Blog — Elementa Poeticæ

Elements of Borgesian literature, or Borges and his precursors

§ I. Introduction

The notable principle attributed to Parmenides, ex nihilo nihil fit, is overlooked to the same extent that it is indisputable; we, seeking to avoid such a defect of thought, will use it as a basis for thinking about El Aleph, Borges, and literature in general. My purpose is to offer the reader, both specialist and amateur, certain solid criteria —theoretical and bibliographic— for studying Borges. To do so, we will discuss his short story titled El Aleph.

The title of this text is a clear reference to Borges’ article titled Kafka y sus precursores, where Borges lists some works and thinkers that might have influenced Kafka. We will attempt something similar, advancing for now an important premise: Borges uses the most varied detritus of universal history (fundamentally philosophical and literary) to subordinate them to aesthetics and, through it, “to communicate experiences of his life, […] without indiscretion and also without impudence”¹.

§ II. The sphere of Borges

While it is common for literary criticism to be used as a pretext for speculating or conjecturing fancies, our method will be different, and we will confine ourselves solely to speaking and issuing judgments on those matters that objectively allow us to do so. Let us begin, then.

In the story itself, Borges clarifies the reason for choosing the title “Aleph”, so it is unnecessary to add anything in this regard; however, we can mention that, thanks to the preservation of the manuscript of this story, we know that Borges had used the word mihrab (محراب) instead of Aleph. A mihrab is a semicircular niche, located in a small room, which in mosques indicates the direction to face when praying.

Now, moving to the central idea, we find that Borges refers us directly but subtly to its origin, making this task relatively simple. The story is about a man who remembers Beatriz with veneration, who in turn has a cousin named Daneri. Evidently², both names refer us to the Divina Comedia; if we skim the Comedia in search of more clues, we will come across Canto XXXIII (85-90), where Alighieri describes God as a simple light where the orb is unbound:

Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna,
legato con amore in un volumen,
ciò che per l’universo si squaderna;
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume
quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo
che ciò ch’i’ dico è un semplice lume³.

The reader will surely have already guessed the clear similarity of these verses with the Borgesian lines describing a “small, iridescent sphere, of almost intolerable brilliance”, through which one can see “the inconceivable universe”; but also, if we continue reading in parallel, we will find that verses 55 to 57 of Dante read: “[…] what I saw exceeds all human language, which is powerless to express such a vision and memory surrenders to such greatness”⁴, while Borges also complains of his “writer’s despair”, since the shortcomings of language complicate the narration of what he saw⁵.

In the same story, Borges cites a series of congeneric artifices, that is, devices that share certain qualities with The Aleph. In the accounts of such artifices (including the Borgesian one), the theme of descent into darkness is also shared. In Dante, for example, one first descends into the darkness of hell; in the passage from Lucian of Samosata that Borges quotes, we read: “I also saw another marvel in the palace: a large mirror suspended over a not very deep well. If one descends into the well, it is possible to hear everything that is said on earth; and if one raises one’s eyes to the mirror, one sees in it all the cities and all the peoples, as if one were in them”.

Likewise, both in the epilogue of the book and in conversation with Bioy Casares (December 28, 1966)⁶, Borges confesses that he read The Crystal Egg by Wells while drafting the story, so the crystal egg, through which Mr. Cave observed the inhabitants of Mars, could also have influenced some images in The Aleph. For example, said crystal egg only shone in the dark; the protagonist would cover it with a black velvet cloth and hide in a recess under the counter to observe it.

In Wells’s story we also find another similarity: Mr. Cave panicked when an inhabitant of Mars approached the crystal to observe him through it; in The Aleph, Borges feels vertigo and weeps just after seeing the reader’s face.

