i

Columbia Essays on Modern Writers 31 . 00

Jorge Luis Borges

Jaime Alazraki

/.'I'.ViW
lllllllI
lllllll
I
I

I
I
I
I
I
I
Ilk
llllllllllll
Mill lllllll!
llllllllllll
V.V.V.W.V.V
llllllllllll!
.
,
.
,

llllllllllll
.
,
.
, , , , ,
. . . . .V.V. HI
868 ii 1 1 1 1 ij*»T4u;^«.^^-l.y.vy
ii ii
BORGES ii i
 rr ^ 1
-7 1985

SAUSALITO PUBLIC LIBRARY

SAUSAUTO, CALIh 94965
868 Alazraki, Jaime.
Borges Jorge Luis Borges. New York, Columbia University
Press, 1971.

48 p. 21 cm. (Columbia essays on modern writers, 57) $1.00

Bibliography : p. 47-48.

1. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-

I. Title II. Series: Columbia essays on
modern writers. Borges, Jorge Luis
LW 11/71
PQ779T.B635Z57 ( 58 77-136494
ISBN 0-231-03283 3 \ MAKC
TJhrarv r\f Pnnfrrs* 71 r4t
 3 l 1 I 1
001*5:4196

Jorge Luis Borges

DATE DUE
b
nFC 9. 2 1998
JAIM FFR 1 5 2000

RARV
i965

DEMCO, INC. 38-2931

COLUMBIA ESSAYS ON MODERN WRITERS
is a series of critical studies of English,
Continental, and other writers whose works are of contemporary
artistic and intellectual significance.

Editor

William York Tindall

Advisory Editors
Jacques Barzun W. T. H. Jackson Joseph A. Mazzeo

Jorge Luis Borges is Number 57 of the series

JAIME ALAZRAKI
is a member of the Department of Literature
of the University of California, San Diego. He
is the author of La prosa narrativa de J. L. Borges.

Copyright © 1971 Columbia University Press

ISBN: 0-231-03283-8
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-136494
Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to

quote from works by Jorge Luis Borges: to New Directions, for per-
mission to quote excerpts from Labyrinths, translated by James Irby and
Donald Yates (copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing
Corporation; reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Cor-
poration) and to Grove Press, for permission to quote excerpts from
;

A Personal Anthology, edited and with a foreword by Anthony Kerrigan

(copyright © 1967 by Grove Press, Inc.; reprinted by permission of
Grove Press, Inc.).
Jorge Luis Borges
Andre Maurois has written some terse pages on the greatness
of the art of Jorge Luis Borges, and he has said of his vast
erudition: "Borges has read everything, and especially what
nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks,
medieval philosophers." John Barth has referred to Borges as

one of "the old masters of twentieth-century fiction." The

sophisticated reader has surely stumbled upon Borges' name
in the most heterogeneous texts, in contexts that appear to
have very little to do with his work. As with Joyce, Kafka,
or Faulkner, the name of Borges has become an accepted con-
cept; his creations have generated a dimension that we desig-
nate "Borgesian." In the same way that much of contemporary
Hispanic literature cannot be explained in its totality without
keeping Borges in mind, it is not an exaggeration to say that
the map of twentieth-century fiction would be incomplete
without his name.
Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and was educated
in Europe from 1914 until 1921, when he returned to Argen-
tina. In 1961 he shared with Samuel Beckett the International
Publishers Prize, and since then he has become an influential

force on modern letters.

One of the central premises of Borges' fictional world-view

is the belief that "this world was only the first rude essay of
some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of
his lame performance." "But," he concludes, "the impossibility
of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot dis-

[3]
suadc us from outlining human schemes, even though we are

aware that they are provisional." These schemes are the busi-
ness of philosophy and theology. "It is venturesome to think,"
says Borges, "that a coordination of words (philosophies are
nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very
much." The conclusion which is imposed on us is the value of
these systems, which we know are fallible beforehand, as

"verbal games," as literature. Borges concludes Other In-

quisitions, one of his finest collections of essays, with the fol-

lowing statement:

As Icorrected the proofs of this volume, I discovered two tend-

encies in these miscellaneous essays. The first tendency is to
evaluate religious or philosophical ideas on the basis of their
aesthetic worth and even for what is singular and marvelous about
them. (p. 201)

In another place he says, "The inventions of philosophy are

no less fantastic than those of art." For this reason, in Tlon,
the ordered planet of his story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,"
metaphysics is "a branch of fantastic literature." "What," asks
Borges, "are the wonders of H. G. Wells or of Edgar Allan
Poe confronted with the invention of God, with the laborious
theory of a being that in some way is three and that solitarily
endures outside of time?" Consequently, he puckishly avows
that in hisAnthology of Fantastic Literature there is a faulty
omission: "the unsuspected and greatest masters of the genre—
Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Erigena, Albertus Magnus,
Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and Francis Bradley— are left out."
These "masters of fantastic literature" are also the masters of
Borges the fiction writer. The themes of his stories are inspired
by the metaphysical hypotheses accumulated through many
centuries of the history of philosophy, and by theological

[4]
systems that are the scaffoldings of several religions. Borges,
skeptical of the veracity of the former and of the revelations
of the latter, stripsthem of their claims of absolute truth and
pretended divinity and makes them instead raw material for
his inventions. In this way, he returns to them the character

of aesthetic creation and wonder for which they are valued

and justified.

In his stories we find echoes of these doctrines. At times

he makes them function as the frame on which the fiction is

woven. Having read any one of his narratives, we sense be-

neath the design the presence of a metaphysics or the rever-
beration of a certain theology, which in some way explains
the story and at the same time confers on it a transcendental
flavor which all his stories have, although Borges denies this

and laughs at such transcendentalisms. In his stories, the partic-

ular is intertwined with the general, but they are also con-
founded within each other and integrated into a unity where
it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. We perceive
a meaning that goes beyond the event? of the story and which
projects the fable of the narrative to a level of generic or
symbolic values. In "The Library of Babel" we are told from
the beginning that the Library is also the universe. The Li-
brary, without losing its validity as such, becomes a metaphor
of the universe and its chaos. This overlapping or confusion
of the two levels— the individual and the abstract— has been
studied by Borges himself in an essay dedicated to Hawthorne,
and some of his fine observations there apply to his own work.
In this essay he says, alluding to the fissure which opened in
the middle of the Forum in Hawthorne's Marble Faun:

It is amultiple symbol, a symbol that is capable of many, perhaps

incompatible, values. Such values can be offensive to reason, to

[5]
logical understanding, but not to dreams, which have their singular
and secret algebra, and in whose ambiguous realm one thing may
be many. (Other Inquisitions, p. 66)

Borges' stories can be read as a direct narration of fictional

actions, but we know that other values throb beneath these
actions. In "Deutsches Requiem" the protagonist will be shot
for being a torturer and murderer, but he also represents the
destiny of Nazi Germany, in the same way that the perplexities
of Averroes with regard to the Greek words "comedy" and
"tragedy," in the story "Averroes' Search," are a symbol of the
perplexities of Islam with respect to Greek culture.
Thus, Borges projects the individual in a broader context
and the singular is explained in the generic as much as the

generic in the singular, or to put it in Borges' words, "The

starving and emaciated wolf in the first canto of the Divine
Comedy is not an emblem or letter for avarice: it is a wolf
and it is also avarice, as in dreams." Like dreams, the narratives
of Borges are symbols capable of several meanings and they
pose a double or triple intuition to the reader. The seed of
this symbolic or sometimes allegorical conception of his

stories is found in a footnote to the essay "History of

Eternity." There Borges explicitly says, "The generic can be
more intense than the concrete," and later explains:

Illustrative cases arenot lacking. When I was little and spending

the summer in the north of the province the round plains and the
men who drank mate in the kitchen interested me, but my happi-
ness was tremendous when I found out that this circular plain
was "pampa" and these men, "gauchos." The same thing can be
said of the imaginative man who falls in love. The generic (the
repeated name, the type, the country, the wonderful destiny that
he attributes to it) takes primacy over individual features, which
are tolerated by the grace of the former. (Historia de la eternidad,
pp. 21-22)

[6]
It is not difficult to see that in many of his stories, or perhaps
in all of them, Borges attributes to the concrete a generic
value. The concrete realities of his stories are what the con-
crete world is for the mystics: a system of symbols. Borges
enlightens the concrete with the perspective of the generic
and in this way confers upon it an intensity that it does not
have as an individual entity.
Confounding the limits of the individual and the generic,
of the relative of a singular reality with the absolute of an
abstraction, Borges widens the scope of his stories, giving
them an elasticity, a simultaneity, that if at first makes them
seem fantastic, "unreal," in the end saves them from becom-
ing a very gross simplification of reality. It is true that, for
Borges, the doctrines that form the backdrop of his stories
are very far from being essential truths. It is true that he
judges them to be literature, to be inventions of the imagina-
tion that at best have value as marvels, but the metaphysical
systems which he handles constitute the synthesis of the
human mind in its attempt to penetrate the arcana of the
universe, and the theologies which he uses as literary ingre-
dients for his stories are, to this day and throughout centuries
of history, the theoretic foundation of religions whose fol-

lowers number in the millions. The fact that these metaphysics

and theologies appear in his stories as the solutions to the
puzzle posed by the narration, in his essays as an interpreta-
tion of cultural phenomena, and in his poems as an expression
of the inexorable condition of human destiny, not only does
not contradict the value of a marvel that Borges confers on
them, but is a way of underlining the character of invention
of all literature. It is a way of saying from another perspec-
tive, "unreality is the necessary condition of art." Thus meta-
physics and theology— which are creations of the human mind
[7]
—have an impact not on the world, which is unknowable to
man, but on literature, which is one more dream in men's
imaginations. But the stories, essays, and poems of Borges go
still further: they suggest that, in man's powerlessness to
perceive the laws that govern the world, he has invented his
own reality, ordered according to human laws which he can
know. This epistemological tragedy of man is the theme of
the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": Tlon is a planet
created by human knowledge, and as such its laws are acces-
sible to man. The unreality of Tlon is such only in relation

to the unknowable reality, but in relation to man this unreality

constitutes his only reality. Therefore the context of litera-
ture is not historical reality but that unreality which man has
created for his consumption and which now has become his

reality. Consequently, what metaphysics pretends to do, with-

out success, on the level of reality (penetrate it and interpret
it) can be accomplished with success within the bounds of
Borges' stories. It is precisely within the limits of literature
that the hypotheses of philosophy and the doctrines of theol-
ogy regain their validity.

