Patrick Dove

METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN BORGES'S

"EL ZAHIR"

O ne of the most frequently cited lines from the work of Jorge Luis Borges
comes from the conclusion of the 1951 essay "The Fearful Sphere of
Pascal": "It may be that universal history is the history of the different in-
tonations given a handful of metaphors" {Labyrinths 192). Over the years a
good deal of critical attention has been paid to the importance of metaphor in
Borges's writing. Critics have pointed to his use of figural language to suture
the rift between being and thought, lived experience and recollection. Literary
metaphor exemplifies what one critic describes as Borges's efforts to enumer-
ate "sharply diverse yet somehow harmonizing parts." Bringing likeness and
unity into view where we ordinary see only difference and fragmentation,
Borges's writing gestures to "some larger, static whole unnamable by any
unilateral means" (Irby, Introduction to Other Inquisitions, x). While Borges
is famous for his association of metaphor with universality, I will propose
that his writing also initiates a confrontation with the limits of metaphor as it
has been defined in the Western tradition. In the text I will be discussing, the
short story "El Zahir," this limit is approached through a literary treatment
of the image.' The literary image does not allow itself to be transcribed into
a language of equivalence. It names a mode of appearing—or it may be the
secret origin of any and all appearances—that is irreducible to hermeneutic
models of reading, or to any view of literature as containing a hidden meaning
waiting to be interpreted or revealed.
In the first part of this paper, I discuss Borges's engagement with the prob-
lem of metaphor in "El Zahir." The presence of metaphor as a literary topos
initiates two related considerations in this story. First, the text is a reflection on
what could be called the economic determination of metaphor, or metaphor
defined as exchange, substitution or transfer. Under this general definition, the
passage which occurs in metaphor has been predetermined as an expenditure
that will eventually be recuperated as value or meaning. In other words, the
difference between words is conceived as a negation (of appearances) that will
ultimately negate itself (as the revelation of meaning). Borges's text alludes to

1. The short story "El Zahir" was first published, according to Emir Rodriguez
Monegal, in Los Anales de Buenos Aires in July 1947, and later republished in a
slightly revised version in El Aleph (1949). See Ficcionario 458.

The Romanic Review Volume 98 Numbers 2-3 © The Trustees of Columbia University
170 PATRICK DOVE

the central role that metaphor plays in the Western tradition. At the same time,
the story is an anticipation of the end of universal history, at least insofar as
it has been determined as a totality comprised of the differential intonations
of a few metaphors. It foresees—and attempts to forestall—the nightmare of
a world that has fallen entirely under the sway of the One.
The second half of my analysis looks at Borges's treatment of the literary
image. I use the term "image" with some trepidation, as it is often associated
with the most traditional of metaphysical distinctions: the image as the other
of "truth," "original," or "depth," and thus as a name for what is deficient in
being. For Borges, the image tells a different story: it challenges the old associ-
ation of truth with what is hidden beneath the surface (depth, essence). Begin-
ning with Aristotle, theories of metaphor always come back to a hermeneutic
presupposition: the idea that the metaphoric passage sheds light on a hidden
meaning waiting to be revealed or interpreted. The image, on the other hand,
suspends the distinction between appearances and depth, and thereby com-
pels us to re-examine the basic assumptions of our reading strategies. Can an
image be interpreted? Can we decipher what it says and what it does not say?
To what extent is the literary image readable in the sense that hermeneutics
understands the term? I will not attempt to answer these questions here, and
will only concern myself with establishing that they represent an important
concern for "El Zahir" and perhaps for Borges's writing in general.
Borges approaches the relation between metaphor and image in "El Zahir"
by engaging with the age-old philosophical distinction between truth and
appearance. Let us be clear: Borges does not use literature as a vehicle for
philosophizing; instead, he borrows material from the philosophical tradition
in order to generate literary form. Although Borges is not a philosopher, this
does not mean that the fabulist and essayist has nothing to say to philosophy,
or that these borrowings do not refiect something back to the domain from
which they were taken.
A brief discussion of how the philosophical tradition has approached the
question of metaphor will help set the stage for the first half of the essay.
Aristotle defines metaphor [metaphora] as a transfer [epiphora] to one
thing of a name that belongs to something else.-^ This passage, as Jacques
Derrida has demonstrated in "White Mythologies," proves analogous to

2. Poetics I, 57b7-b8. The common root pherein means "to carry" or "to transport."
Aristotle clarifies that the operation can work either by analogy (e.g., "the evening of
life" for old age, or "The sun sows its radiant seeds," in which no proper figure exists
for the scattering of sunlight), from species to genus ("Here stands my ship," where
lying at anchor is part of the genus to stand), from genus to species ("Truly has Odys-
seus done ten thousand deeds," where ten thousand is part of the genus many), or from
one species to another ("Draining his life with bronze," where to drain and bronze are
substituted for to kill and sword respectively). For modern rhetorical theory, some of
these would be considered catachresis or metonymy.
 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN "EL ZAHIR" 171