To the list of artifices of this nature, we could add the passage from Joyce’s Ulysses, where we read: “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods” (although, in truth, we might think this passage more similar to The Zahir); the verses of William Blake (“To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”); the mystical experience of Jacob Böhme, who in 1600 had a vision of the spiritual structure of the world by looking at a beam of sunlight reflected in a pewter dish; to a lesser extent, Laplace’s attempt to encrypt in a single mathematical formula all the facts that make up an instant of the world, in order to then derive from it all the future and all the past⁷; or Georges Lemaître’s theory of the “cosmic egg”, a primeval atom exploding to give birth to the universe; and, finally, Alonso de Ercilla, who in his verses (La araucana, XXVII) speaks of a shining circle —an apple, he tells us— through which all the lands of the orb were contemplated:

Era en grandeza tal que no podrían
veinte abrazar el círculo luciente,
donde todas las cosas parecían
en su forma distinta y claramente.
[…] El mágico me dijo: “Pues en este
lugar nadie nos turba ni embaraza,
sin que un mínimo punto oculto reste
verás del universo la gran traza:
lo que hay del norte al sur, del este al oeste,
y cuanto ciñe el mar y el aire abraza,
ríos, montes, lagunas, mares, tierras
famosas por natura y por las guerras”⁸.

Some verses later, Alonso also apologizes for dwelling at length on the matter and on his enumeration of all he could see through that apple, for “one cannot walk much in a single step / nor enclose great matter in a small vessel”. Evidently, it is impossible to know to what extent such and such fragments influenced Borges; however, we now know with much greater clarity that Borgesian themes (the Aleph, the spherical form, the impossibility of expressing the absolute, the descent into darkness, the limited nature of language) are framed within a long tradition that Borges recovers and condenses. It is no coincidence, of course, that Borges opens his text La esfera de Pascal with the line: “Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors”. Evidently, it is also not sensible to conclude that Borges recovers these themes in a fantastic story to make a philosophical, metaphysical, or mathematical statement; it is, simply, a matter of recovering, modulating, and endowing them with aesthetic value (which is why we speak of literature and not a philosophical treatise)⁹.

Now that we better understand where the central idea comes from, we can proceed with some marginal ideas. Just before describing the Aleph, Borges refers to some metaphors to signify divinity: the Persian he refers to, who speaks of the bird that is all birds, is Farid Al-Din Attar, who in his Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr [“The Conference of the Birds”] speaks of thirty birds that, after searching for the Supreme Being allegorically symbolized by the mythical Sīmurğ [سيمرغ‎.], realize that they themselves are him —“si-murgh”: si (سی, [thirty]) and murgh (مرغ, [bird])—; the four-faced angel is the one we find in Ezekiel I, 4-28, where the faces correspond to a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle —this biblical passage evokes the mysticism of the Merkabah— and Dante also recovers it in verse 92 of Canto XXIX of the Purgatorio («vennero appresso lor quattro animali»); finally, the sphere of Alain de Lille, to which Borges precisely dedicates the text La esfera de Pascal, carries a very long tradition that we can also appreciate in the “highest Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind, nor on the sides, but everywhere, at once” of La escritura del Dios and the “sphere whose perfect center is any hexagon, whose circumference is inaccessible” of La biblioteca de Babel.

Regarding the character Daneri, Harold Bloom points out (following Enrico Mario Santi) that the character was a prophetic satire against Neruda, since Neruda was planning an encyclopedic epic that would sing of all Latin America in those days; but although Neruda’s poetry was not to Borges’ liking, Bloom’s reasoning relies on incorrect dates and weird logic leaps, and such dislike was not of major importance. Moreover, we must consider that satires of baroquism abound in his mature work, so it seems less risky to say that he is mocking —as in the other cases— his youthful baroquism, as well as that of some of his contemporaries¹⁰.

The reader, no doubt, will have noticed that I have overlooked other things. In particular, Borges’ relationship with Beatriz and Daneri; but it is impossible to pronounce on this matter with the bibliography we have (all we can say about Beatriz is what Borges already said: he was in love with the woman that inspired the character, yet we don’t really know who she was, and at most we can speculate it was Estela Canto). To exemplify what I mean, we can recall the poem Everness (“everness” and “neverness” are words that Wilkins coined but did not prosper), in which themes such as eternity, the impossibility of oblivion, and a person’s face are interwoven. Reading the poem by itself, it is impossible for us to determine with certainty the reason why the face appears in it. Is Borges referring to the reader’s face? Is it an abstract person or a specific person? Fortunately for us, Bioy gave us the conversation he had with him about it on November 3, 1963:

Bioy: “Today I read your poem Everness in La Nación, thinking there were references to these days”.
Borges: “You will have noticed some references. I wrote it the same day that girl told me that… I wrote it because I had to do something. There are some ambiguities, because I was thinking of two things at the same time: the evident theme of the poem; the secret theme, its relationship with the girl who had left me. I wrote: Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el olvido because I felt I could never forget her”.
Bioy: “Those kinds of ambiguities enrich the texts”.
Borges: “Yes. Because they suggest that the meaning is not exhausted with the first reading; that there is a mysterious meaning. Well, I know I have forgotten other women: I should not despair”.

Lines later, Borges regrets not having married that girl (it is not known which one). But with all this I mean to say that, no matter how much of a hermeneutist we become, it is completely impossible for us to infer from reading the poem that Borges wrote it because he felt he could not forget a woman. If it were not for Bioy’s testimony, we would not know. The autobiographical features of a text, besides not being of interest to us, are dispensable for the intellection of the central argument and the story in general; most of the time, the secret theme (the autobiographical part) of literature is indecipherable to us and, therefore, we must remain silent about it.

In addition to what has been said, it seems to me that the other details of the story are marginal. For example, it is of no consequence that Borges mentions his cousin and grandfather in the story; nor is it of consequence that he writes “oximoron” without an accent and that “gracious clumsiness” is not an oxymoron because the epithet does not contradict the noun (on the other hand, the turn of phrase “divine clumsiness” by Alfonso Reyes in the Himno a Miss Proserpine Garnett, is); nor is it of consequence that the preference for exotic synonyms (like “azulino” instead of “azulado”) was a subject of continuous criticism on his part, since he considered that such artifices only deteriorate the prose; that he writes that one of his youthful works which he considered pretentious in his maturity, Los naipes del tahúr¹¹, competed with Daneri’s work; that Mario Bonfanti is the only character of Bustos Domecq who also appears in Borges’ work and that he is inspired, according to Bioy interviewed by Sorrentino, by Borges’ brother-in-law (Guillermo de Torre), by Larreta and by Carlos Noel. Although we can discover these details, knowledge of them does not change, but marginally complements our understanding of the story, so they are almost irrelevant.

§ III. Borgesian Principles

Now that our journey through El Aleph has taught us certain lessons, let us derive some premises for reading Borges: the key to understanding Borges’ literature lies in Borges’ own work (he reveals his influences, his artifices, his methods, and his convictions), so that not understanding him or misunderstanding him only reflects not having read him completely; Borges must be read for what he is, a man of letters, an aesthete, and a skeptic whose knowledge of science is reduced, in his own words, to “knowing how to use a barometer”¹² and having read a couple of volumes of mathematics; Borges spent most of his life among books, so no one should be surprised that the world and the references he projects in his work are almost all literary; Borges rejects literature in the service of morals and considers it senseless to look for secret messages, mystical revelations, or philosophical explanations in his stories. For Borges, Funes el memorioso is a long metaphor for insomnia; Ragnarök is, just as it is, the narration of a dream he had¹³; Everness is, as we were saying, a poem he writes because he cannot forget a woman. The richness of Borges’ texts should not impress us to such an extent that we end up taking them seriously; the simplicity of his arguments and the premises we have proposed should save us from such a slip. Whoever wants to find something else in his literature and fills his head with mental cobwebs talking about quantum mechanics, metaphysics, nominalism, geometry, riddles, or any other sophistries¹⁴, let him do so under the warning that he has not read or understood Borges as he should¹⁵.