Accordingly one can say that in Borges' short stories his

metaphysical and theological motivations and his literary in-

ventions are resolved in symbols and allegories. The reader

thinks immediately of the parables and the paradoxes of Kafka.
However, and in spite of the similarities in style— in both
writers the realistic texture of the prose has been observed;
in both a density and an economy of code have been noted-
there is nothing more dissimilar in intention and scope. Kafka's
fiction is a form of rebellion against a world ruled and ordered
by Aristotelian logic; it is an attempt to transcend the reality
invented by reason. To accomplish this Kafka returns to the
myth, to the symbol, to the parable— in short, to those forms
that seek to arrive at reality by a path very different from

[8]
the one followed by reason. And so it has been said of the
works of Kafka: "To understand his message, his stupendous
revelation of a reality only half-seen before, it is necessary to
recognize that all of what really happens is fulfilled in accord
with the language of myth, because it is pure myth." Because
of this, many of the happenings in his stories remain pro-
foundly impenetrable. In Borges we also find a system of
myths but in it Borges has mythicized the "findings" of phi-
losophy and the "revelations" of theology. In this operation
(one must remember that the first tries to replace myth with
reason, and the second, exorcism with doctrine, in order to
understand the hugeness of the irony) Borges reduces these
ideas to creations of the imagination, to intuitions that now
are not fundamentally different from any other mythical form.
Hence, these "myths of the intelligence" would be returned
to the only reality to which they correspond: not to the
world created by gods, but to the one invented by men. While
the parables of Kafka have their only context in a reality
intuited by Kafka himself— hence Walter Benjamin's assertion
that "we do not have the doctrine which Kafka's parables
interpret"— the symbols coined by Borges always find their
precise context in theories and doctrines created by human
intelligence. There is not any philosopher of importance who
has escaped Borges' attention: from Parmenides to Bertrand
Russell he has followed with vigor the avatars of metaphysics.
No less vigorous is his devotion to theology: "Every culti-

vated man is a theologian, and faith is not a requisite," he has

written.

In presenting which impregnate Borges'

some of the ideas
works, we have already defined some of his central themes.
The chaos of the world and the order created by man could
be considered the abscissa and the ordinate of his narrative

[91
world. In the essay "A Vindication of the False Basilides,"
Borges summarizes the cosmogony of Basilides. According to
this Gnostic doctrine, there are 365 floors of sky between
God and human reality; each sky is presided over by seven
subordinate divinities; the deficient angels of the lowest sky
founded the visible sky, they molded the immaterial earth
which we walk on, and they divided it among themselves.
According to another system— that of Valentinus— a fallen

goddess, Achamot, has two children by a shadow who are

the founder of the world and the devil. The comment of
Borges is, "An admirable idea: the world imagined as an
essentially futile process, as a lateral and lost reflexion of old

celestial episodes, the creation as an accidental fact." A world

which is the bungled job of a decrepit divinity cannot have
pretensions of order and harmony. If there is an order, this

order responds to divine laws, not human ones. In both cases

the universe is impenetrable: human intelligence cannot recon-
struct an order which does not exist, or if it does is ruled
by divine laws which are inaccessible to men. From another
perspective, Borges has written of the Argentines, "For the
European the world is a cosmos where each person corre-
sponds intimately to the function he performs; for the Argen-
tine, it is a chaos." Doubly motivated by Gnostic theories and
by the Argentine's concept of the world, Borges arrives in

his stories at the view of the universe as a chaos. This is the

theme of "The Library of Babel": the description of the
Library traces an image of the universe. The Library, like the
world, is interminable, infinite. The chaotic character of the
Library is defined through Kurd Lasswitz's idea according to
which twenty-five symbols in their variations with repeti-
tion comprise everything which it is possible to express,

organizing chance and eliminating intelligence. But, adds

Borges, "For one reasonable line or one straightforward note

[10]
there are leagues of insensate cacophony, of verbal farragoes
and incoherencies." Two conclusions are drawn from this

statement: first, that the Library is total, and second, that the
nature of all its books is formless and chaotic. But the chaotic
condition of the books does not stop the librarians who, eager
to interpret them, venture conjectures about the language of
these impenetrable books: remote tongues, cryptograms, Por-
tuguese, Yiddish, and, finallv, "a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect
of Guarani, with classical Arabic inflections," which turns
out to be— the irony is evident— the sought language. With
sardonic humor, Borges pokes fun at the theories and sup-
posed solutions which the librarians propose in order to read
these unreadable books. The Library contains everything
which can be expressed in every language, everything which
has been and will be, but its books cannot be read. The
Library is a symbol of the world, and the chaos of the former
is but the chaos of the latter.

The vision of the universe as a chaotic library is comple-

mented by the representation of human life as a gigantic
lottery. In "The Library of Babel," the chaos of the world is
the work of a god; in "The Babylon Lottery," chance, which
determines the destiny of men, is the result of "the sacred
drawings of lots, which were carried out in the labyrinth of
the gods every seventy nights." In the beginning the lottery
was what it is today: a game of chance. Starting with a well-
known game of elementary procedure, in which the players
do not more than some copper coins, Borges amplifies
risk

and complicates it. First a few adverse lots are intermixed

with the favorable numbers, and at the end, the lottery com-
prises all the vicissitudes of every single life. Each act per-

formed by any man, no matter how insignificant, is a secret

decision of the Company. Like the laws of the universe, the
laws which govern the fate of men are beyond human reach.

mi
And also like the universe, which according to the Gnostic
theories is the rudimentary outline of a god that abandoned it

half-completed, the silent functioning of the Company, "com-

parable to that of God," makes room for all kinds of conjec-
tures: "one of them abominably insinuates that the Company
has not existed for centuries and that the sacred disorder of
our lives is purely, hereditary, traditional."
"The Babylon Lottery" is, then, a variation of the theme
of "The Library of Babel" (one need not be reminded that
the connotation of Babel or Babylonia is that of disorder and
confusion). The library is the symbol of the chaos of the
universe; the lottery shows this chaos translated into chance
which rules human life. In both cases the possibility of a
divine order is presented, of a labyrinth ordered according to
laws which are incomprehensible to human intelligence and
which are, consequently, undecipherable.
Besieged and stimulated by the chaos of the universe, the
human mind has striven to find an order, or the Order. The
history of every civilization records these endeavors which,
when they appear for the first time, seem to resolve all the
incoherencies and contradictions posed by the universe. But
since man, throughout time, has not ceased to draw diagrams
and to propose schemes, this plurality alone is the token of
his failure. "A philosophic doctrine," writes Borges, "is at the
beginning a verisimilar description of the universe; years pass
and it is a mere chapter— when not a paragraph or a name in

the history of philosophy." The impossibility of permeating

the divine order of the universe suggests the possibility of an
imaginary and fantastic universe, constructed according to a

human order. That universe is Tlon. The nations of this

planet are congenitally idealists. Their citizens "conceive the
universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop
in space but successively in time," according to the hypothesis

[12]
of Berkeley. Borges describes this peculiar way of reasoning

of Tlon's inhabitants by means of an eloquent example:

The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon, and, later,

of the countryside on fire, and, later, of a half-extinguished cigar
which caused the blaze is considered an example of association of
ideas. (Labyrinths, p. 9)

Examining the arguments of the idealist conception of the

universe in the light of empirical science, Bertrand Russell
has written: "It has become natural to suspect the fallacy in
any deduction of which the conclusion appears to contradict

patent facts." For the inhabitants of Tlon, the empirical world

of concrete realities, like a fire, exists solely as an idea: "the
world is constructed by means of logic, with little or no appeal
to concrete experience." This last assertion is Russell's, and
it refers not to Borges' story but to the classical tradition in
philosophy. To give body to these fallacies, to reconstruct on
a fantastic planet the world constructed by idealist logic, to

create a reality with the unrealities of idealism, is what Borges

has done in his story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
In "The Library of Babel," Borges presents the world as
a library of chaotic books which its librarians cannot read
but which they interpret incessantly. In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius," the interpretations of the universe proposed by phi-
losophy (read "the librarians"), and in particular by "the most
ancient and the most widely divulged among them: idealism,"
become a universe in the planet Tlon. The Library, for its
chaotic nature, is unclassifiable. "Why not fall under the spell

of Tlon and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an

ordered planet?" Here Borges touches the gist of his inven-
tion: since the world is by some subordi-
a labyrinth devised
nate god, its order is blocked to the human mind: "Tlon may
be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a laby-

[13]
rinth destined to be deciphered by men." Tlon is a planet
which would be the Earth if the idealist doctrine were the
true description of reality; but Tlon is only an invention
whose fictitious character is already revealed at the beginning,
in thenumber of pages of the Volume XI of A First Encyclo-
pedia of Tlon which describes it: 1001.
The essential skepticism of Borges is a lesson in fidelity to

the truth, although truth seems unattainable. By reducing those

symmetries with appearance of order (the philosophies of all

times) to pastimes of men, and by showing that the rigor of

Tlon (all the forms of the idealist tradition) "is a rigor of
chessmasters," Borges has taught that to view the world
through such spectacles is to falsify it to disintegration. "Con-
tact with Tlon and the ways of Tlon," says Borges at the

end of the story, "have disintegrated this world." The rigor

of Tlon— the longing for an order embodied in human schemes
—has already obliterated history, making it harmonious:

A scattered dynasty of solitary men

has changed the face of the
world. Their task continues. If our foresight is not mistaken, a
hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred
volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlon. (Labyrinths, p. 18)

The achievement of Borges in dealing with a theme of such

deep philosophic roots lies in his having given an artistic

projection to a problem which Russell defined in equal terms

on the speculative level of philosophy. In Russell's Our Knowl-
edge of the External World, on pointing out the function of
logic in idealist philosophy, he says of the classical tradition:

Thus the world is constructed by means of logic, with little or

no appeal to concrete experience. Thus, while it liberates
. . .

imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as

to what the world is.