the way thinking itself works. A well-wrought metaphor brings to light a

likeness that is not apparent to the naked eye: a resemblance of idea, cause
or purpose. "To make metaphors well is to observe what is alike" [To gar
eu metapherein too to homoion theorein estin] (Poetics 4.5.5, 1459a7-8).
"Metaphors must be drawn . . . from things that are related to the original
thing, and yet not obviously so related—just as in philosophy also an acute
mind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart" {On Rhetoric 3.2,
1412a). Theoretical vision [theorein] provides an analogy for what happens
when we use metaphors, but it is not just one analogy among many: the
production of apt metaphors presupposes that theoretical perception is at
work ensuring that language remains the likeness [homoiosis] of being. The
Aristotelian theory of metaphor thus exemplifies the ontological primacy
granted to being over language in the metaphysical tradition. Homoiosis,
the principle of likeness, presupposes that language comes after being and
remains a mere reflection of it. It thus provides the foundation for the mod-
ern concept of the sign and the determination that signification represents
the essential function of language.
On the other hand, the conduit between thinking and language in Aristotle's
discussion can also be made to flow in the opposite direction: thinking turns
out to depend—and more than one might suspect—on the exemplary nature
of metaphor. According to Aristotle, metaphor affects us by bringing the idea
it aims to communicate "before the eyes" [pro ommaton poiein]. This visual
analogy supports Aristotle's claim that metaphor is most effective when it
prompts the listener to "see" the thing in a new light, and when it illustrates
something in a dynamic, active state [energeia] (Rhetoric 3.10-3.11). In the
Rhetoric, the section on metaphor is positioned within a broader discussion of
the relation between thinking [dianoia] and speaking [lexis], or in the words
of Derrida, a discussion of "what one is given to think through language"
("White Mythology," 232). For Aristotle, thinking is fundamentally reflexive:
in order to take place it must be able to "see" itself at work. Because thinking
is unable to make itself manifest to itself on its own, it rehes on exemplifica-
tion or mimesis in order to reflect on itself through analogy. Thinking seeks
the right turn of phrase that would allow it to enter the light of the logos. We
do not truly grasp an idea (say, "old age") until we have seen it transferred
into a different form ("the evening of life").
Aristotle's text also exemplifies how easily theories of metaphor slip into
a vicious circle. In order to illuminate the event it attempts to account for,
the theory of metaphor must have recourse to another metaphor. The com-
mon root in Aristotle's famous definition—metaphor [meta-phora] as transfer
[epi-phora]—provides a clear indication of this difficulty. The theory of meta-
phor, it would seem, can only ever be a metaphor of metaphor. Derrida situ-
ates this ambiguous relation between theory, event and repetition under what
he calls the law of tropic supplementarity, according to which "the extra turn
of speech becomes the missing turn of speech" ("White Mythology" 220). The
172 PATRICK DOVE

difficulty philosophy has in freeing itself from this zone of indeterminacy helps
to explain the abundance of everyday, worldly things that have at one time or
another served as stand-ins for metaphor.
In the Western tradition, numismatics has provided a rich source of analogy
for thinking about metaphor. More generally, of course, coins often serve as
figures for the word. The analogy can be pursued in a myriad of directions: like
coins, words circulate within a national context; words are likewise inherited
and transferred between generations and traditions; words are subject to both
inflation and material wear and tear; words can be classified as authentic or
counterfeit; words give access to things, and when a proper word is lacking a
term can sometimes be coined. The specific association of coin and metaphor,
meanwhile, underscores the fact that the tradition has tended to classify meta-
phor (or word coinage) as a genus of exchange and valuation. How is the use
of one word to substitute for another analogous to the act which designates
a piece of metal as representing a specific quantum of value? In an economic
transaction, the material stuff of the coin does not substitute directly for the
commodity or its use value. As Marx demonstrates, the practice of exchange
involves at least two orders of abstraction: (1) units of money, as represented
by a piece of metal, paper or some other material, are designated as represent-
ing a specific value; and (2) the commodity acquires a specific exchange value
as a reflection of the labor time that is needed for its production in any given
time and place.^ The coin constitutes the exception in such an economy of
exchange: it is the one thing that cannot be assigned a use value, and whose
"thingliness" we agree to ignore. This is also what makes the defacement of
money scandalous: to mar a coin is to interrupt the timely withdrawal of its
materiality from the scene of exchange.
Borges's short story "El Zahir" is both a love story and a tale of loss and
destitution. The temporal structure is fairly traditional: the narrator, who is
also the protagonist, first provides an expository statement about his present
circumstances, followed by a longer retrospective account of how things came
to be the way they are. His recollections begin with the death of Teodelina
Villar, a fashion model with whom he was in love. He does not clarify what
her feelings may have been for him, though from the little we learn it is far
from certain that she returned his affection. The portrait he sketches is a cari-
cature of a portefia debutante whose eyes were focused permanently on the
metropolis. He then recounts a serendipitous occurrence following her death,
an event he describes proleptically as having precipitated his imminent fall
into the abyss of madness or subjective destitution. The fatal happenstance
unfolds as follows: After paying his last respects at Villar's wake, the nar-
rator departs with the intention of returning home; but no sooner does he
leave the funeral parlor then, following a mysterious impulse, he enters a bar

3. See Capital, Volume I, Chapter 1 ("The Commodity").

 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN " E L Z A H I R " 173

and orders a drink. Among the change he receives an unremarkable twenty-

centavo coin whose sole unusual characteristics are the letters "N," " T " and
the number " 2 " which have been scratched into its surface. However, the
image of this banal coin imposes itself on the narrator and becomes an irreme-
diable obsession. During the few hours he has the coin his possession, he finds
himself unable to think of anything but coins, and it soon becomes evident
that it is in fact the image of the coin that "possesses" him and not the other
way around. The day after the wake, the narrator resolves to rid himself of
the coin in the expectation that the image would dissipate along with it. But
even in the coin's absence his mind is unable to free itself from the strange,
captivating power of the image. In the following months the narrator tries
various remedies—devoting himself to composing a fantastic tale, meditating
on other coins, consulting with an analyst—but none of these substitutions
succeeds in dissolving the obsession.
The narrator finally receives a diagnosis as he pages through a tome entitled
Urkunden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage. According to the Urkunden, the coin
was an avatar of the "Zahir," one of the ninety-nine manifest names of God
in Islam, and whose Arabic meanings include "''visible" [visible] and "notorio"
[notorious, clear, obvious].''According to Muhammad, anyone who enumer-
ates the ninety-nine names consecutively would gain access to Paradise. The
Urkunden relates that in certain Islamic traditions, the Zahir is regarded as
an avatar which, presenting itself to its victims in the form of some ordinary
object, captivates them and drives them mad. Similarly, the tome associates
the Zahir with the Sufist mystical tradition, which holds that God has a secret
one-hundredth name whose pronunciation would allow the mystic to lose
him- or herself in divine unity.
In confirmation of this strange diagnosis, we are then informed that two
others in Teodelina Villar's circle have been stricken by the same obsessive
symptoms, and that one of the victims has been institutionalized. Speculating
that the same fate awaits him, the narrator foresees that soon he will soon be