Appendix

Although I do not consider myself to have sufficient philological wisdom to develop this thesis rigorously, the plausibility of this discovery makes it seem worthy of consideration, so I offer it to the public so that those who know best and can may judge it:

The representation of the universe or of God in the form of a sphere or circumference, to which Borges probably referred based on the text Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt by Mahnke, has its philosophical-geometric germ in the 6th century BC, in the writings of Heraclitus¹⁶, Xenophanes¹⁷, and Parmenides¹⁸. In the 5th century it appears in Empedocles¹⁹, then in Plato²⁰, later in Eudemus²¹ and, moving to the first century of the Common Era, this idea will have some particular channels that will begin with Cicero. Macrobius, in his commentary on the Dream of Scipio, recovers a fragment from Cicero that says: “The whole universe, you see, is bound together with nine orbits, or rather, spheres, one of which is the celestial sphere, the most distant, which embraces all the others, itself the supreme divinity, which retains and contains the others” (Republic VI, 17: Dream 4, 1-3). In this passage —Macrobius comments— a meticulous description of the ‘entire body’ of the universe has been condensed, “what some called tò pân, that is, ‘the all’”, and he also adds that this sphere aplanḗs (“fixed”), the most distant, “Cicero called ‘supreme god’”. The gloss by Navarro Antolín²² suggests: “for Cicero and the Stoics summus deus is the sky (cf. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods I, 36), although the identification of the celestial sphere with divinity goes back to oriental mysticism (cf. Herodotus I, 131) and appears already in the Presocratics (Frag. 7 A 9; 31 A 33; 64 B 5)”. But, although Navarro refers us to Herodotus, Carlos Schrader²³ warns that this is an imprecision on the part of the Greek historian, since the Persians considered the sky as a work of Ahuramazdah, not as God himself.

The main source that Macrobius uses to elaborate the first sections of the chapter we are dealing with (Com. I, 12) is The Grotto of the Nymphs by Porphyry, where the author allegorically interprets Homer’s description of the grotto of the nymphs in Ithaca (Odyssey V 102-122) as a symbol of the cosmos conceived as a place of destiny for souls. Porphyry explicitly attributes this doctrine to Numenius and his disciple Cronius (cf. Numenius, Testimonies 42-43 [Leemans]). Macrobius observes that the Creator, in his constructive providence, “subordinated the succession of the seven wandering spheres to the starry sphere that contains them all, so that they move in the opposite direction to the rapid movements of the upper sphere and govern all the lower bodies”. Souls —continues Macrobius— proceed from the last sphere, called aplanḗs; this sphere provides a dwelling for souls that have not yet been captivated by the longing for the body (cf. Plotinus, Enneads III 4, 6; Porphyry, apud Stobaeus, II 388). And, the souls that deserve it, return there after death (cf. Plotinus, Enneads I 6, 8; Porphyry, On Abstinence I, 30). The soul, in its descent from the zodiac and the Milky Way to the lower spheres, takes a sheath from each sphere, and develops each of the movements that it will later have to put into practice: “in the sphere of Saturn, reasoning and intelligence, called logistikón and theōrētikón; in that of Jupiter, the energy to act, called praktikón; in that of Mars, the ardor of passion, called thymikón; in that of the Sun, sensory perception and imagination, called aisthētikón and phantastikón; the movement of desire, called epithymētikón, in the sphere of Venus; the movement of enunciating and interpreting thoughts, called hermēneutikón, in the sphere of Mercury; as for phytikón, that is, the faculty of engendering and making bodies grow, it exercises it after penetrating the lunar sphere” (cf. Servius, II 482-483 [Thilo Hagen]; Proclus, 260a-b, 348a [Diehl]; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies V 30, 8). This Macrobian list of “movements” results from the superposition of the divisions of the soul according to Plato (logistikón, thymikón, epithymētikón) and according to Aristotle (logistikón, aisthētikón, phytikón), to which two supplementary qualities have been added.

This stage, as I say, is important because it links both the tradition of the Universe or God in the form of a sphere and the tradition of the descensus animae. The latter leads us to Orphism, to Numenius of Apamea (2nd century) when he says, referring to the empyrean and the planetary spheres: “Do not incline downwards; a precipice lies under the earth, which violently drags (the soul) from the threshold of seven paths…” (fragment 164²⁴); and to the Nag Hammadi Corpus (3rd century), where —inspired by Plutarch— it is understood that the seven planets are placed between God and the Earth (Marsanes X, 1-5), and the spiritual ascent after death is also narrated; in the Apocryphon of John 41, moreover, it is narrated how the spirit unites with the body, acquiring capacities as it passes through each sphere or planet.

