OTHER INQUISTIONS
——
Jorge Luis Borges
Also by Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of the Forking Paths
The Aleph
Ficciones
The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance of a revolving publication fund established by the Pan American Sulphur Company. Publication of this book was assisted also by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation through the Latin American translation program of the Association of American University Presses.
International Standard Book Number 0-292-73322-4 (cloth)
International Standard Book Number 0-292-76002-7 (paper)
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-19416
Copyright © 1964 by the University of Texas Press
Copyright © 1965 by Jorge Luis Borges
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
Second printing, 1975
OTHER INQUISTIONS
——
Jorge Luis Borges
To Margot Guerrero
Preface
This work, here translated into English for the first time, is Borges’ best collection of essays, and forms a necessary complement to the stories of Ficciones and El Aleph, which have made him famous. Otras inquisiciones was first published in 1952, but its pieces had appeared separately (most of them in Victoria Ocampo’s review Sur or in the literary supplement of La Nation) over the preceding thirteen years. The title harks back to Borges’ first volume of essays, published in 1925, when he was twenty-six. Those original Inquisiciones now seem to him affected and dogmatic avant-garde exercises; he will not have the book reprinted and buys up old copies to destroy them. The present collection’s curiously ancillary title is therefore ambiguous and ironic. “Other” can mean “more of the same”: more efforts doomed to eventual error, perhaps, but certainly more quests or inquiries into things, according to the etymology. But “other” is also “different,” perhaps even “opposite”: these essays hardly set forth inflexible dogma, with their sagacious heresies, pursuit of multiple meanings, and dubitative style. In 1925 Borges stated that his title aimed to dissociate “inquisition” once and for all from monks’ cowls and the smoke of damnation. After an inquisitorial pursuit of his own work, the effort continues.
Borges’ reference to De Quincey in opening the essay on John Donne is typical in its candid confession of influence and also typical in the English and uncommon nature of that influence. For Otras inquisiciones will probably seem no less unusual to the English-speaking than to the Spanish-speaking reader. Traits of nineteenth-century essayists as little read today as De Quincey—whimsical bookishness, a blend of conversational discursiveness and elevated diction, informal opinion prevailing over formal analysis—combine with the many unfamiliar subjects to produce a kind of alienation effect, a somewhat archaic or even atemporal quality remote from our age of urgent involvements, as well as from current critical modes. This effect is more compounded than mitigated by a very un-nineteenth-century brevity that may seem fragmentary and, with the great heterogeneity of the subjects, make the collection appear arbitrary and without unity. But there is method here; its basic principle is already suggested by the union of diverse and opposite meanings in the title.
One of the foremost quests in Otras inquisiciones is for symmetries; two that are rediscovered throughout the book under various guises appear in the first two essays. In “The Wall and the Books” Borges evokes the Chinese emperor who both created the Great Wall and wanted all books prior to him burned. This enormous mystification inexplicably “satisfies” and, at the same time, “disturbs” Borges. His purpose then is to seek the reasons for “that emotion.” (Note that the stimulus for the supposedly cerebral Borges is not an idea, that the satisfaction and disturbance are one feeling.) Various conjectures lead him to suggest that the aesthetic phenomenon consists in the “imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced”: a kind of expanding virtuality of thought, an unresolved vet centrally focussed multiplicity of views, which the essay’s form as discussion, as tacit dialogue, has already reflected. The other essays also display, centrally or laterally, paradoxes or oppositions with analogous overtones. At the end of “Avatars of the Tortoise” the paradoxes of Zeno and the antinomies of Kant indicate for Borges that the universe is ultimately a dream, a product of the mind, unreal because free of the apparent limits of time and space we call “real.” But the paradoxical confession with which “New Refutation of Time” end—”it [time] is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire”—must conclude that “the world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.” Extremes of fantastic hope and skepticism paradoxically coexist in Borges’ thought.