4. In her essay "Borges, or the Mystique of Silence," Luce Lopez-Baralt provides a

detailed account of the cultural and religious significance of the term Zahir, much but
not all of which corresponds with the story. The work of identifying these connections
is doubly important, as it helps shed light on several key thematic threads (Islam and
mysticism) while at the same time underscoring Borges's conviction that the origin of
the Western tradition is multiple and divided. Like many of Borges's stories, "El 'Zahir"
must be read against a long history of Eurocentric and nationalist essentialisms that
have perpetuated themselves through the idea that the origin is synonymous with a
proper identity or a self-identical subject. Its merits notwithstanding, this kind of read-
ing also risks reinforcing the belief that Borges's writing is primarily concerned with
communicating content, meaning or message. In other words, philoiogically oriented
readings often avoid posing the question of how Borges's writing engages with literary
problems.
174 PATRICK DOVE

unable to remember or think anything that is not the Zahir, and will find him-
self incapable of performing even the most basic and fundamental of routines:
attending to his daily necessities and being able to state who he is. The Zahir,
whose diameter measures only a few centimeters, will soon have eclipsed the
entirety of his world, suspending all meaningful relations and leaving him in
a space of undifferentiated sameness.

I shall no longer perceive the universe: I shall perceive the Zahir.

According to the teaching of the Idealists, the words 'live' and
'dream' are rigorously synonymous. From thousands of images
I shall pass to one; from a highly complex dream to a dream of
utter simplicity. Others will dream that I am mad; I shall dream
of the Zahir. When all the men on earth think, day and night, of
the Zahir, which will be a dream and which a reality—the earth
or the Zahir ?^

What are we to make of the narrator's warning that this peculiar fate will
not be uniquely his, and that we are all sooner or later destined to share the
dismal end that awaits him? He likens his fate to the world as it would look
like if it had been designed by the philosophical perspective which Kant
termed dogmatic idealism, for which the sensible world only exists as pro-
jection of an infinite mind (Berkeley). We will see later that philosophical
idealism is only one of several possible codes in which this passage can be
read. For the moment, suffice it to say that Borges's text describes history
as haunted by a rationale whose full realization would place us in a world
in which differences are nothing more than shadows projected by the Same.
There would no longer be any significant distinction between the sensible
and the intelligible, between speech (lexis) and thought (dianoia), and thus
no need for metaphor itself.

I reflected that every coin in the world is a symbol of those famous

coins which glitter in history [la historia] and fable. I thought of
Charon's obol; of the obol for which Beiisarius begged; of Judas'
thirty coins; of the drachmas of Lais, the famous courtesan; of
the ancient coin which one of the Seven Sleepers proffered; of the
shining coins of the wizard in the 1001 Nights, that turned out to
be bits of paper; of the inexhaustible penny of Isaac Laquedem;
of the sixty thousand pieces of silver, one for each line of an epic,
which Firdusi sent back to a king because they were not of gold; of

5. Labyrinths 164; El Aleph 116. All citations taken from "El Zahir" will give the
pagination for the Dudley Fitts's English-language translation in Labyrinths, followed
by the pagination in the Spanish-language El Aleph (1994).
 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN "FL ZAHIR" 175

the doubloon which Ahab nailed to the mast; of Leopold Bloom's

irreversible fiorin; of the louis whose pictured face betrayed the
fugitive Louis XVI near Varennes (158-59; 108-09).

I will comment on three points in this passage, each having to do with the
fact that in Borges's story the Zahir assumes the form of a coin. The narrator
here emphasizes that a coin is never just a coin, and thus each of these motifs
will relate to a question of metaphor. First point: The coin is an aesthetic
metaphor representing a compendium of the Western tradition, from Greek
mythology to the modern novel, and from the Byzantine Fmpire to the French
Revolution. A stand-in for all coins both real and fictive, the Zahir is both a
species (twenty-centavo coin) standing for the totality of a genus (coins) and a
species representing other species (as the Spanish "historia" [history or story]
emphasizes, the coin mobilizes references to world history and to literary
history). This presentation of universality anticipates the famous assertion in
"The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" that universal history is the history of tonalities
imparted to a small number of metaphors. The notion of differential repeti-
tion which Borges develops in the 1951 essay suggests that metaphor plays a
fundamental role for all creative activity (art, thinking, and so on), providing
the "material stuff" through which new ideas, works, and projects enter the
world. It is through metaphor that a particular thinker (or even a generation
or an entire epoch) finds its attunement to being, its way of engaging with
and asking questions about the world. But as we will see shortly, the aesthetic
metaphor in "Fl Zahir" does not just recall all of history, it also announces the
imminent collapse of the division between the finite and the transcendent, or
between representation and the absolute—and thus the end of history itself.
As was suggested earlier, Borges's strategy in writing a story about metaphor
is to transform the philosophical problem of metaphor into literary form. This
transposition is what drives plot development in "Fl Zahir," where the action
involves a series of thematic transferences, exchanges, and repetitions, and
thus formally resembles the logic of metaphor. The ill-fated scene in which
the narrator first receives the coin marks the first in a series of transfers: of
literary theme (love is substituted by money), of libidinal energy (emotional
attachment to the beloved is displaced by obsession with the image of the
Zahir), and likewise of proper names ("Zahir," whose Arabic meaning is "the
visible," replaces "Teodelina," from the Greek teo- [god] and delina [delo: to
make visible]).^ When the narrator begins to intuit the coin's sinister nature.

