Borges, Second Edition

The Passion of an Endless Quotation

Lisa Block de Behar, Christopher RayAlexander, William Egginton

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438450322
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life's work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness—through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences—of a certain index of universality. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation.

ONE

FIRST WORDS

Even at the risk of falling into redundancies from the start, one would have to recognize, once again, the gravitation of quotations in Borges’s universe, where, unbeholden to time, though without eluding the facts of their origin, quotations allow for the repetition of several discourses at once. On more than one occasion, Borges affirmed the literary fatefulness of his destiny and, assuming that task, recognized the precedence of a writing that cannot avoid the quotation. Literary repetition reiterates and demands the affinities of a shared place, more than a shared place, a common place, which—beyond distances and circumstantial differences, and on the basis of verbal coincidences—is conducive to signs of universality.

A balance of unsuspected reciprocities impels us to appreciate and recognize this repetition as a proper practice: if Borges quotes innumerable authors in his works, it should not surprise us that innumerable authors continue to quote Borges. Recourse and recurrence, from one author to the other: literary passion manages to order itself around quotations that animate an inconclusive textual game.

Borges’s library multiplies, in parts, the books of others in his books and his in those of others, accumulating the potential of a partial, endless literary play. Reading Borges, one makes out the parts of disparate works, and that shared discovery—a discovery parceled between author and reader—lends itself to more than one meaning. Someone glimpses the revelation of a distant fragment and comes to be glimpsed in turn. Fragments come and go as if transported by an endless band in which oppositions are knotted and annulled, reconciled by the same passion for quoting.

This back and forth of the quotation replicates the literary ritual, or rituals, of the circulating. It is a curious tendency of quotations that they are quoted, as if each one, once invoked, reserved the imminence of a potential quoting, which is mentioned for its energy, for its efficacy, or simply because it can occur. Its simple occurrence refers it to a previous instance, like to a past time but pointed toward a text or time to come. It returns to the beginning, only to circle back again.

Despite the secret to which Borges ambiguously refers in his story, the narrator belonging to “The Sect of the Phoenix”¹ knows that this textual reproduction seals literary continuity via the quotation; literal, in silence, the species is not extinguished. In the same way that the sense of this story is doubled, so should we understand the ambivalence of the quotation’s meaning.

These are dualities that Spanish, in its good fortune, does not dissimulate: “cita” [quote, citation/rendezvous] designates a meeting—more than a meeting—of the text or of the heart, and, as a result of the complicity of this meeting, other passions rush forth. The words of a text mingle and cohabitate in another text and thus do they survive. If it is true that a book does not choose its lectors, it is the “e-lection” that the latter realize that affords the book an unforeseen permanence, beyond the disposition of a presumable authority. Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the century’s most quoted authors should be an unknown author—one who doesn’t exist—of a well-known book—which already existed; the quote legitimates the ambivalences of its open statute. Borges’s character, Pierre Menard,² consecrated reader and author, writes not another Quixote but the Quixote of another: letter by letter, word for word, its identical paragraphs authorize a meaning that modifies, according to different versions, a truth in terms. This eventual alteration of the truth is found precisely in a text that deals with truth conditioned by history; the references to the discipline make of the theme and of the discourse that articulates it one and the same hermeneutic question.

This is not an objection, on the contrary; nevertheless, one may observe that, for a long time now, Borges has been quoted too much. It is true that his lines are repeated in other pages and that passages, verses, words to which Borges restored original meaning appear in contexts that reveal, or not, the origin that the poet demands: “Every word was once a poem”³ and, in the same way that only the word remembers, its reiterated use attenuates the origin.

Repetition is a phenomenon that lacks novelty, as is known; in any case—and this has also been said—novelty is rooted only in the return, which suggests that the recognition of the quotation is especially appropriate—in Borges’s text, with Borges—for the celebration of a centennial.⁴ In its repetition it calls for suspension in a timeless time, a return to a placeless space that, as the ceremony punctually authorizes, rescinds the circumstances.

If, for Borges, quotations reveal that authors are readers who rewrite what has already been written, those turnings that found and shape his poetics approach the doctrine that Borges shared, according to which Paradise exists in the form of a library. Without departing from it, I would call for an old maxim belonging to Talmudic interpretations that attribute to the loyalty of the quotation the recuperation of a time that courts eternity. “All who utter the words in the name of the one who uttered them”⁵ not only provoke their own salvation but also initiate a redemption without end.⁶

TWO

VARIATIONS ON A LETTER AVANT-LA-LETTRE

Seul le chapitre des bifurcations reste ouvert à l’espérance. N’oublions pas que tout ce qu’on aurait pu être ici-bas, on l’est quelque part ailleurs.

(Only the chapter of bifurcations remains open to hope. Let us not forget that all that we could have been down here, we are somewhere else.)