[14]
Borges presents this world constructed by logic— a world
which imagination has created but which only adds a library
of rich inventions to the world which it aims to penetrate-
in the planet Tlon. To see in Tlon the description of the
universe would be as preposterous as Novalis' sorcerer "who
bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantas-
magorias for autonomous apparitions." The vision of an
ordered universe is an old dream of that mind whose product
is philosophical idealism. "The classical tradition in philos-
ophy," writes Russell,

is the last surviving child of two very diverse parents: the Greek
belief in reason, and the medieval belief in the tidiness of the uni-
verse. To the schoolmen, who lived amid wars, massacres, and
pestilences, nothing appeared so delightful as safety and order. In
their idealising dreams, it was safety and order that they sought:
the universe of Thomas Aquinas or Dante is as small and neat as a
Dutch interior.

Tlon is that universe ordered by the metaphysics of the clas-

sical tradition, Tlon is the anti-chaos dreamed by the human
mind. Borges' themes are nourished by those dreams of order
dreamed in the chaos of the Library. From the chaotic view
of the universe emerges that favorite image of Borges, the
labyrinth. The labyrinth expresses both sides of the coin: it

has an irreversible order if one knows the solution (the gods,

God) and it can be at the same time a chaotic maze if the
solution constitutes an unattainable secret (men). The laby-
rinth represents to a greater or lesser degree the vehicle
through which Borges carries his world view to almost all

his stories.

In his essay "Forms of a Legend," Borges has recalled that

all the religions of India, and in particular Buddhism, teach

[151
that the world is illusory: "The minute narration of the game
(of a Buddha) is what Lalitavistara means, according to
Winternitz; a game or a dream is, for the Mahayana, the
life of the Buddha on earth, which is another dream." This
doctrine of the world as a dream of Someone or of No One
becomes another of the main themes in Borges' writings. The
story "The Circular Ruins" carries as an epigraph a line from
Lewis Carroll's Through the Loo king-Glass, "And if he left

off dreaming about you . . . ," which already hints at the

theme of the story. A man arrives at a temple on fire and
decides to realize there the magical project of his life: to
dream up a man. After many nights of failure, insomnia, and
frustrations— which form the body of the story— the wizard
dreams a man, but one who neither rises nor speaks. The
sphinx of the destroyed temple hears the wizard's pleas and
promises to animate the dreamed ghost in such a manner that
all creatures, except fire and the dreamer, will believe him
to be a man of flesh and blood. When the wizard understands
that the dreamed man is ready to be born, he kisses him for
the first time and sends him to another temple. One night, two
boatmen bring the wizard news of a magic man capable of
walking on fire without burning himself, and the wizard
understands that the dreamed son has ascertained that he is

merely a semblance. One morning, a fire in the abandoned

sanctuary omens the end of the wizard's days. He realizes

this and walks into the flames, but the fire does not burn him;
instead it caresses him without heat. "With relief," concludes
Borges, "with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he
too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another." Like his

dreamed son, the dreamer also is none other than the dream
of another wizard. The existence of two dreamers implies the
possibility of an infinite series of dreamers. This possibility is

reinforced by the circular form of the temple (circular time,

[16]
according to which all things repeat themselves cyclically,
is another of Borges' favorite themes), by the number of
nights that the wizard needs to procreate his dream: 1001
(Borges has made reference in his essays to night DCII of
A Thousa?id and One Nights: "That night the Sultan hears
his own story from Scheherazade's mouth," which suggests
the vast possibility of an "infinite and circular" repetition),
and by the meditations of the wizard who imagines his unreal
son carrying out the same rites, in other circular ruins, as he
does now. "The Circular Ruins" gives expression to the Bud-
dhist idea of the world as a dream, or to the hallucinatory
character of the world as the idealist philosophers postulate.
Buddhism and idealism fuse in Schopenhauer's theory of the
Will. Significantly, Schopenhauer had in his room next to the
bust of Kant a bronze of the Buddha, and his theory of the
abolition of Will, as the road to reach freeing Nothingness,
is the adaptation of the Nirvana of Buddhism to Western
philosophy. "Indian philosophy," he wrote in his The World
as Will and Idea, "streams back to Europe and will produce
a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought." Borges
gives body in his narration to the idealist view of the world
according to the Buddhist formulation. While Schopenhauer
claimed that some paragraphs of his work The World as Will
and Idea had been dictated by the Holy Ghost, Borges opens
his story with a quotation from Through the Loo king-Glass.
Let us remember that the quotation is taken from the chapter
'Tweedledum and Tweedledee": Tweedledee explains to
Alice that the sounds she hears are the Red King's snorings,
who sleeps and who is dreaming about her, and if he left off

dreaming about her, she, the small Alice, could go out— bang!
—just like a candle, and she would be nowhere, since "you
are only a sort of thing in his dream." Thus, with a quota-
tion from Lewis Carroll's children's classic, Borges transfers

[17]
the Buddhist doctrine to a line extracted from that fantastic
story. With finesse, with subtlety, Buddhist doctrine is re-

duced to a marvel of the enchanted world behind the looking-

glass.

The idea of the universe as the book of God appears in

several of his essays. In one of them ("On the Cult of Books"),

Borges recalls a thought of Bacon according to which God
offers us two books: "The first, the volume of the Scriptures,
reveals His will; the second, the volume of the creatures,
reveals His power." For Carlyle, "universal history was a
Sacred Scripture: one that we decipher and write uncertainly,
and in which we also are written." In his story "The Dead
Man," Borges capitalizes on this idea. Benjamin Otalora, a

compadrito (Argentine hoodlum) from Buenos Aires, has

killed a man and flees to Uruguay. There he joins Azevedo
Bandeira's gang and begins a life of apprenticeship, smuggling,
and adventures. Otalora covets the position of his chief, Ban-
deira, and resolves to replace him: instead of obeying Ban-
deira's orders, he corrects or inverts them. During one night
of alcohol, Bandeira gets up like one who remembers an
obligation and decides that the end has come for the Argen-
tine. "Otalora realizes," concludes Borges,

before he dies, that they have betrayed him from the start, that
he has been condemned to death; that they have allowed him to
make love, to command, to triumph, because they had already
given him up for dead, because in Bandeira's eyes he was already
dead. Suarez, almost scornfully, pulls the trigger. (A Personal
Anthology, pp. 31-32)

In the epilogue to El Aleph Borges says of Bandeira, "He

is a man of Rivera or Cerro Lago and he is also a coarse
divinity, a mulatto and wild version of the incomparable
Sunday of Chesterton." Otalora's destiny is a line in Bandeira's

[18]
book: all the vicissitudes of his life are words in that line in

which his destiny has already been set. Otalora writes them
without suspecting that his acts are repeating a predetermined
text in the book of the mulatto divinity that is Bandeira and
that in this book he, Otalora, who thinks that he is worth
more than all the Uruguayans combined, is already dead.
This tragic contrast between a man who believes himself

to be the master and the maker of his fate and a text or divine

plan in which his fortune has already been written parallels

the problem of man with respect to the universe: the world
is impenetrable, but the human mind never ceases to propose
schemes. Man's ambition to resolve the enigma of the uni-
verse is as vain as Otalora's endeavor: Otalora wants to map
out his destiny according to a human geometry, alien to the

design which Someone has already drawn and which he does

not; know about. In this book (i.e., the universe), God or

-Someone has already written out our fate. For us this text is
illegible because, explains Borges, quoting Bloy, "there is no
human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is.
No one knows what he has come to this world to do, to what
his acts, feelings, and ideas correspond, or what his real
name is."

Borges has said that "Death and the Compass" is a detec-

tive story. It is so because it responds to the theory of the

genre, but it also exceeds its limits. Lonrot, a sophisticated
and perspicacious investigator, now takes the place of Otalora,
and Scharlach, a famous gunman, that of Bandeira. Lonrot is

certain of having discovered the mechanism of the three mur-

ders perpetrated at regular intervals of one month, and the
conclusion of an inevitable fourth is irrevocable. Lonrot, fol-
lowing the dictates of an impeccable logic, tries to discover the

murderer without suspecting that he himself will be the vic-

tim of the fourth murder which he believed he had solved.

[19]
Lonrot thought that he had discovered the scheme which the
murderer had planned; what he really didwas to follow the
games and stratagems of a plan invented by his avenger to
trap him. The illusion of having unraveled the plan presents
again, from another perspective, the problem of human help-
lessness to cope with the fatality of destiny. In "The Dead
Man," Bandeira is the divinity who has already decided the
fate of Otalora; in "Death and the Compass," Scharlach
weaves a labyrinth around the man who jailed his brother.

Like Otalora, who believes that he is living his own life, Lonrot
believes that he has solved the mystery of the murders; like

the former, what the latter has done is to unweave a labyrinth

that is part of Scharlach's plan for killing him.