6. In the 1947 version of the story, the beloved's name was Clementina Villar, in
which resonates the idea of divine clemency. Dudley Fitts's English-language transla-
tion likewise refers to the beloved as "Clementina." The exchange of "Teodelina" for
"Clementina" in the 1949 version has the effect of transferring the theological motif
from a Latin to a Greek register, and perhaps masking it in the process.
176 PATRICK DOVE

his efforts to rid himself of it set in motion another series of substitutions and
repetitions: his first impulse is to bury it (just as Teodelina is to be buried in
the cemetery) or to abandon it in a library (returning it to the order of "his-
tory and fable"), but he finally decides to send it back to its native sphere by
spending it, clarifying that he does so "in order to remove [himself] from its
orbit" (159). The role of urban topography likewise contributes to this struc-
turing effect: the narrator's peripatetic wanderings on the night of the wake
and the following day trace a circuit which resembles the way that a coin or
a word might circulate in public. The celestial metaphor ("orbit") describing
the coin's sphere of influence combines with figures of economic and libidinal
investment as well as urban circumnavigation to form a multi-dimensional
tropological network of exchange and transference.
How should we understand these meta-tropological turns in Borges's text,
these movements which produce figures of metaphor? No doubt one could
read this as a tropological affirmation of movement—substitution, sharing
and exchange—where previously there had been nothing but the paralyz-
ing silence of absolute loss. Metaphor would align itself with the work of
mourning understood as the possibility of symbolizing the real (loss), and thus
against the deadly return of the unmediated real.''In this reading, "Fl Zahir"
presents itself as a story about language as symbolization. Its many merits
notwithstanding, such a reading would have problems accounting for the fact
that it is the image of the coin—metaphor par excellence—that imposes an
unsurpassable limit for all negation, substitution and exchange. If there is a
limit for the captivating power of the image, Borges's text locates it in a pas-
sage to the hither side of language understood as signification.
Second motif: immediately after the passage cited above, the narrator goes
on to assert that the coin, in its abstract character as money, represents a
condensation of innumerable temporal possibilities. The link between money,
temporality and the infinite then serves as a springboard for a commentary
on the philosophical problems of will and freedom. As general equivalent,
money represents pure possibility: it can in principle be exchanged for any
commodity whatsoever. It thus provides an analogy (according to the narra-
tor) for the concept of free will. Money, before changing hands, represents the
future as decision. More than the possibility of choosing between commodi-
ties, it represents the decision to decide, the possibility of deciding when and
where to choose. However, there is also an important distinction which the
money: will analogy glosses over a bit too quickly: whereas philosophy has
always conceived of the will as the self-agreement or saying-yes of a subject
(the will to power is first and foremost the will to will, as Heidegger says),
in Borges's text the coin appears to sustain a thought of the future as divided

7. Rodriguez Monegal, "Toda una teoria del amor, y de la catarsis que es la escritura,
esta implicita en este cuento" (Ficcionario, 458).
 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN "FL ZAHIR" 177

from itself and thus irreducible to any philosophical decisionism. Future time
is marked by a split between a determinate future to be purchased and made
actual as present time (either a night at the concert or a new book), and the
future as what can never be made present nor be reduced to a matter of cal-
culation: the future as the uncertainty that we experience whenever we face
a decision, an uncertainty without which there could be no decision worthy
of the name.
Here we encounter the first of several indications that "Fl Zahir" is not just
a eulogy to metaphor but a consideration of the limits of metaphor understood
as exchange and valuation. I propose that the discussion of how the question
of money leads to a thought of the future as differing from itself could easily
be transcribed into a different key and posed as a question about literature as
aesthetic event, or to a thought of the internal difference of all presentation.
I am thinking specifically of Borges's paradoxical definition of the aesthetic
act in the essay "La muralla y los libros" as "the imminence of a revelation
that does not take place" [la inminencia de una revelacion que no se produce].
What is always still to come in revelation and therefore does not take place:
could this impossible object be anything other than the very condition of pos-
sibility of revelation, understood as the unpresentable difference of the future
and of all coming into presence? I will return to this point in the final part of
this essay.
The problem of time introduced here can be extended to the text's self-
reflexive consideration of the relation between lived experience and narrative
time. The narrative act, as Borges emphasizes in more than one of his texts,
unavoidably runs into a problem associated with aesthetic temporality. This
problem can be formalized as the following antinomy: whereas the nature of
experience is simultaneous, continuous and chaotic, the structure of language
is chronological and divides its subject matter according to causes and effects.*
This confiict is stated explicitly in the short story "Fl Aleph," often seen as the
companion piece to "Fl Zahir": "what my eyes saw was simultaneous; what
I will now write is successive, because language is successive" ("The Aleph,"
283). The text's declaration of its inability to do justice to the real is either a
suspect claim or a literal presentation of the problem, since it can only call
attention to the problem by temporalizing it: first the experience, then the
inability to capture it by writing or speaking of it. It is the very structure of
language that prohibits it from making itself the likeness of the real, and the
resulting aporia constitutes a fundamental preoccupation for Borges's writing:
even when literature becomes aware of the structural impossibility of repre-
senting the real without losing it, this knowledge does not cancel the impulse
that compels literature to return to the real, to an experience it cannot bring
forth into the light and time of the day.