—Louis-Auguste Blanqui¹

I

If the aesthetic, theoretical, and hermeneutic present is debated in the face of the indeterminacy of works that slip between the expansive spaces of a disputable disciplinary topography; if epistemological definitions question its limits and its doctrinal and methodological foundations; if questions of taxonomy challenge the rigidity of inventories that fail to encompass the inventions they seek to classify; nor oppositions justify series because they interlace them, accelerating their differences; if other uncertainties are not exclusive of the scientific present; perhaps it is not necessary to remind ourselves that, since more than a half a century ago, numerous thinkers, philosophers, and writers have been reading Borges. They hesitated at first, interpreting as metaphors the aporias of his rhetoric of indecision, as allegories the paradoxical variations of a poetics of preterition that grasps the imagination of possibilities and their opposites, convinced, like some of the characters of his fiction, that historical times interlace their differences, multiplying uncertainties, planting suspicions, filtered through an unpredictable network that intercepts them as much as it lets them pass through.

Just as after Borges² it is no longer disputed that each author creates his or her own precursors,³ it is even less disputed that Borges creates other authors who follow him, read him, who write and therefore exist. So many poets and narrators, so many theoreticians and critics are occupied with the imagination of Borges, that the imagination of Borges has occupied the world. Understandably, a long time after Emir Rodríguez Monegal⁴ wrote down the illustrious terms of that “greatest common denominator” that is his name, a North American critic proposed to nominate Borges as the emblem of this era.⁵ There is no question about it: In such a case, I would carve in that emblematic image the inscription ante litteram.

It is not unusual to approach the variations of his literature’s reasoned aesthetics, the diverse modulations of his intellectual poetry, which anticipated and concentrated the thought, knowledge, and imagination of the century, attending to the reticencies contained in a transgressive writing that has been alluded to more than once but whose excesses would recuperate the original meaning of “to transgress”: to pass to the other side, traverse margins, cross borders, go beyond—also in capitals, transitions that cede way to the transcendence that is, properly speaking, an ascension to universal terms, by which it overcomes categories, oppositions, the eventuality of differences. A contradictory transgression overcomes limits or suspends them through a bringing into relief (relevamiento) that, like the well-known Aufhebung—that Hegelian form of “to bring into relief” (relevar)—is overcoming and suppression, both actions at once. It is important to bring into relief that first meaning of to transgress, among other reasons, because that is how to understand, in a contradictory way, that his writings “read with a previous fervor and a mysterious loyalty”; those conditions of reading that define, according to Borges,⁶ the classical writers. An in-fraction restitutes the fracture, reunites the fragments, and animates the vigor and validity of his writings. It is precisely in that essay, “On the Classics,” where he concludes by formulating an assertion that I would introduce here as an exhortation, with the purpose of controverting a permanence that neither endorses nor invalidates transgression:

The emotions that literature evokes are perhaps eternal, but the means must constantly change, even if only in the slightest way, in order not to lose their virtue. They expend themselves as they are recognized by the reader. Thus the danger of affirming that there exist classical works and that they will be so for ever.⁷

II

Beyond the functions of reader and critic, of author and critic, or of author and reader, Borges’s writing melds attributions that are presumed to be external to the textual universe, interlacing them in a threshold that extends and disappears. Neither inside nor outside, neither before nor after. A diegesis in crisis alters the spaces and times of a textuality that does not distinguish between them. Beyond oppositions between language and metalanguage, between both, it is possible to imagine variations of a semiosis that, (a) posited in the abyss, confuses references, impeding the discerning of another way out through an exit facing inward, facing backward, at the same time or timelessly. Beyond disciplinary conventions, his writing slips between literary and philosophical borders, superimposing theory and poetry, history and fiction, representation and reference, lucidity that is not only wakefulness. Without imposing, without being excessive, a spectral entity—a specter in fact—oscillates between narrator and characters, victims and heroes, hangmen and traitors, between times that do not differ, return, or coincide in the simultaneity of an instant, an Augenblick that, deprived of time, is not distinguished from eternity: fleeing that threshold a man is discerned on the way to a universe where space does not count, nor time, who persists in creating a passage where extension and ephemerality are confused in a reality au-delà, à outrance, an ultrareality,⁸ an ideal reality, perfect, eternal, exaggerated, extreme.

Beyond limits, the writing of Borges e-liminates them; beyond oppositions, it requires an interpretation, succinct, in the key of O; different or the same, either the letter or the cipher, or both, it obliterates the disjunction making of alterity another identity. His imagination does not resolve the antagonism of superimpositions, suppositions, conjectures; it invents or discovers the literary space that makes place for an origin, the beginning (principio) of a thought that adjusts to the principles (principios) of a logic—if not proper, adverse, illogical—a logic that reveals the mechanisms of a reasoning secured according to rules that, albeit imposed, seem natural, or it seems natural that they be so.

What is missing are limits to this transliminal aesthetic, where definition coincides with the indefinite, the finished with the infinite, acceding to a perfection that, unexpected, does not end. In “Of Rigor in Science,”⁹ the brief text (which could serve as epigraph to these reflections) endorses the cartographic practices of geographers who expose the perfection of their maps to the inclemencies of time and ...