In philosophers like Apuleius (2nd century) it will remain without the touches of Macrobius, as he will repeat in De Platone (I, 198) what is in the Timaeus: that God, to make the world as perfect and beautiful as possible, makes it resemble a beautiful and perfect sphere; in the Confessiones (VI, 3, 4) of St. Augustine (4th century) God “is everywhere whole, and nowhere confined” [ubique totus es et nusquam locorum es]; in the Philosophiae consolatio (III, 12, 36-38) of Boethius (5th century) Parmenides is quoted, saying that the divine essence, “everywhere like the roundness of a sphere, makes the mobile circle of the universe turn, while it itself remains immobile”, and the Roman will also write (De institutione arithmetica, II, 30): “unity is like a circle or a sphere, since, multiplied by itself, it always returns to its beginning”.

After this journey, the sentences of Alain de Lille (who around 1177 would even write his Sermo de sphaera intelligibili) and the Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum will take place: “Deus est sphaera intelligibilis cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam” (God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere) (or “sphaera infinita”, in the second case)²⁵. From then on they will be quoted continuously. We find it in the Liber introductorias of Michael Scotus, where just as the center gathers all the lines and these derive from it, from it they are extracted and taken to the circumference, so only God deduces, limits and defines all creatures, which proceed from him and ideally return to him; in Alexander of Hales (Summa theologica III, ii, 3): “the divine essence considered in itself is perfect, similar to a circumference that has no beginning or end and is outside of everything; but if it is considered in the creature, inasmuch as it defines, limits and deduces it, then it is like the center, which is the beginning and end of all the rays”; in Vincent of Beauvais (Speculum historiale I, ii, 1): “Empedocles defines God in this way: Deus est sphaera, cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam”; in Bonaventure (Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum, I, 37, 1) when he says: “the divine power is ‘most simple’ in itself and ‘most infinite’ in the multiplicity of the created [omnis virtus unita plus est infinita quam virtus multiplicata (every united virtue is more infinite than a multiplied virtue)], and for this reason Trismegistus said that in every place is the center of his power”, as well as, in Itinerarium mentis in Deum (5), he will say that God is an “intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere”; in Eckhart (Lectio I super Ecclesiastici, 24), who warns that the words of verse 23 (“I, like a vine, have brought forth a pleasant odor”) state that the property and condition of divine realities, unlike the things of the world, have the flower in the fruit and the fruit in the flower: “my flowers are fruits”. “In divine realities everything is in everything —warns the theologian—, the maximum in the minimum and, in the same way, the fruit in the flower, since God, as stated in Scripture, works all in all, is beginning and end, first and last. For this reason a wise man has said: God is an intellectualis infinita sphere whose center is everywhere with the circumference”. In the form sphaera intelligibilis it will also be quoted by Thomas Aquinas (De veritate II, iii, 11), as well as by Duns Scotus²⁶ (Reportatio parisiensis, Distinction 1, Part III, Questions 1-3, 65). Under the variant sphaera intellectualis it appears in Bartholomeus Anglicus; under the form sphaera infinita it is quoted by Alexander Neckam, who attributes it to Aristotle, and later by Thomas Bradwardine (De causa Dei contra Pelagianos) who relates it to the hypothesis of the infinite void as eternally inhabited by God, as well as by Bertold of Moosburg, Richard of Middleton and Nicholas of Cusa (De docta ignorancia I, xxiii, 70).