8. See Paul de Man, "A Modern Master.''

178 PATRICK DOVE

The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter,

but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution
of size. Fach thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was
infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in
the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the
multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center
of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London). . . .
("The Aleph," 283).

Time, which softens recollections, only makes the memory of the

Zahir sharper. There was a time when I could visualize the obverse,
and then the reverse. Now I see them simultaneously. It is not as
though the Zahir were made of glass, since it is not that one face
superimposes itself on the other; rather, it is as though my eyesight
were spherical with the Zahir abounding at its center (163; 115,
translation modified).

The Aleph represents the aesthetic presentation of simultaneity as a point

of universal visibility, an ideal locus from which objects occupying different
locations in space become manifest together. With the Zahir, on the other hand,
the absolute is the simultaneous presentation of what we ordinarily perceive
as opposing sides or faces. Whereas the Aleph negates the distance between
points in space, the Zahir negates time: time rendered tropologically—that is,
spatially—as the perception of opposing sides of a coin. This account of the
Zahir suggests a representation of absolute knowledge as defined by speculative
philosophy: the image of the Zahir is that of mind thinking together the oppos-
ing moments or "faces" of the dialectic. The Zahir, in this reading, represents
the fundamental fantasy of the dialectical tradition. It is the reconciliation of
thesis and antithesis, the negation of negation, and the sensible presentation of
the Idea. It should not come as a surprise, however, that the imminent triumph
of metaphysical reason over its others would also be the end of all reason, its
plunge into the infantilizing space of undifferentiated sameness.
Third motif: The inclusion of the infamous "louis" in the narrator's descrip-
tion of the coin points to an important, albeit somewhat ambiguous connec-
tion between aesthetic metaphor, literature and the question of sovereignty.'

9. The events to which Borges's text alludes are as follows: in 1789 the French King
Louis XVI was imprisoned shortly after the storming of the Bastille. He escaped briefly
in 1791, but was soon recaptured, and was later put on trial and executed. According
to one version of the story (to which Borges is here referring), the King's short-lived
escape was foiled in the most ironic manner: when the fleeing monarch tried to make
a purchase in a store, an unsympathetic clerk recognized him by his likeness to the vis-
age on the coin with which he paid, and the clerk promptly turned him in. Louis XVI's
trial and beheading in 1793, of course, represent a rupture in the classical concept of
sovereignty, for which the King is God's representative on earth.
 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN "FL ZAHIR" 179

While the question of sovereignty is only implicit in "El Zahir," my view is

that Borges considers that language itself is the true sovereign. If "Fl Zahir"
can be read as an extended metaphor of metaphor itself, as well as the vision
of a world that has been entirely subsumed within a certain logic of equiva-
lence, it is also an attempt to think the limit of exchange and to awake from
the nightmare of a world that has fallen entirely under the shadow of the One.
"In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis recite their own names, or the
ninety-nine divine names, until they become meaningless. I long to travel that
path. Perhaps I shall conclude by wearing away [gastar] the Zahir simply
through thinking it again and again" (164; 116). Borges's story concludes
with this thought of quiet perseverance in the face of imminent loss of world.
The notion that repetition could somehow dissolve the absolute tyranny of the
One is underscored by the Spanish verb gastar, which can mean both "to wear
away" and "to spend." What would this "wearing away" or "exhaustion"
of the absolute look like? The perseverance to which the narrator appeals is
by no means a vision of heroic defiance. Perseverance is allied, through the
tedium of repetition, with thinking and language; and Borges appears to be
suggesting that this description might apply to literature itself at times. Litera-
ture would hasten the exhaustion of the word's signifying power and thereby
enable the emergence of another force latent in the word—one which, unlike
the power of signification, does not sacrifice itself for the sake of meaning.
In thefinalpart of this study, I discuss two ways in which Borges's text sheds
light on this alternative notion of sovereignty beyond signification. The first
instance involves a kind of metaphor, the kenning, which Borges describes
as both belonging to the Western tradition and as irreducibly foreign to the
presuppositions of classical rhetorical and aesthetic theories. The second case
refers to the literary portrait of Teodelina Villar. I will discuss the literary
image as a question of what is excluded or foreclosed in tropological language
and signification.
Farlier it was mentioned that writing represents one of the substitute activi-
ties to which the narrator turns after the death of Villar and in an attempt to
dissolve the obsession with the Zahir. Let us now look briefiy at the descrip-
tion of the "tale of fantasy" and the peculiar figure of thought mentioned
there. The plot of this story within the story resembles an episode found in
both Norse mythology and the Volsunga saga, a thirteenth-century Icelandic
epic poem. It tells of a prince, Fafnir, who kills his father in order to steal his
gold, after which he is transformed into a dragon before being slain by a cer-
tain Sigurd. Of particular interest is the meta-textual reference to the kenning,
a figure commonly used in Old Norse, Old Fnglish and Skaldic poetry—of
which Borges was an avid reader and occasional translator. While there is no
clarification in "Fl Zahir" of what significance the kenning might hold in this
context, Borges does comment more extensively on these figures elsewhere.
On the basis of those remarks we can surmise that Borges has in mind a liter-
ary experience of the exhaustion of meaning, through which language would
become image, or the trace of what falls out of signification.
180 PATRICK DOVE