The dreamer "The Circular Ruins," the wild divinity of
of
"The Dead Man," and the gunman Scharlach of "Death and
the Compass" are projections of an inexorable will that has
dreamed or written the world. The wizard, who dreams a man
only to find out later that he himself is a dream; Otalora,
whose plan was already anticipated in the plan of Bandeira;
and Lonrot, the pursued pursuer, are all manifestations of
human will. Their efforts to understand divine will are con-
demned beforehand to failure. Furthermore, even these vain
efforts have been foreseen in the dream of someone who has
dreamed them, or in the book of a divinity who has written
them.
In these stories we recognize the condition of man's fate
reduced to a fragile and contingent manifestation of an un-
appealable Will (the evocation of Schopenhauer is inevitable).
This will that dreams or writes us, and pf which we are im-
perfect simulacra (as in the poem "The Golem") or pieces
in an infinite game (as in the poem "The Game of Chess"),
is God. Behind God, however, Borges suggests the possibility
of a second god who repeats the dream, the text, or the game,

[20]
and so on ad infinitum, as in the case of the dreamers of "The
Circular Ruins." This insistence on the infinite character of
the dream is not fortuitous. Besides being a recurrent motif
which in greater or lesser degree appears in almost all his

stories, the infinite is translated on the stylistic level as an

insistent adjective whose repetition permits us to define it as

a "linguistic tic." Borges tells us of an "infinite process,"

"infinite villages," "infinite lot drawings," "infinite histories,"
"infinite reasons," "infinite punishment," "infinite cipher,"
"infinite series," "infinite things," "infinite veneration," "infi-

nite pity," "infinite distances," "infinite sand," "infinite term,"

etc. This adjective and a few others which are repeated with
almost obsessive frequency ("vast," "remote," "chaotic,"
"inextricable," "intricate," "secret," "undecipherable," "enig-
matic," "inexhaustible") express certain key attributes of
Borges' world view and are indicative of his preference for
certain ideas. The infinite is the only dimension which suits

a world conceived as an insoluble labyrinth. Its function is

clear: the spatial and temporal infinity of the universe accen-

tuates its chaotic nature and reinforces its impenetrable
condition.

The theme of the world as a dream of God is related to

the pantheistic notion that "everything is everywhere and
any one thing is all things." According to the pantheistic idea,

as formulated by Plotinus, the world is which God

a spectacle

conceives, represents, and contemplates. Applying the possi-

bilities by this doctrine, Borges sees the palace con-
offered
structed by Kubla Khan and the poem "Kubla Khan" by
Coleridge as fragments of the work of a superhuman per-
former. In another essay Borges asks how the Rubaiyat of
Fitzgerald could be explicated and then replies, "The English-
man could have re-created the Persian, because both were,

[211
essentially, God— or momentary faces of God." The idea that
anything is all things may be the solution not only to the
enigmas of history but also to the riddles posed in his stories.

In "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," Borges first presupposes

the existence of a novel and then proceeds to summarize and
comment on it. In the apocryphal novel, a law student in
Bombay decides to dedicate his life to the search for the
man who is the origin of "a clarity" which he once perceived
in a very vile and abhorrent man. He embarks on a long
pilgrimage through Hindustan, and finds that all the men he
interrogates possess a portion of Al-Mu'tasim, the source of
the clarity for which he is looking, and that all are mere
mirrors of the divinity, numbers in an ascending progression
whose final term is named Al-Mu'tasim. After many years,
the student arrives at a gallery, asks for Al-Mu'tasim, and the
voice of this man urges him to come in. At this point the
novel ends. At the end of his note to the novel, Borges in-
cludes another note, this time a footnote. The note-to-the-note
contains another summary, now of a poem: Mantiq ut-Tair
(Colloquy of the Birds), written by the Persian mystic Ferid
ed-Din Attar. In the poem, Simurg, the king of the birds,

drops a splendid feather in the center of China. The birds

resolve to look for it. After some unlucky episodes, only
thirty birds reach the mountain of Simurg (which means
"thirty birds"). "At last they contemplate it: they perceive
that they are the Simurg, and that the Simurg is each one
of them and all of them." This poem, which no longer is an
apocryphal creation of Borges, resolves the enigmatic ending
of the hypothetical novel: the identity of the searcher and
the sought. The student of Bombay is Al-Mu'tasim, and
Al-Mu'tasim is the student and all men.
The poem Mantiq ut-Tair is an allegory which describes
the religious experience of the Sufis: the Simurg is God and

[22]
all men are the Simurg. In presenting the events of a detective
story in the model of an allegory which expresses the panthe-
istic belief of Sufism, Borges gives evidence again of the
aesthetic value of religious doctrines. The inclusion of a sum-
mary of the poem in a summary of a nonexistent work re-

minds us of the Borgesian device which mixes real persons

with fictitious ones. The effect is the same: the fictitious (the
detective story) becomes full of reality, and the real (the
poem) takes on an aura of unreality. Furthermore, the inclu-
sion of one note within another, of one summary within an-
other, and the reduction of both to different versions of the
same doctrine are a form of expressing in the structure of
the story the pantheistic idea that anything is all things.
"The Theologians," Aurelian and John of
In the story
Pannonia, Roman theologians, wage a secret battle. Although
both serve on the same side and fight against the same enemy-
heresy— the attacks of the second surpass in power and efficacy
those of the first. The influence of John of Pannonia over-
shadows the work of Aurelian: in spite of Aurelian's efforts,

John of Pannonia is designated by Rome to refute the heresy

of "the Monotones." When a new heresy— that of the "His-
triones"— threatens the Empire, Aurelian denounces John of
Pannonia with accusations taken from John's own refutation
of the Monotones. John is executed at the stake, accused of
a heresy which before had been the refutation of the heretics
of the Wheel. The treatise of John of Pannonia, which was
the official orthodoxy in the times of the Monotones, thus
becomes heterodoxy in the times of the Histriones. Aurelian,
who had accused John of pantheistic heresy, discovers upon
arriving in heaven that "for the unfathomable divinity, he and
John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the
abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused)
formed one single person." The pantheistic notion, by equal-

[23]
izing the orthodox with the heretic in a paradox woven with
the theologies of all times, has an unquestionable revealing
function, and the fantastic story gains a far-reaching signifi-
cance. To verify this one need only recall that the same faith
and belief of those Christians who in Roman times were
thrown into the circus arenas to be mangled by beasts would,
centuries later, ignite a blaze no less cruel than the Roman
lions and whose Inquisitional flames would destroy thousands
of men who did not share this faith. Or, perhaps, recall the
tragic destiny of Baruch Spinoza, the son of Jew- a family of

ish refugees who fled the intolerance of the Inquisition, and

was expelled and excommunicated from community in his

1656 by the intolerance of the Jews of Amsterdam. Thus do

the times transform victims into executioners, accused into
accusers. If the victim can be the executioner, if the orthodox
believer can be the heretic, if the accuser can be the accused,
why not accept the possibility of a unique and universal iden-
tity—God, the Simurg, Someone— and that "every man is an
organ put forth by the divinity in order to perceive the
world"?
The pantheistic notion that one man is all men implies the
negation of individual identity, or more exactly, the reduction
of all individuals to a general and supreme identity which
contains all and at the same time makes all contained in each
one. In the stories "The Shape of the Sword" and "Abenjacan
the Bojari, Dead in His Labyrinth," this notion functions as
a narrative technique. In the first story, the hero tells of a
betrayal in which he is the victim and his fighting companion
is the traitor; in the middle of the story the narrator, who is

the one betrayed, interpolates this observation, "What one

man does is something done, in some measure, by all men,"
which anticipates the denouement: the betrayed is in reality

[24]
the traitor, and the traitor becomes the betrayed. The inver-
sion of subjects in the story, first by the narrator (at the
fictitious level of the character), and afterwards by the out-
come of the story (which is the fictitious level of the author),
suggests the possibility of a third traitor, or of a fourth, or
fifth, or of an infinite number of traitors, because any single
man is all men and "for that reason," explains Borges, "it is

not unjust that a disobedience in a garden should contaminate

all humanity and that the crucifixion of Jew should a single

be sufficient to save it." In "Abenjacan the Bojari, Dead in

His Labyrinth," King Abenjacan is assassinated by his cousin
Zaid in a labyrinth which the king had constructed in Corn-
wall to defend himself against Zaid, who pursued him. At the
end we discover that the fugitive who constructed the laby-
rinth was not the king but Zaid, and that the pursuer is not
Zaid but the king. The labyrinth was constructed not by the
pursued but by the pursuer, and its purpose is not to lose the
pursuer (as is said at the beginning) but to attract him. Zaid
has made himself pass for the king, but throughout the entire
story Zaid is the true king. The individuality of people is only
apparent: every man is all men, every man is a feature of the

only face which contains all: Judas can be Jesus. This last

hypothesis is presented in the story "Three Versions of Judas,"

which could just as well have been considered an essay were
it not for the fact that the three theses examined, and their
author, are a "Christologic fantasy" of Borges. The first thesis
sustains the idea that Judas Iscariot in some way reflects Jesus:
the Word (Jesus Christ) had been lowered to mortal condi-
tion; Judas, a disciple of the Word, lowered himself to become
an informer in representation of all men and the Word. The
second version declares that the ascetic, for the greater glory
of God, vilifies and mortifies his flesh; Judas did the same

[25]
with the spirit: "He renounced honor, morality, peace and
the kingdom of heaven, just as others less heroically, renounce
pleasure." The third formulation stems from the first two:

God made Himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy,
a man to the point of reprobation and the abyss. To save us, He
could have chosen any of the destinies which make up the com-
plex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras
or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny: He was Judas.
(Labyrinths, p. 99)

As in the case of "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," where the

structure functions as an expressive medium of the story's
meaning, in "Three Versions of Judas" the essay form is far

from being a whim, it responds to a constant exchange of

the fictitious with the real which takes place throughout all

Borges' narratives. Together with illustrious authors, prestig-

ious books, and respected theories, Borges intermixes fictitious

authors, apocryphal books, and invented theories, and of his

short story he says, "Whoever goes over this article . .
."