In “Pascal’s Sphere” he examines an image which is not only paradoxical in itself—the universe as an infinite sphere, in other words, a boundless form perfectly circumscribed—but which has also served to express diametrically opposite emotions: Bruno’s elation and Pascal’s anguish. But the other basic symmetry to note here is Borges’ history of the metaphor. Not only paradoxes are found throughout this collection, but also various listings of ideas or themes or images which though diverse in origin and detail are essentially the same. In “The Flower of Coleridge” the coincidence of Valéry’s, Emerson’s, and Shelley’s conceptions of all literature as the product of one Author seems itself to bear out that conception. At the beginning of the essay on Hawthorne, Borges again briefly traces the history of a metaphor—the likening of our dreams to a theatrical performance—and adds that true metaphors cannot be invented, since they have always existed. Such “avatars” point beyond the flux and diversity of history to a realm of eternal archetypes, which, though limited in number, “can be all things for all people, like the Apostle.” While the paradox upsets our common notions of reality and suggests that irreducible elements are actually one, recurrence negates history and the separateness of individuals. Of course, this too is a paradox, as “New Refutation of Time” shows: time must exist in order to provide the successive identities with which it is to be “refuted.” The two symmetries noted above, if we pursue their implications far enough, finally coalesce, with something of the same dizzying sense, so frequent in Borges’ stories, of infinite permutations lurking at every turn. Both are uses of what he calls a pantheist extension of the principle of identity—God is all things: a suitably heterogeneous selection of these may allude to Totality—which has, as he notes in the essay on Whitman, unlimited rhetorical possibilities.
Stylistic uses of that principle are the paradoxical or near-paradoxical word pairs (“that favors or tolerates another interpretation,” “our reading of Kafka refines and changes our reading of the poem”) and also the ellipses and transferred epithets based on substitution of part for whole, whose possibilities for animation of the abstract and impersonal explain why Borges terms a typical example “allegorical” at the beginning of “From Allegories to Novels.” (The classical concept of Literature’s precedence over individuals, outlined in the first essay on Coleridge, is analogous to this and to the priority of archetypes. As we shall see, Borges’ very personal essayistic manner actually reinforces such impersonality.) In general, the enumeration of sharply diverse yet somehow harmonizing parts that allude to some larger, static whole unnamable by any unilateral means is a common procedure underlying many features of Borges’ style and form: the sentences that abruptly rotate their angular facets like cut stones, the succinct little catalogs that may comprise paragraphs and even whole essays, the allusions and generalizations that find echoes of the line of argument elsewhere and project it onto other planes, the larger confrontations of a writer wit
h his alter ego (in himself or in another) or of the essay with its own revision or complement—all those series and inlays, in short, which are so much the curt mosaic design of this collection.
It is even possible to see the miscellaneous range of subjects taken up in Otras inquisiciones as yet another extension of the same “pantheist” principle, as books that variously point to one subsistent order beyond. In Borges’ stories (as also in Don Quixote) the turning points, the crucial revelations, are very often marked by the finding of some unexpected text. Otras inquisiciones opens with the words “I read, not long ago . . .” and closes with the author’s reflections on rereading his own essays. This ubiquitousness of books and their scrutiny is but one aspect of that ancient topos, with all its Cabalist elaborations, that so fascinates Borges: the world as Book, reality transmuted into Word, into intelligible Sign. All reality, including the symbolic and lived aspects we normally consider separate—the translation of this unity into literary form, as “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote” points out, is the structure of work within work in Cervantes’ novel, in Hamlet, in Sartor Resartus, where the boundaries between fiction and life shift and tend to disappear.