Kennings were a common rhetorical figure in the Old Norse, Anglo Saxon and
Celtic poetic traditions. Akin to compound metaphors, they are formed through
the combination of two or more unrelated nouns to replace a single noun. For
instance, "sea" becomes "whale-road" or "blood" becomes "sword-water."^*'
In one of his poems, Borges alludes to the kenning as a "coining of laborious
names."" The kenning constitutes a sovereign act of naming which, as we will
now see, also marks a limit for the Aristotelian determination of metaphor as
signification. In his relatively early essay "Las kenningar" (1933), Borges draws a
clear distinction between the kenning—which he calls "savage metaphors"—and
the concept of metaphor as it is developed in Aristotle's Poetics. According to
Borges, the proliferation of kenning in the Skaldic poetic tradition cannot be
explained by Aristotle's theory of metaphor, which is grounded in the distinction
between hidden truth and appearances. By the same token, Borges asserts that
the kenning did not intend to produce specific emotions in the listener, and he
thereby rejects the possibility of accounting for this aesthetic event in terms of the
Aristotelian economy of catharsis. "Kennings . . . are or seem to be the result of
a mental process which seeks fortuitous resemblances. They do not correspond
to any emotion. They come from a laborious game of combinations, not from
a sudden perception of intimate likeness. Mere logic can justify them, but senti-
ment cannot" (Nueva Antologia Personal 223; my translation). For Aristotle,
metaphor names an analogy among ideas. The difference between words brings
the invisible unity of meaning to the light of day; and in view of this unity, the
material difference of the word silently withdraws. The kenning, on the other
hand, comprises an analogy strictly among words, a juxtaposition of signifiers
which aims at no idea; what it puts on display is nothing more than the intimate
contact between phonemes (in the Skaldic poetic tradition) or graphemes (for
Borges's prose writing). "It makes no difference what they try to transmit; they
suggest nothing. They do not invite us to dream, and do not provoke images
or passions in us. They are not points of departure: these terms are ends in
themselves. The pleasure—the sufficient and minimal pleasure—is found in their
variety, in the heterogeneous contact of the words" (221). Neither beautiful nor
sublime, the kenning is language asserting itself as sovereign. Before designating
any real object in the world, it points to language itself taking place.

10. The term is said to come from the Old Norse kenna eitt vid, or "to express a
thing in terms of another." Old English and Old Norse both encourage the formation
of compound nouns, whereas in Spanish and other Romance languages, compounds
are far less common. And thus one could surmise that translation or reproduction of
kenning in Spanish would yield an entirely different—and much stranger—resonance
for a Spanish ear, and that the "savage" character of these metaphors is entirely an
effect of translation.
11. "Para cantar memorias o alabanzas / Amonedaba laboriosos nombres; / La guerra
era el encuentro de los hombres / Y tambien el encuentro de las lanzas" ["Un Sajon
(449 A.D.)"].
 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN "FL ZAHIR" 181

From here I turn to the literary image. Borges's consideration differs signifi-
cantly from the treatment the image typically receives in the Western tradition,
where it is often equated with mere appearance as opposed to substance,
depth or truth, and is thus seen as lacking what these latter possess: being or
permanence. The portrait of Villar undoubtedly mobilizes a traditional view
of the image, but only to a certain point. Beyond this point, the image begins
to call into question the metaphysical distinction between appearance and
being. In order to clarify what is at stake in the distinction between metaphor
and image, I will comment on the narrator's recollections of Teodelina Villar
and of her death. The first two passages represent a literary portrait of her as
a sign of her time and place: of bourgeois snobbery in the periphery, and of
the ascendancy of capitalist mass production in competition with the values of
the humanistic and Fnlightenment traditions. The third passage, meanwhile,
presents a striking reflection on the image in relation to a corpse.

Like any Confucian adept or Talmudist, [Villar] strove for irre-

proachable correctness in every action; but her zeal was more
admirable and more exigent than theirs because the tenets of
her creed were not eternal, but submitted to the shifting caprices
[azares] of Paris or Hollywood. Teodelina Villar appeared at the
correct places, at the correct hour, with the correct adornments and
the correct boredom; but the boredom, the adornments, the hour
and the place would almost immediately become passe and would
provide Teodelina Villar with the material for a definition of bad
taste (157; 106, translation modified).

At first glance this portrait reads as a light-hearted social critique in which

the dictates of fashion have assumed the status of a secular religion. Villar
represents a certain bourgeois imaginary in a peripheral city which has always
wanted to be seen as the "Paris of the South." But the irony running through
this satire also makes room for posing new questions about authority, mimesis
and modernity. The absurd claim about the social order existing in order to
facilitate the codification of taste does not find itself refuted in the way one
might expect: i.e., through the counter affirmation that taste is in fact either
frivolous or the highest of pursuits, and in either case irreducible to the do-
main of politics. Villar's position precisely inverts—and thereby inadvertently
exposes—the ideological function of "taste" in modernity. By sustaining that
taste represents the goal of social organization, she touches on the fact that
"taste" has served both to consolidate and naturalize class difference (under
monarchy, good taste is reflected "naturally" in the actions and choices of the
nobility) and as an instrument of discipline under the modern State (beginning
in the nineteenth century, taste comes to be seen as a faculty available to all in
principle, thought it must be cultivated through education; good taste is thus
synonymous with the pedagogical formation of modern subjects under the
182 PATRICK DOVE