The artifice is part of the battle to confuse the reader: confuse

him up to the point of forcing him to accept the false as true,
up to the point of preventing him from defining the identity
of things and making him feel that anything can be all things,

as Judas is Jesus. The essay structure is part of the purpose

of derealization, not only because the fictitious is presented
as real, but also because we believe we are reading an essay
when in reality we are reading a fantastic tale (in an other-
wise very competent bibliography of Borges' works, this story

is listed as an essay).
A derivation of pantheism is the idea that "God is the
primordial nothingness." He is no one in order to be every-
one. In the essay "From Someone to Nobody," Borges studies
this idea and applies it to Shakespeare. Citing Hazlitt he says,

[26]
"Intimately he [Shakespeare] was nothing, but he was every-
thing that others were, or could be." In "Everything and
Nothing," the idea becomes a tale: a young man of twenty-
odd arrives in London and becomes an actor; no one before
him had ever been as many men as that man. Before dying,
he addresses God:

"I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man:
myself." The voice of God from a whirlwind: "Neither
replied
am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work,
my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you,
who, like me, are many persons— and none." (Dreamtigers, p. 47)

The idea also appears with reference to George Bernard Shaw,

who wrote in a letter: "I understand everything and everyone,
and am nobody and nothing," and it undoubtedly constitutes
the axis of the story "The Immortal." The incongruencies
and anachronisms that at the beginning of the tale confuse
the reader so much are clearedup at the end, and the story
recovers an essential coherence which in all of Borges' stories
binds the most contradictory details into an unquestionable
unity. At an unknown date, Cartaphilus drinks from "the
secret river which cleanses men of death." Immortalized, he suc-
ceeds in entering the City of the Immortals, and since, "if we
postulate an infinite period of time . . . , the impossible
thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once," Joseph
Cartaphilus, an antique dealer from Smyrna, is Homer, and
also the tribune Rufus, and all men: a militant of Stamford
in 1066, a translator of the seven voyages of Sinbad in the
seventh century of the Hegira, a chess player in the jail of
Samarkand, an astrologer in Bikaner and Bohemia, a subscriber

to the six volumes of Pope's Iliad in 1714. When "the immor-

tal" succeeds in leaving the last cellar of the City of the
Immortals, he discovers that the troglodyte who accompanies

[27]
him Homer. Like God, like Shakespeare, like Shaw, the
is

troglodyte (Homer), "lying on the sand like a small ruinous

lava sphinx," was nothing and no one in order to be every-
one. Borges has said that this story is "an outline of an ethic
for immortals." The governing principle of this ethic is the
pantheistic notion that Cartaphilus, immortalized, defines in
order to explain his manifold identity: "No one is anyone,
one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa,
Iam god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I

am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not

exist." Cartaphilus has lost his individual identity and he can
now be everybody and, consequently, Homer. One day he
drinks from the second river, which returns him to his mortal
condition. Before dying, he confesses: "I have been Homer;
shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be
all men; I shall be dead." There is here an apparent contradic-
tion which can only be explained with the aid of the panthe-
istic doctrine: God, Shakespeare, Homer, are immortal be-
cause they live in everyone, and they have died because to be
everyone they have had to renounce their identity, which is

a form of nonbeing, of dying. Or, perhaps more simply, the

Shakespeare "of the brothels and taverns of London," "the
retired impresario . . . who concerned himself with loans,
lawsuits, and petty usury," "the weary actor who one day
sold his theater and returned to the village of his birth," had
to live and die so that the other could be all or almost all

men and could live eternally in Caesar, Juliet, Macbeth, and

in "so many kings who die by the sword and so many un-

happy lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously ago-

nize." In an interview, when asked about the impersonality
of his stories, Borges replied:

No. I have felt them very deeply, so deeply that I have told them

[28]
using strange symbols so that people might not find out that they
were all more or less autobiographical. The stories were about
myself, my personal experiences.

Through the destiny of Homer, or of Shakespeare, Borges

expresses intuitions and feelings whose roots are in himself,
in his own manner of feeling the intricate and complex dimen-
sions of the human personality. In the essay "Borges and I,"
Borges gives us the context in which "The Immortal" should
be read:

It's Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about

the other one, it's

Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the

arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me
through the mail and I see his name on an academic ballot or in a
biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-cen-
tury typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson's prose. The
other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that
converts them into the attributes of an actor. It would be too
much to say that our relations are hostile; I live, I allow myself to
live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature
justifies my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has man-
aged to write some worthwhile pages, but those pages cannot save
me, perhaps because the good part no longer belongs to anyone,
not even to the other one, but rather to the Spanish language and
only a few instants of me will be able to survive in the other one
[ . ]. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything
. .

and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one. (Dream-

tigers, p. 51)

At "The Immortal" there is a postscript. There

the end of
Borges indicates some of the works which served him as
sources for his tale. The indication is not only a manifesta-
tion of the intellectual probity which in Borges is proverbial,
but by presenting the possibility of the apocrvphal character
of Cartaphilus' document, made with interpolations and intru-
sions from other authors (Pliny, De Quincey, Descartes,
Shaw), by declaring that his story contains elements from

[29]
other works, Borges restates, from another perspective, the
theme presented in the story. He has dedicated an essay to
the idea of pantheistic lineage, that one single person has
edited all the books that there are in the world and that all

the authors are one single author. Like world history, which
according to pantheism is the history of a single man, the
history of all literature is the history of a single book, the
work of a single author. The theme of "The Immortal" is the
pantheistic idea that a man is nothing and no one in order to
be all men. The structure of the tale re-creates, in part, the

implications of the theme. "Words, displaced and mutilated

words, words of others," says Borges at the end of the story,
referring to the apocryphal character of Cartaphilus' docu-
ment, "were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the
centuries." The narrative of Cartaphilus, like Shelley's "infi-
nitepoem" written by all the poets of the world, like the
Greek and Latin centos, like Ben Jonson's Discoveries, like

the Virgilius evangelizans of Alexander Ross, like the artifices

of George Moore and T. S. Eliot, is a text which contains
other texts.
A derivation of the pantheistic idea is also his microcosmic
image of the universe and of human destiny, summarized in

the following statements taken from his essays: "any thing is

all things," "universal history lies within each man," "any

destiny consists of a single moment" The necessary conclu-
sion is Leon Bloy's assertion, which Borges cites: "everything
is a symbol." In the stories "The Zahir," "The Aleph," and
"The God's Script," a microcosmic image of the universe
appears as three different symbols: the Zahir of Islam, the
Aleph of the Kabbalah's mystics, and the Wheel of the reli-

gions of India. In "The Zahir" Borges says, paraphrasing

Tennyson, that "there is no fact, however insignificant, that
does not involve universal history and the infinite concatena-

[30]
tion of cause and effect . . . , the visible world, is implicit
in every phenomenon." This phenomenon can be the Zahir, a

coin which Borges, narrator-protagonist, receives as change

in a bar after paying for a drink. "Zahir in Arabic," explains
Borges himself, "means 'notorious,' 'visible'; in this sense it is

one of the ninety-nine names of God." In the Koran (Surah

LV, 3) one reads that Zahir— the evident, the manifest— "is
one of the ninety-nine attributes of God; He is the First and
the Last, the Visible and the Occult." Zahir, then, is one of
the Islamic designations for God and therefore, according to
the pantheistic thesis, a designation for the universe. Now,
since "every coin in the world is a symbol of those famous
coins which glitter in history and fable," in order to illustrate
his thesis, Borges enumerates eleven of these coins for which
the Zahir becomes the symbol, and, thus, a representation of

universal history.
In "The Aleph" Borges also employs a symbol of established
tradition in the mystical doctrines of the Kabbalah. The Jew-
ish mystics saw the Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew
alphabet, as the spiritual root of all letters and the carrier, in

its essence, of the whole alphabet and therefore of all the

elements of human speech. Thus, the Aleph is the first letter

of the alphabet and also all that can possibly be expressed.

According to Hassidic tradition, this letter was the only one
that the people heard directly from the mouth of God, and
this singular virtue makes it a symbol of his Will, that is, of
the universe. Borges, again author and character, sees the
Aleph in the cellar of a house. It is not a coin— as in the case

of the Zahir— it is a microcosmic vision and, like the Aleph

of the Kabbalists, it contains the world. Upon describing this
infinite image, Borges presents one of the essential limitations
of literature with respect to reality: the successive character
of language as opposed to the simultaneity of reality. In sim-

[31]
ilar situations, he says, the mystics opt for the emblem. Borges
adopts this solution in "The Zahir"; in "The Aleph," on the
other hand, he confronts us with the mysterious apparition:
challenging the deficiencies of language, he puts all the vast-
ness of the universe into a small iridescent sphere. How- does
he accomplish this? By using a long series of anaphoric sen-
tences which sketch the chaos of the world. Leo Spitzer's
so-called chaotic enumerations, which in Whitman make the
most unlike things cluster together in a whole to express the
perfect unity of nature, in Borges convey his chaotic view
of the world. The levels of meaning and form (now m the
level of style, as before in that of structure) converge in the

performance of the same function: the representation of the

chaos of the universe.
This stylistic device is also used in the story "The God's
Script." The protagonist, buried in the darkness of a prison
which he shares with a tiger, searches for the magical sen-
tence which God wrote on the first day of creation. The
miracle occurs, but this time the representation of the uni-
verse is less visual. It is not a coin or an iridescent sphere,
but a very high Wheel, "which was not before my eyes, nor
behind me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time."
The Indian religions, in particular Hinduism, use the "Bhava-
cakra" (the Wheel of life) to represent the various spheres
of existence in which the infinite concatenation of causes and
effects operates. Like the Aleph, the Wheel of the story is

infinite within its borders: it is formed by everything that

will be, that is, Brahma of the Bhagavad-
and that was, like the

Gita. The same anaphoric "I saw" which heads the enumera-
tions in the vision of the Aleph is repeated in the description
of the Wheel, but while in "The Aleph" the enumerations
outline the image of the chaos of the world, in a given "now,"
in "The God's Script" the description of the Wheel traces

[32]
the motley and chaotic history of the universe: all times and
events of the universe are contained in it.

