me my first love, the men I killed…”—; that is, the totality of a life, which again transforms into “The Odin’s Disc” in the hand of a stranger whose possession legitimized him as king: “It is Odin’s disk. It has one side. On earth there is nothing else that has only one side.”
These magical elements acquire all their symbolism, cabalistic and algebraic, in “The Book of Sand”: “The number of pages of this book is exactly infinite. None is the first; none the last.” While Borges culminates the polymorphous faces of this symbol that runs through some of his fundamental tales, in a kind of gradually assembled collection, where the Zahir, the Aleph, Undr, Odin’s disk and the book of sand transubstantiate into “Blue Tigers,” in whose stones one can finally feel in his hand “the blue of the tiger in my dream.”
On this occasion, the object takes the form of small pebbles that continually operated according to an unknown algebra that completely altered reality: “at the end of a month the chaos was inextricable.” Borges ends this masterful tale with a paraphrase reminiscent of The Thousand and One Nights, where once again he faces the reader with one of his most disconcerting paradoxes, after he frees himself from the malevolent enchantment of the blue stones; the visionary beggar who frees him imposes another, equally unbearable: “You keep the days and the nights, the sanity, the habits, the world.”
Other symbolic objects for Borges, to which he also grants properties that connect them to magical objects, are the white weapons—knives, daggers, blades—so mythologized in his family surroundings as representing mainly the proud heroic branch of his maternal lineage.
In Borges, daggers and knives do not hoard involuntary memory, which could awaken memories more or less concealed or forgotten, as happens in Marcel Proust’s narrative. Borges endows these instruments with a tragic fatality by imbuing them with a certain literary animism, through which the weapons, not the men, move the hand of their provisional bearers, as happens, among other tales, in “The Encounter”: “Uriarte did not kill Duncan; the weapons, not the men, fought”; and in “Juan Muraña”: “That poor misguided woman had killed Luchessi […], she had driven the dagger. The dagger was Muraña, the dead man whom she continued worshipping.”
In other instances, such as in “The South,” one of his best-known tales, the dagger serves to assert an identity, as unyielding as fate itself. When the warehouse boss calls the protagonist by his family surname, he feels there is no escape: “as if the South had decided that Dahlmann should accept the duel.” And for Borges, as clearly noted in “Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874),” our deeds are our symbols… Any destiny, no matter how long and complicated it may be, consists in reality of a single moment: the moment when a man knows forever who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges also employs a narrative technique that derives from the more traditional rhetoric, with an inventio and a dispositio characteristic. At the opening of his tales he often seeks the reader’s complicity through a captatio benevolentiae, in which, by means of a humilior tone, he presents the plot. Frequently an intervening character tells the story, or the narrator comes upon an apocryphal book—technique, by the way, quite Cervantine—in whose margins lies an incomplete manuscript that narrates the events.
After this captatio benevolentiae, Borges moves into the development of the plot, full of symmetries and parallels, but also of contrasts. He knows that the more perplexing the enigma, the more frustrating its solution or ending may be for the reader, immersed in the expectations, most of the time unfounded, that the enigma itself creates. That is why Borges, with mastery, closes many of his stories, in the style of Ambrose Bierce or Nathaniel Hawthorne, with endings that tend to reiterate or deepen the enigma posed, leaving the reader with a range of open possibilities.
Another technique he develops in his plots, even in his more Argentine-themed tales, is destemporalization and delocalization, because, as clearly explained in the prologue above, “I have placed my tales somewhat far away, either in time or in space. Imagination can thus work with greater freedom”. This also enables him not to tell the story, but to start from it, focusing on what is essential. Borges moves beyond the psychological traits of characters, among ideal types, following the Platonic model.
Borges is fully aware of his narrative technique —dispositio and elocutio—, so, through the game of the double, in one of his most self-referential tales, “August 25, 1983,” he himself mimics some of the features that characterize his style — as the excellent literary critic that he is above all — to safeguard himself from any parody, and also from imitators: “false memories, the double game of symbols, long enumerations, a good command of prosaicism, imperfect symmetries that critics delight in discovering, not-always-apocryphal quotes.”
Thus Borges’s tales are a lesson in literature, uniting the characteristics of wise texts and the fascinating enchantment of the finest pages of The Thousand and One Nights.
To read Borges, a reader of the palimpsest of diverse literary traditions, also of the apocryphal, is to dive into the infinite algebra of days and nights, into the held-back waters of the Heraclitean river. That is why his stories, as their creator wished, continue to astonish us.
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The Argebrino
He did not fear the most intrinsic labyrinths that the locals proudly showed him, nor even those woven by the inscrutable chance in the desert sands; he only feared what was secretly woven by his own steps.
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Author: Jorge Luis Borges. Title: Complete Short Stories. Publisher: Alfaguara. Seller: All Your Books.