tutelage of the State). Taste is defined in both of these orders as the faculty of
a Subject who is attuned to a universal code: the rights of the nobility or the
egahtarian values of the humanist and Fnlightenment traditions. Villar's own
life, however, attests to a rupture in the continuity of this history, a moment
when the codification of social relations has begun to waver and fluctuate.
Borges's text underscores this discontinuity when it refers to the distinction
between the eternal tenets of theology and humanism and the whimsical vicis-
situdes of fashion. The time of mass production defines the difference between
modernity and its others in terms of speed. The allusion to Flollywood—capital
of the twentieth century—thus involves more than just a historical modifica-
tion of the old image of Paris as capital of the nineteenth century. It marks
a transformation of the very determination of modernity: from a spatial and
geopolitical model (Paris/Buenos Aires, center/periphery) to a temporal and
technological one (Hollywood is not so much a place as it is the reproduction
and dissemination of certain images). In view of the massive reconfiguration of
planetary relations initiated through technologies of mass production, it could
be said that "Hollywood," as name for the cinematographic dissemination of
the image, presents itself as the promise of overcoming distance itself. What-
ever is currently showing in Paris or New York can now be consumed (viewed
or worn) simultaneously in Buenos Aires. If taste still functions as a sign of the
subject within the order of capitalist mass production, it is because it attests
to her ability to keep up with the speed of modernity, to match its increas-
ingly frenetic pace and its incalculable whims [azares: literally, "chances"]. In
conjunction with modernity experienced as speed, taste is the projection of
a subject able to remain identical with itself in time. And thus we have gone
from the old idea of a subject whose changing appearances refiect the being
of wbat does not change (the rights of the nobility or the universal values of
the humanist tradition) to a new subject whose appearances do not refiect
anything at all except the fact of appearing.

The war gave her much to think about: with Paris occupied by
the Germans, how could one follow the fashions? A foreigner
whom she had always distrusted presumed so far upon her good
faith as to sell her a number of cylindrical hats; a year later it was
divulged that those absurd creations had never been worn in Paris
at all!—consequently they were not hats, but arbitrary, unauthor-
ized whims (157; 107, translation modified).

The war is experienced as the interruption of fashion and its projected

simultaneity. These ills displace from Villar's horizons the rise of fascism, the
technological routinization of genocide, and the imminent threat to the self-
understanding of the West. Once again, however, we see satire generating its
own profound insight. What should we make of the fact that Villar turns out
to have been emulating an image which was never there in the first place? If
 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN " F L Z A H I R " 183

this "scandal" sets the tone for Borges's mocking of the powerful imaginary
that has presided during much of the history of Argentine modernity (an
imaginary which arose in response to the spatial differentiation of the planet
into center and periphery), it also begins to shed light on another way of see-
ing the image. The hats, signifiers par excellence of social status, turn out to
be simulacra. The true scandal perpetrated in this scene is the laying bare of
language itself as structured by the law of iterability. According to structural
necessity, a sign must be repeatable and recognizable a priori in order to be
a sign. Unlike the symbol, the sign is "arbitrary" and "unautborized" from
its very conception. The sign must be produced in such a way that it can be
repeated; but in making it repeatable one thereby relinquishes control over the
future of its reception. What enables a sign to be communicated is also what
interrupts any possibility of determining in advance how it will be repeated
and understood. The law of iterability is thus an inscription of finitude which
establishes the radical absence of the producer and his or her authority from
any communicative act. In opening the possibility of communication, the sign
also exposes itself to the incalculable risks of errancy: of being taken out of
context, misunderstood, distorted, etc.^^
Let us now look at the description of Villar's corpse as it lies in wake. De-
spite what the text might at first glance seem to be saying, here it is no longer
possible to associate tbe image with an idea of falsity, artifice or superficiality
that could be opposed by something truer or more essential. The image is no
longer the negative which negates itself as meaning. This passage takes us from
"make up" (cosmetics but also fiction) to tbe appearing of mimesis itself.

At a wake, the advancing corruption causes the corpse to reassume

its earlier faces. At some point during that confusing night of the
sixth, Teodelina Villar was magically what she had been twenty
years before: her features recovered that authority which is con-
ferred by pride, by money, by youth, by the awareness of heading

12. On the notion of iterability see Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context." This
is also the place to note that Villar's situation represents a mirror image of Borges's
views on what it means to write from a peripheral space such as Argentina (see in
particular the essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition"). What Villar takes to be
a fraud, Borges views as the secret resource of the peripheral writer, who is able to
work with the material of the Western tradition while at the same time maintaining a
critical distance from the history of its valuation. Metropolitan writers, on the other
hand, are more likely to over-identify with established understandings of this material.
To put this in terms closer to Villar's context, we could say that the peripheral writer
is the one who calls our attention to the finitude of the sign, or to the fact that a "hat"
is not a hat, and that certain sacred philosophemes of the Western tradition—such as
the sign and the proper—are in fact based on the forgetting of convention, iterability,
materiality and arbitrariness.
184 PATRICK DOVE

a hierarchy [coronar una jerarquia], by the lack of imagination,

by hmitations, by stolidity. Somehow, I thought, no version of that
face which so unsettled me would be as memorable as this one; it
is fitting that it should be the last, since it could have been the first
(158; 107-08, translation modified).