Borges has utilized three pantheistic symbols from three

them the universal micro-
different religions to represent in
cosm: the Zahir of Islam, the Aleph of Judaism, and the
Bhavacakra of Hinduism. Again Borges extracts from theology
the yarn with which he weaves his fiction, thus showing that
his interest in these doctrines resides in their aesthetic value.

By taking them down from their divine pedestal and convert-

ing them into fantastic literature, Borges sublimates his es-

sential skepticism into art. From this stems part of his original-
ity. By making literature with the doctrines of theology and
the speculations of philosophy, he has shown that their worth
rests not on being the revelation of the divine Will or the
outline of the universal order which for Borges
(pursuits
exceed the power of the human mind) but on being inventions
or creations of man's restless imagination.
In -the; same way that the universe can be reduced to a cipher
(a letter, a coin), "any destiny at all,however long and com-
plicated, in reality consists of a single moment: the moment
in which a man once and for all knows who he is." In the
story "Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," Borges says, "It is

not my purpose to repeat his story. Of the days and nights

which compose it, only one night is of interest to me." Not
only the world has its microcosmic symbol but an instant from
any life can also be the microcosm of its destiny. In the case
of Cruz, the hero of the story, this moment is one night: that
when on confronting Martin Fierro (the character in
night the
poem of the same name who embodies the archetype of the
gaucho) he understands his destiny to be a rebel and, accept-
ing this fate, throws off his soldier's cap and begins to fight
alongside the deserter (Fierro) against the group of soldiers
he was part of and whose mission was to capture Fierro. This

[33]
story begins with a literary reality: a paraphrase of the ninth
chapter of Martin Fierro book which Borges has de-
(the
fined, in an Argentine context, as a work "whose matter may
be all things to all men"). But Borges describes the fight not
from Fierro's point of view, as in the poem, but from Cruz's.
This inversion is a way of emphasizing the revealing meaning
of an act otherwise arbitrary: Cruz cannot explain the logic
of his desertion, but on that night, on confronting Martin
Fierro, he accepts forever his intimate destiny. The accept-
ance of a fate which is known to be inexorable but whose
meaning escapes all logic is a recurrent theme in Borges. Sim-
ilar to the case of Cruz is that of Dructulft in "Story of the
Warrior and the Captive," that of zur Linde in "Deutsches
Requiem," and that of the Minotaur in "The House of
Asterion." All of them are redeemed in the fulfillment of a

destiny whose logic they do not comprehend, but which

sweeps them away "by a secret impulse, an impulse more
profound than reason." In "Inferno I, 32," Borges presents
the problem again and parallels the fate of a leopard and the
fate of Dante. God reveals to them the secret of their fates
in a dream, which the beast and the poet, enlightened, accept.
Upon awakening, both recognize the divine inexorableness of
a fate which they have accepted but which they no longer
understand because, concludes Borges, "the machinery of the
world is far too complex for the simplicity of men," or of
beasts.

In the story "The End," Borges returns to the poem Martin

Fierro, this time to narrate a revenge nonexistent in the poem.
Toward the end of the poem, a payada (guitar contest) is

described between Martin Fierro and a Negro, the brother of

a man whom Fierro has killed in a fight. When the Negro is
defeated a dispute seems inevitable, but is finally averted. Of
"The End" Borges has said, "Nothing or almost nothing is an

[34]
invention of mine; everything in it is implicit in a famous
book, and I have merely been the first to reveal, or at least to
declare it." In the storv, the fight which was averted in the

poem occurs and that afternoon the Negro kills Martin Fierro.
"Now he was no one," concludes Borges. "More accurately,
he became the stranger: he had no further mission on earth,
but he had killed a man." The afternoon of the fight not only
holds the fate of the Negro, it also exhausts it: now that his
fate has been fulfilled, the rest of his life is a shadow.
In "The Secret Miracle," Hladik is about to be shot without
having finished a play, The Enemies, which justifies him and
which explains his existence. He asks God for a year to finish
the work. God concedes this to him when the firing squad is

lined up and he is standing against the wall. Hladik carries out

his fate in the instant between the command to fire and its ex-
ecution. God stopped time so that in those fleeting and infinite

seconds Hladik could justify Him and justify himself: Hladik

gave his play an end. The meaning of his whole existence is

contained in the instant that a raindrop takes to slide down his

cheek, and which for God is a year.

Every individual is "unique and unfathomable," Borges has

written, and an indefinite and almost infinite number of biogra-
phies of a man would not exhaust his fate. Like the universe,
a life is ungraspable. The pantheistic microcosm offers Borges
the possibility of representing not a life— a task as unattainable
as the ambition to draw the scheme of the world— but its sym-
bol, that instant which contains it as in a cipher: the morning
for Cruz, the afternoon for the Negro, and 9:02 a.m. for
Hladik.

For Borges, time is the central problem of metaphysics, and

so it is only natural that time becomes one of the main themes
of his work. Of all the temporal schemes, the one Borges

[35]
prefers and the most frequent in his work is cyclical or cir-
cular time. In various essays, Borges has studied the vicissitudes
of this doctrine, from its Pythagorean genesis to Nietzsche's
renovated formulation. Of all the versions of the eternal re-
turn, Borges seems to enjoy most the one that considers the
cycles which repeat themselves infinitely not as identical, but
as similar. Such a conception of time promises an interpretation
of reality with fertile consequences, and Borges applies it in-

geniously in his essays, poems, and stories. In the story "Theme

of the Traitor and the Hero," whose title in itself indicates

that reality is seen sub specie aetemitatis, we witness an assassi-

nation that is a replica of that of Julius Caesar. Further on we
find out that more than reproducing the circumstances of the
historical death of Julius Caesar, it follows the plot of Shake-
speare's Julius Caesar. When we are about to believe that we
are seeing in Fergus Kilpatrick's death (hero of an Irish re-
bellion) a cyclical repetition of the assassination of the Roman
hero, Borges reveals the artifice to us: there is no such repeti-

tion of cycles; the plan of Kilpatrick's assassination has been

copied from Shakespeare's tragedy. This story is another typi-
cal exponent of the incessant exchange between fiction and
reality where Borges delights in confounding one with the
other. At the beginning of his narrative he tells us that the
story is a plot imagined under Chesterton's influence. Later
the story is compared with a historic fact, and Borges adds
details (dates, names, circumstances, places) which give his

character a distinct historical relief (by the middle of the tale,

Kilpatrick is already referred to as a historical character).

When the fictitious is converted into historic reality, the

historic (the assassination of Caesar) becomes fiction. The

story of the Irish hero's assassination repeats the details, not
of the murder of the historical Caesar, but those of the Caesar
in the Shakespearean play. Kilpatrick's biographer becomes at

[36]
the end an ingredient in the conspirators' plot. Perhaps as an
echo of the Shakespearean "All the world's a stage" or Cal-
deron's El gran teatro del nntndo, reality is seen as a gigantic
performance: "He made of the entire city a theater, too, and
the actors were legion. And the drama . . . embraced
many days and many nights." This theater and this drama of
the assassination foreshadow another murder, now of a his-

torical character: that of Lincoln. Thus, the whole story

describes a pendulum movement which oscillates
constant
between the real and the fictitious, between the historical and
the imaginary, which in braiding confound themselves.
In the essay "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote" Borges
writes:

Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the
map and the thousand and one nights are within the book of A
Thousand and One Nights? does it Why disquiet us to know that
Don Quixote is Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator
a reader of the
of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions
suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spec-
tators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious. {Other
Inquisitions, p. 48)

If art is a dream, or a magic, the success of the magician is the

instant in which the real seems fictitious, and the fictitious,

real. In the story "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,"

Borges carries out what could be defined as the program of
his narrative: "To create unrealities that confirm what all

idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world."

That these unrealities of art can be confirmations of idealist

hypotheses is endorsed by the following paragraph of Scho-

penhauer's The World as Will and Idea:

If the whole world as idea is only the visibility of will, the work
of art is to render this visibility more distinct. It is the camera

[37]
obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to
survey them and to comprehend them better. It is the play within
the play, the stage upon the stage in Hamlet.

For Schopenhauer, then, art is one unreality within another—

like the play within the play in Hamlet— but which has the
strange virtue of projecting a clearer image of reality. Borges
proposes a task on the level of art, of fantastic literature, that

idealist metaphysics undertakes on the level of reality: if the

world exists only as my idea of it, myself, a part of this world,
is just an idea in the mind that perceives me or projects me as

its perception. To achieve this task Borges creates fictitious

characters who acquire historical validity (although within
the frame of fiction). When we think of them as real, he
returns them to the level of fiction. Conversely, Borges
renders historic and real beings fictitious characters. When,
finally, the narrator of the story explains the incoherencies of
these identities in constant movement, Borges converts the
narrator— like Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights—
into a character of his own narration.
In "The Man on the Threshold," the narrator looks for
the British judge David Alexander Glencairn, who has dis-
appeared in India. His numerous searches lead him to the yard
of a house where a A4uslim festival is being celebrated and on
whose threshold "a very old man was huddled up." The old
man tells him of the disappearance of another judge, when
he himself was a child, who was kidnapped and later tried by
a madman. We now sense the denouement: the fate of David

Alexander Glencairn is contained in the old man's tale. A few

lines later we realize that the story of the judge searched for
by the narrator is the cyclical repetition of the fate of the
other judge in the old man's tale, and, perhaps, of all the
judges "who brought English law to India."