As sphaera intelligibilis infinita it will be exposed in Thomas of York and John of Ripa. It will continue with Henry More, van Helmont, Böhme, Silesius, Comenius, Georg Wachter, Bruno, Pascal, Rabelais, Fichte, Hardenberg, Manuel Ascensión Berzosa, etcetera, reaches Borges and culminates in Gabriel Albiac, who in Caja de muñecas, regarding the verse Lorsque la femme est partout (When woman is everywhere), regurgitates Borges’ La esfera de Pascal. Thus, Bruno has Filoteo say: “because in the universe there is no middle or circumference but, if you will, the middle is everywhere and every point can be considered as part of some circumference in relation to some other middle or center”. Marie de Gournay, in the preface to her 1635 edition of Montaigne’s Essais, notes: “Trismégiste apelle la Déité cercle dont le centre est partout, la circonférence nulle part” (Trismegistus calls the Deity a circle whose center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere). Rabelais (Le Tiers Livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du noble Pantagruel, 13): “Nostre ame, lorsque le corps dort, s’esbat et reueoit sa patrie, qui est le ciel. De la receoit participation insigne de sa prime et diuine origine; et, en contemplation de ceste infinie et intellectuale sphere, le centre de laquelle est en chascun lieu de l’universe, la circonference point, à laquelle rien n’aduient, rien de passe, rien ne deche, tous temp son presents, note non seulemente les choses passees…, mais aussi les future” (Our soul, when the body sleeps, plays and revisits its homeland, which is heaven. From there it receives a signal participation of its prime and divine origin; and, in contemplation of this infinite and intellectual sphere, the center of which is in every place of the universe, the circumference nowhere, to which nothing happens, nothing passes, nothing decays, all times are present, notes not only past things…, but also future ones). Pascal in his Pensées (Article I), states about nature: “C’est une sphère infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonférence nulle part” (It is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere). Ernest Havet, in the edition of the Pensées I own, suggests that Pascal may have taken this idea from Marie’s preface. He also says that Voltaire attributes it to Plato’s Timaeus, but I could not find that text by Voltaire.

Now that we have briefly reviewed this tradition and its channels, we can recall a peculiar moment: The Self-Taught Philosopher by Ibn Tufail. In the first place, we know that Borges was a reader of Menéndez Pelayo, Deussen, and Defoe and that most likely through them he came to know Ibn Tufail (whom he mentions in his Historia de la eternidad). The influence that this author may have had on him seems important. At least in terms of his Robinson Crusoe character, The Self-Taught Philosopher could have influenced the creation of stories like Utopia of a Tired Man, The Immortal, and The Writing of the God.

But what interests us is that, in the book in question, the protagonist reaches the ecstasy of the Sufis of Persia and the Buddhist Nirvana. When he immerses himself in his contemplation and becomes one with God, he sees the ‘supreme sphere’ (the Highest Wheel) “which was no longer the essence of the one truth, nor was it the same sphere of absolute beauty, but was like the image of the sun that appears in a burnished mirror, and is neither the sun nor the mirror, but neither is it something different from them. And in the sphere next to this, which is the sphere of the fixed stars, he saw the essence separated from matter, which was not the essence of the one truth, nor the essence of the separate supreme sphere, nor was it anything different from them, but was like the image of the sun seen in a mirror in which this image is reflected from another mirror placed opposite”.

The fragment is of a Borgesian vein, or Plotinian if we remember that “everything is everywhere, anything is all things, the sun is all the stars, and each star is all the stars and the sun” (Enneads, V, 8, 4). Later, in the summary that Menéndez Pelayo gives us, we also read: “And he saw many essences separated from matter, which were like rusty and stained mirrors, which turned their backs to those other burnished mirrors in which the image of the sun was reflected; and he saw in this essence infinite spots and deformities, which he had never imagined; and he saw them surrounded by countless pains and sorrows, and burned by the fire of separation, and divided by iron; and he saw many other essences that were tormented, that appeared and vanished in great terrors and great agitations”. But that is not all, for he also “saw that the perfection, splendor, and beauty of those separate spheres is so great that the tongue cannot express it, and it is so subtle that neither letter nor voice can manifest it”. Here, Ibn Tufail expounds on his character’s ascent to the One following the milestones of Neoplatonic philosophy, a fundamentally mystical philosophy whose objective, both in Ibn Tufail and in Plotinus, is the ecstatic union with the One.

In such fragments one can also appreciate a significant similarity with El Aleph and the themes we are dealing with (only this time the influence is surely indirect); but, in this case, what most catches our attention is that all this ancient philosophy is a mystical version of the Aleph, that it uses different modulations of the same metaphors and that, in short, the ideas of the men of the past are so surprisingly similar to ours despite the centuries.

This article is an English translation of one from the book Oh tiempo tus pirámides, available for sale in all Amazon marketplaces (Mexico, Spain, USA, etc.).