The reference to "earlier faces" is an ironic figuration which lends a proper,

human face to what is absolutely improper: the physiological mechanics of
death. In fact, the figure is doubly ironic, as the representation of rigor mortis
echoes those calculating self-transformations that characterized the personal
and professional life of Teodelina Villar (she was a model for cold creams
and the like). Nothing could be stranger and more out of place—and thus
nothing more memorable—than a corpse. It presents a corporeal excess for
any accounting procedure (the counting of the members of a community, the
counting of the objects in a room, etc.). Indeed, even the term "corporeal" is
inaccurate, as it belongs to a conceptual network of opposites—of soma and
pneuma, matter and spirit, body and mind or soul—in which every finite term
is mirrored and negated by an ideal term. The cadaver's mute presence in the
room does not point to the beyond, as it would in a theologically oriented
representation: it attests only to the fact that it no longer has a place, having
withdrawn from the world of meaningful relations. In the words of Maurice
Blanchot, the cadaver "establishes a relation between here and nowhere."'^
And yet nothing in this scene is truly new. This nameless remainder that
has no place has always been there, even if we are not ordinarily troubled by
its presence. What becomes apparent here and now is that the radiant image,
which had until now been regarded as something belonging solely to life and
its vanity—in other words, something fleeting that would vanish at the end
of life—is in fact a resilient part of life, resilient because it receives its support
from death. The somewhat enigmatic phrase "it could have been the first"
may be the key to this passage. The first in relation to what? The first he had
ever seen of her—a perverse rendering of the cliche of love at first sight? Or
"first" in the ontological sense that Villar herself sought to define: as exem-
plar of the beautiful and the contemporaneous, and in relation to which all
other appearances would be relegated to the poverty of mere appearances out
of sync with their time? Or, then again, there may be a third way of hearing
this phrase: if what comes last, after everything is said and done, could also
have been first, is it not because the image now shows itself to be a copy and
reflection of nothing? Strictly speaking the image does not appear, if by that

13. "Two Versions of the Imaginary," 256. There are a number of resemblances (I do
not use this term lightly) between this passage in "El Zabir" and Blanchot's meditations
on the corpse, the image and mimesis, and my reading of "El Zahir" has thus been
strongly influenced by Blanchot's text.
 METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN "EL ZAHIR" 185

we understand a relation to a hidden essence. It shines at a moment when

there is no longer anything that could support the idea of depth or substance.
The image is relational but it is not a relation to anything. Appearing at the
site of a corpse which has withdrawn from all significant relations, the image
describes the unsettling presentation of mimesis itself, of the very possibility
of appearing before and affecting others.
"Her life was exemplary, yet she was ravaged unremittingly by an inner
despair. She was forever experimenting with new metamorphoses, as though
trying to get away from herself" (157). In retrospect, Villar's restless self-
transformations offer themselves to be read as symptoms of a primordial
wound which never saw the light of day. Her frenetic pursuit of the moment
seems to suggest that she was haunted by a liminal awareness that the realm
of appearances was not hers to master. If the image does not hide or reflect
anything, this also means that it cannot be negated as if it were a stepping stone
toward a secret essence. The cadaver as its own image is the inability of nega-
tion to negate itself in the end. What cannot be grasped or negated is also what
cannot be avoided, and thus it returns incessantly like a ghost or a bad coin.
I said earlier that the image is that part of life which receives its support
from death. Let me try to clarify this further. The image recalls that cut or
mark which, while possessing no meaning in itself, provides the speaking sub-
ject with the means to produce meaning while at the same time depriving him
or her of the plenitude of being. Language grants the possibility of recalling
a thing in its absence, but also imposes an absolute limit on our access to the
immediacy of the thing's being. Language is both the memory of being and the
death of the thing as plenitude. Turning once again to the portrait of Teodelina
Villar, however, we can see that language in fact deprives us of nothing, or
at least nothing that could be brought forth into the light of day. There is no
such thing as a true hat (the ideal or authentic hat) before the emergence of the
errant hat (the signifier "hat," which can just as easily be assigned to a fake as
to the real thing). The notion of a plenitude that was there before language,
and from which language would keep us at arm's length (but always within
earshot), is only retroactively inscribed into the scene with the advent of the
word. What lies behind the word, what the word both recalls and prevents
from coming into the light of day, is not being as plenitude but being as void.
The image, then, represents a part of life which receives its support from
death; it is life giving itself to language and thereby exposed to the void.
By way of conclusion, let us return to the question of literary aesthetics that
was raised earher. To repeat, Borges defines the aesthetic act as "the immi-
nence of a revelation that does not take place." The significance of the image
for Borgesian literary aesthetics is that it marks a rupture within the onto-
theological concept of revelation, as well as a limit for metaphor understood
as transfer and signification. The literary image does not belong to the logic
of revelation, which is grounded in the distinction between appearances and
truth. The image gestures toward what metaphor can only foreclose when it
186 PATRICK DOVE

introduces the idea of hidden meaning. If the image can be described as the
imminence of what does not take place in presentation, this is because it is
the taking place of place itself. But lest we think that Borges is simply gener-
ating another opposition here, it must be noted that the literary image does
not manage to break away completely from metaphor and signification. In
approaching the image as a trace of what signification cannot grasp, litera-
ture is unable to avoid the gesture of indicating that there is something there
which exceeds any relation of equivalence. To postulate the existence of the
unpresentable is still a form of signification, even if it understands a different
relation to its limit.
Earlier I described Borges's tendency to borrow ideas and problems from
the philosophical tradition while turning this material into literary form. This
tendency could be summarized as the conversion of the concept into figure or
trope. However, the ensuing discussion has opened up a competing account
of the literary in Borges: as language becoming image. This association of the
image with the literary does not represent a new definition, since the image is
not a stable object or state over and against which literature could constitute
itself. This alternative view leaves us with two tendencies or trajectories—in a
word, metaphor and image—which are at odds with one another and seem-
ingly irreconcilable. Perhaps most intriguing of all is that, while Borges's writ-
ing does not offer a resolution of this conflict in favor of one tendency or the
other, neither does the conflict loses its edge through reiteration. It does not
allow itself to be transformed into the stable terrain of a recognizable differ-
ence. Just as the tropological production of metaphor is always on the verge
of becoming image—for better or for worse—so the literary vindication of the
image as what signification excludes is always subject to being captured and
reinscribed as metaphor.

Indiana University

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