[38]
 In one of his shortest tales, "The Plot," Borges sums up his

perception of time as a cyclical repetition. In six lines he re-

counts the assassination of Caesar, or more precisely, the his-

tory of the pathetic cry, "You too, my son," which Shake-

speare and Quevedo revive. Later, he adds the following tale:

Destiny takes pleasure in repetitions, variants, symmetries: nine-

teen centuries later, in the south of the Buenos Aires province, a
gaucho is attacked by other gauchos. As he falls he recognizes an
adopted son of his and says to him with gentle reproof and slow
surprise (these words must be heard, not read), "Pero Che!"
["Come on!"] He is killed, and never knows he dies so that a
scene may be repeated. (Dreamtigers, p. 36)

Commenting on the novel of an Argentine author, Borges has

observed, "Under the pen of J.L.B, a plot such as this, of
ingenious type, would have been subjected to an ironclad
system of symmetries, coincidences, and contrasts." In his

stories, reality is seen sub specie aeternitatis, which is to say,

not as ordinary everyday occurrences but as generic ones, not
through individual beings but through archetypes. Such a

view of reality should perforce be organized into a system.

Borges uses the systems already outlined by philosophy and
theology. If representing reality means transporting the silli-

nesses and trivialities which Borges associates with the psycho-

logical novel— or at least with one type of psychological novel
—to literature, systematizing it is more interesting, more crea-
tive, and more imaginative: not this or that fortuitous gaucho,
but Martin Fierro, who is the archetype of the gaucho; not
puzzling chaos, but reality arranged into cycles and symme-
tries; not time in its ironbound flow, but in circles, spirals,

and infinite webs. Subjected to "a system of symmetries, co-

incidences, and contrasts," the narrative of Borges is organized
into symbols which achieve on the level of fiction that which

[39|
is denied to philosophy on the level of reality: the knowledge
of the ultimate ends of things, the revelation of the essences
and of the laws which govern the world.

Another of the philosophical ideas which has insistently

occupied the attention of Borges is the law of causality. Borges

applies it with fruitful results in his "inquisitions," in the ter-

ritory of his stories, and in some lines of his poetry. The scope
and implications of this doctrine are summed up in one of his

essays:

It well-known that Whistler was asked how much time he

is

required to paint one of his nocturnes, and that he replied, "All

my life." With equal rigor he could have said that he had required
all of the centuries that preceded the moment that he painted it.
From this correct application of the law of causality it follows
that the least important facts presuppose the inconceivable uni-
verse and, inversely, that the universe is in need of the least impor-
tant facts. (Discusion, p. 11)

In the story "Deutsches Requiem," the narration is framed by

the law of causality. Borges shows that a discredited doctrine
(one only has to think of the absurd "causalist" explanations
of a Pangloss) can take on an unusual lucidity on the level of
literary fiction. In the epilogue of El Aleph, Borges says of
this story: "In the last war no one could have desired more
strongly than I that Germany be defeated; no one could have
felt more than I the tragedy of the German fate; 'Deutsches
Requiem' wants to understand this fate." Otto Dietrich zur
Linde is going to be shot for being a torturer and murderer.
On the night preceding his execution, zur Linde summarizes
the most important events of his life and tries to understand
the meaning of his destiny. Appointed subdirector of the con-
centration camp at Tarnowitz, he discovered that "essentially,
Nazism is an act of morality, a purging of corrupted hu-

[40]
inanity, to dress him anew. . . . For the superior man of
Zarathustra, mercy is the greatest of sins." He almost com-
mitted this sin when the eminent poet David Jerusalem was
sent to him. It was necessary to create the new man, and
Jerusalem, capable of inspiring pity, was a barrier. Zur Linde
destroyed him to destroy the last remnants of mercy left in

himself, and for this reason he says, speaking of the tortures

which slew Jerusalem: "I agonized with him, I died with him
and somehow I was lost with him; therefore, I was implacable."
To construct the new man of Nazism, zur Linde destroyed
himself. In the same way he reflects: "Many things will have
to be destroyed in order to construct the New Order; now
we know that Germany also was one of those things. We have
given more than our lives, we have sacrificed the destiny of our
beloved Fatherland."
History, the course of time, discloses the hidden meaning
of events, their secret continuity. By unveiling the unsuspected
effects of an event, history and time reveal consequences un-
expected at the moment the event occurs:

Arminius, when he cut down the legions of Varus in a marsh,

did not realize that he was a precursor of the German Empire;
Luther, translator of the Bible, could not suspect that his goal
was to forge a people destined to destroy the Bible for all time;
Christoph zur Linde [Otto's ancestor] killed by a Russian- bullet
in 1758, was in some way preparing the victories of 1914; Hitler
believed he was fighting for a nation but he fought for all, even
for those which he detested and attacked. It matters not that his
/ was ignorant of this fact; his blood and his will were aware of it.

(Labyrinths, p. 146)

Zur Linde finds in the law of causality an explanation for his

fate and for the fate of his country. Only on the eve of his
execution does he understand the dialectics of this law. All his
life he has obeyed it blindly, without understanding its mean-

[41]
ing, as Germany did not understand the meaning of its strug-
gle. No moral digression perturbs the ironclad logic of the
protagonist-narrator. Horges lets him become entangled in the

labyrinth which he fashions "to wander in it until the end of

his days." Like the Adinotaur in the story "The House of
Asterion," who welcomes Theseus' fatal sword without re-
sistance, zur Linde and Germany embrace a destiny which
destroys them. For the reader, who knows that the redemption
the Minotaur expects is Theseus' sword which kills him, and
that the New Order for which Germany fights is the design
of an insane mind, the hopes of the Minotaur and the bloody
war which Germany wages are equally a catastrophic ab-
surdity. Zur Linde's narration is presented with the same con-
viction that governs his ideals: his monologue flows undis-
turbed by either a shade of doubt or a fragile scruple. This
"infallible" logic of the protagonist nurtures his literary au-

thenticity: zur Linde is the faultless exponent of the destiny

of a Germany which he symbolizes. He fights and dies for an
idealwhose necessary condition is his own destruction, an ideal

which destroys him and his people but whose meaning they
do not know. Furthermore, in defining Germany's place in a
new era that is about to begin, zur Linde uses an image, of
Goethean extraction, which describes the conqueror as the
hammer and the conquered as the anvil (one need only recall
Goethe's "Kophtisches Lied" or "Epigramme 14"): "What
matters if England is the hammer and we the anvil?" In this
repetition of an illustrious metaphor, Borges underlines his

belief that the true metaphors, "those which formulate inti-

mate connections between one image and another, have al-

ways existed" and that "those we can still invent are the false
ones."
The law of causality governs another impossibility no less

absurd in "Averroes' Search." Averroes, confined within the

[421
boundaries of Islam, looks for the meaning of the words
tragedy and comedy; he strives to imagine what a drama is

without having an idea of what theater is. Here, the law of

causality is applied to show the irreversible order of a chain
in which a determined effect implies a determined cause. The
concepts "tragedy" and "comedy" presuppose the idea of
"theater"; to pretend to explain the former without under-
standing the meaning of the latter purports to break the
sequence of an irrevocable order. Such a break can only lead
to absurdity: tragedy and comedy imply not only the idea
of theater but infinite links as well, or, in Borges' words, all

the which preceded the creation of the theater.

centuries
Tangential to this absurdity is another which Borges describes:
"I sensed," he says, "that the work was making mock of me.

I sensed that Averroes, striving to imagine a drama without

ever having suspected what a theater was, was no more absurd

than I, who strove to imagine Averroes with no material other
than some fragments from Renan, Lane, and Asm Palacios."
In this second "absurdity," two Borgesian topoi come together:
first, the impossibility of imagining a man, because this task
would require a number of biographies that would never ex-
haust the infiniteness of his life; and second, the rigidity of an
order where every effect presupposes an infinite number of
causes. In the story's last paragraph, Borges presents the law
of causality from a different perspective: the unalterable order
of causes and effects ultimately forms a circle where the last

effect is also the cause of the first effect:

I on the last page, that my narration was a symbol of the

sensed,
man I was as I wrote it, and that in order to compose that nar-
ration I had to be that man, and in order to be that man I had to
compose that narration, and so on to infinity. (Labyrinths, p. 155)

In these two stories, as in the preceding ones, Borges de-

lights in the possibility of a world intelligently ordered by

[43]
men's restless imaginations. With the idea that "the world is an
interminable chain of causes, and every cause is an effect"
Borges weaves these two narratives. But zur Linde's Germany
and Borges' Averroes are inventions of the human mind which
have very little to do with the Germany of history and the
Averroes of Islam. In both cases, Borges has constructed the
destiny of a country and the destiny of a man, with an impec-
cable logic which he himself proceeds to destroy with an irony
that returns the reader to a reality whose most intrinsic con-
dition is its impenetrability. In the first story, the irony grows
with the tale and culminates in a sentence which makes the
irony obvious and sums it up: "My flesh may be afraid; I am
not." In the second, Borges closes the tale with a reflection
which identifies Averroes' search with his own and which re-
duces both to an absurdity, no less absurd than "the god men-
tioned by Burton . . . who set out to create a bull and
instead created a buffalo." Borges knows that the world per-
ceived by the human mind is an invention or a dream which
has very little to do with the real world, with that other dream
dreamed by a god. His stories, which first propound a reality

only to tell us later that this reality is a design of symmetrical

geometry totally unrelated to the world which it intends to
describe, are a form of expressing the agony of man faced
with the enigma of the universe. Borges' essential skepticism
and his feeling of defeat overwhelmed by an order of divine
laws— which for man is chaos— make possible, nevertheless, a
new understanding of man's confrontation with the world.
This defeat is then a triumph. Borges suggests that since man
can never find the solution to the gods' labyrinth, he has con-
structed his own labyrinths; since the reality of the gods is
impenetrable, man has created his own reality. He thus lives
in a world which is the product of his fallible architecture.
He knows that there is another world which constantly be-

[44]
sieges him and forces him to feel the enormousness of its
presence, and between these two worlds, between these two
dreams (a Borges who lets himself go on living and likes the
taste of coffee and the Borges who weaves laborious books of
fantastic literature), between these two stories (one imagined
by God and another invented by man) flows the agonizing
history of humanity. Borges deflects these agonies into art,
humor, irony, and at times into intense poetry, as in the final

paragraph of his essay "A New Refutation of Time," where

the heroic and tragic condition of man as dream and dreamer
is summed up in a style masterfully plain and functionally
effective:

Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the
hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal;
it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the

substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along,

but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the
tiger; it is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The
world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. (Laby-
rinths, p. 234)

The common denominator of all his fiction can be defined

as a relativity which governs all things and which, by being
the result of a confrontation of opposites, takes on the ap-
pearance of a paradox and, at times, of an oxymoron: a traitor

who is a hero ("Theme of the Traitor and the Hero"), a Don

Quixote written in the twentieth century, identical to Cer-
vantes' and at the same time immensely richer ("Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote"), a library of unreadable books ("The
Library of Babel"), a pursued pursuer ("Death and the Com-
pass"), a divinity whom everyone looks for and does not find
because everyone is the sought divinity ("The Approach to
Al-Mu'tasim"), a minute that is a year ("The Secret Miracle"),
a Judas who is Christ ("Three Versions of Judas"), a letter

[451
that contains the universe ("The Aleph"), a man who lives but
who is already dead ("The Dead Man"), a false story which
is substantially true ("Emma Zunz"), a night that exhausts
the life story of a man ("Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz").
This relativity compels us to see reality in perpetual move-
ment and incites us to transcend it beyond its daily occur-
rences in order to discover new dimensions in it. Borges'
stories, which trite criticism insists on seeing as an evasion of
reality, bring us in fact much closer to reality— not to the
reality of loud and flashy newspapers which bewilders us, but
to an essential reality which reduces us to a fortuitous number
in a gigantic lottery and at the same time links us with every-
thing that was and is to be, to a reality which transforms us
into a cycle which already has occurred and yet teaches us
that a minute can be the receptacle of eternity, to a reality
which effaces our identity and yet converts us into depositories
of a supreme Identity— in short, an improbable, contradictory,
ambiguous, and even absurd reality. But are not these charac-
teristics perhaps the authentic ingredients of its unchallengeable
mystery? When reality is seen from a level which transcends
illusory precisions and adventitious logics, beyond the visible
and resistant shell of rationality, the straight line bends and
the infinite universe finds a stop of finiteness. The multiple
vision of reality which Borges suggests to us is an attempt to
grasp the contradictory elements that compose it. Although
"A" may exclude "B," Borges presents them together, co-
existing, to show that exclusion is deceitful because, while they

reject and oppose each other, they complement and need

also

each other. This fictitious world, where the measure of all

things is a relativism which grants validity to the improbable
and to the absurd, is not an evasion of reality; it is more pre-
cisely its return, but with a flower which, like Coleridge's,
proves that it exists and that it is also a dream.

[46]
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
note: Only some critical studies and articles written in English
have been listed. Readers of Spanish are referred to the text and
bibliography of this author's study, La prosa narrativa de J. L.
Borges, Madrid, Gredos, 1968.
For the most co?nprehensive biography of Borges, see his own
"Profiles: Autobiographical Notes" in The New Yorker, September
19, 1910, pp. 40-99.

Principal Works of Jorge Luis Borges

Ficciones. Buenos Aires, Emece, 1956. (Ficciones. New York,
Grove Press, 1962 [tr. Anthony Kerrigan and others]. Laby-
rinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York, New
Directions, 1962 [selections from Ficciones, El Aleph, Discusion,
Otras Inquisiciones, and El hacedor. Tr. James E. Irby and
others].)
El Aleph. Buenos Aires, Emece, 1957. (The Aleph and Other
Stories, 1933-1969. New York, Dutton, 1970 [tr. Norman T. di
Giovanni in collaboration with the author].)
El hacedor. Buenos Aires, Emece, 1960. (Dreamtigers. Austin, Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1964 [tr. Mildred Boyer and Harold
Morland]. Selections in Labyrinths.)
Otras inquisiciones (essays). Buenos Aires, Emece, 1960. (Other
Inquisitions. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1965 [tr. Ruth
L. C. Simms]. Paperback: New York, Washington Square Press,
1966.)
Antologia personal. Buenos Aires, Sur, 1961. (A Personal Anthol-
ogy, New York, Grove Press, 1967 [tr. Anthony Kerrigan and
others]. An anthology compiled by Borges himself.)
Obra poetica (1923-1967) (poetry). Buenos Aires, Emece, 1967.
(Selections in Dreamtigers, A Personal Anthology, Anthology of
Contemporary Latin American Poetry [ed. Dudley Fitts, New
York, New Directions, 1942], and Twelve Spanish American
Poets [ed. H. R. Hays, New Haven, Yale University Press,
1943].)
Discusion (essays). Buenos Aires, Emece, 1967.
Historia de la eternidad (essays). Buenos Aires, Emece, 1953.
Historia Universal de la infamia (fiction). Buenos Aires, Emece,
1954.

[47]
 Critical Works and Commentary
Alazraki, Jaime. "Kabbalistic Traits in Borges' Short Stories,"
Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (1971).
Barrenechea, Ana Maria. Borges the Labyrinth Maker. New York,
New York University Press, 1965.
Barth, John. "The Literature of Exhaustion" (on the art of Borges),
The Atlantic, August, 1967.
Botsford, Keith. "About Borges and Not About Borges," Kenyon
Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 4 (1964).
"The Writings of J. L. Borges," The Atlantic, January, 1967.
Burgin, Richard. Conversations with J. L. Borges. New York,
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969.
Christ, Ronald. The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion. New
York, New York University Press, 1969.
De Man, Paul. "A Modern Master," The New York Review of
Books, Vol. Ill, No. 7 (November 19, 1964).
Harss, Luis. Into the Mainstream. New
York, Harper & Row, 1967.
Irby, James E. "Introduction to Labyrinths," in Labyrinths. New
York, New Directions, 1964.
Isaacs,Neil D. "The Labyrinth of Art in Four Ficciones of Jorge
Luis Borges," Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. VI, No. 4 (1969).
Merivale, Patricia. "The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov
and Jorge Luis Borges," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary
Literature, Vol. VIII, No. 2 (1967).
Murillo, L. A. The Cyclical Night: Irony in James Joyce and Jorge
Luis Borges. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968.
Running, Thorpe. "The Problem of Time in the Work of J. L.
Borges," Discourse, Vol. IX (1966).
Updike, John. "The Author as Librarian," The New Yorker,
October 30, 1965.
Weber, Frances W. "Borges' Stories: Fiction and Philosophy,"
Hispanic Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2 (1968).
Wheelock, Carter. The Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol
in the Short Stories of J. L. Borges. Austin, University of Texas
Press, 1969.

[48]

SAUSAUTO PUBLIC LIBRARY

5AUSALJTO, CALIf. 94965
 Columbia Essays on Modern Writers

Editor

William York Tindall

Advisory Editors

Jaques Barzun, W. T. H. Jackson. Joseph A. Mazzeo

1 Albert Camus 21 Gerard Manley Hopkins 40 Feodor Dostoevsky

by Germaine Bree by Francis Noel Lees by Ernest J. Simmons
2 William Golding 22 Hermann Hesse 41 J. R. R. Tolkien
by Samuel Hynes by Theodore Ziolkowski by Catharine R. Stimpson
3 Hermann Broch 23 Arnold Bennett 42 Bertolt Brecht
by Theodore Ziolkowski by John Wain by Martin Esslin
4 Samuel Beckett 24 Thomas Mann 43 Ronald Firbank
by William York Tindall by J. P. Stern by Edward Martin Potoker
5 Constantine Cavafy
25 Robert Graves 44 Miguel de Unamuno
by Peter Bien
by George Stade by Demetrios Basdekis
6 Lawrence Durrell
26 Andre Breton 45 George Bernard Shaw
by John Unterecker
by J. H. Matthews by John F. Matthews
7 Eugene lonesco
27 Harold Pinter 46 Guillaume Apollinaire
by Leonard C. Pronko
by Walter Kerr by LeRoy C. Breunig
8 C. P. Snow
by Robert Gorham Davis 28 Juan Ramon Jimenez 47 Ivy Compton-Burnett
by Howard T. Young by Blake Nevius
9 Michel Butor
by Leon S. Roudiez 29 Henry Green 48 Marcel Proust

10 E. M. Forster by Robert S. Ryf by Henri Peyre

by Harry T. Moore 30 Giuseppe Ungaretti 49 Joseph Conrad

11 Alain Robbe-Grillet by Glauco Cambon by Robert S. Ryf

by Bruce Morrissette 31 Jean-Paul Sartre 50 Stefan George

12 John Millington Synge by Henri Peyre by Ulrich K. Goldsmith
by Denis Johnston 32 Norman Douglas 51 Malcolm Lowry
13 Louis-Ferdinand Celine by Lewis Leary by Daniel B. Dodson
Hayman
by David .
33 Nathalie Sarraute 52 Alberto Moravia
14 Raymond Queneau by Ruth Z. Temple by Luciano Rebay
by Jacques Guicharnaud
34 Iris Murdoch 53 Christopher Isherwood
15 W. B. Yeats by Rubin Rabinovitz by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
by William York Tindall
35 Andre Gide 54 W. H. Auden
16 Joyce Cary
by Vinio Rossi by James D. Brophy
by WJIIiam Van O'Connor
36 Muriel Spark 55 Jean Anouilh
17 Graham Greene
, by Karl Malkoff by Marguerite Archer
by David Lodge
37 Luigi Pirandello 56 Anthony Trollope
18 Virginia Woolf
by Olga Ragusa by Alice Green Fredman
by Carl Woodring
19 Franz Kafka 38 -Marcel Ayme 57 Jorge Luis Borges
by Walter H. Sokel by Dorothy Brodin by Jaime Alazraki

20 Jean Genet 39 William Empson 58 Evelyn Waugh

by Tom F. Driver by J. H. Willis, Jr. by David Lodge