Concentric structures of this kind abound in Ficciones and El Aleph, as do direct premonitions and echoes of those stories’ themes in Otras inquisiciones. It is easy to see, for example, that the literary games of Tlön that attribute dissimilar works to the same writer and conjecture upon the apocryphal mentality thus obtained, like Pierre Menard’s art of “the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution,” are only somewhat more extravagant applications of the scrutinies practiced in the essays. In fact, Borges’ entire work, filled with recurring variants of the same interlocking themes, is a cento of itself, a repeated approximation of archetypes like those he glimpses in others. But a more intriguing comparison between his essays and his stories can be posed in this question: what is the difference for him between one genre and the other? Are his many fictions that masquerade as essays, such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” distinct from the “real” essays of Otras inquisiciones simply because the stories have invented books and authors as their subjects? But the fiction entitled “Story of the Warrior and the Captive” (in El Aleph) contains no invented element, save the speculative elaboration upon the scant facts of its real characters’ lives, and the germs of this are found also in an essay like “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” with the same weighing of conjectures, bipartite structure, and final identity of figures greatly separate in time and place. The real difference seems to be one of emphasis or degree: fiction and fact, imagination and critique, are aspects of the same continuum throughout Borges’ work, both within genres and among them. Hence, in these essays, he can use historical deeds to investigate the aesthetic phenomenon, to remark that the “ inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art, “ to find in his own work a tendency to evaluate religious or philosophical ideas on the basis of their aesthetic worth,” and to add epilogues and afterthoughts that are the beginnings of those Chinese-box structures where literature devours and extends itself without limit.
Borges’ major world-pictures have already been noted here in passing: the world as Book, the idealist and pantheist notions of the world as idea or dream, either man’s or God ‘s. (The Gnostic image suggested in the essay on John Donne—the world infinitely degraded, infinitely remote from God’s perfection—is but the exact I obverse of pantheism. As Borges observed in his earlier book Discusíon, “what greater glory for a God than to be absolved of the world?”) That these conceptions also coalesce is shown by the remark “we (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world” in “Avatars of the Tortoise,” by the concluding sentence of “From Someone to Nobody,” which suggests that all history is a dream of recurrent forms, and by the entire essay “The Mirror of the Enigmas,” with its “hieroglyphic” interpretation of the universe that Borges claims most befits “the intellectual God of the theologians,” the infinite mind that can instantly grasp the most, intricate figure in space and time (a nightmare of ars combinatoria, of pure chance) as a harmonious design. Borges’ world-pictures all seem to join in postulating that the world is a supreme mind about to emerge from its symbols and reveal the unity of all things and beings sub specie aeternitatis.
But does Borges believe in such incredible cosmologies? Clearly not: the alternative of infinite chaos is also always about to emerge. The word “believe” here takes on the same uncertainty as “fiction” and “reality.” His cosmologies are like hypotheses, cherished but also incurably problematical, as the whole tentative, self-critical cast of his style, at its most elaborate in “New Refutation of Time,” indicates. Such flexibility of mind he finds lacking in his former idol Quevedo, who is immune to the charm of fantastic doctrines that are “probably false,” and relishes in the atheist Omar Khayyam, who could interpret the Koran with strict orthodoxy and invoke in his studies of algebra the favor of “the God who exists,” because “every cultivated man is a theologian, and faith is not a requisite.” Any theme set forth by Borges will be refuted by him somewhere else: the concept of autonomous pure form espoused in “The Wall and the Books” and “Quevedo” is rejected in the first paragraphs of the essay on Bernard Shaw. Self-refutation has, besides the virtues of probity, its advantages, its “apparent desperations and secret assuagements.” One could suspect that Borges’ nature, like Chesterton’s, is a discord, and see these essays simply as its testimony, but it seems more accurate to consider Otras inquisiciones as a mask, as consciously projecting the image of a “possible poet, “ after the manner he has noted in Whitman and Valéry, those poetic personifications of fervor and intellect, each of whom is a counterpart of Borges’ creative self (the former fully as much as the latter, contrary to widespread belief).
The nature and purpose of that projection are implied in three passages from scattered essays of Borges. In 1927 he called metaphysics “the only justification and finality of any theme.” In 1933 he spoke of Icelandic kennings that produce “that lucid perplexity which is the sole honor of metaphysics, its remuneration, and its source.” And in 1944 he admired the “dialectical skill” of a fragment from Heraclitus, which insinuates part of its meaning and “gives us the illusion of having invented it.” The themes of Otras inquisiciones, as such, matter less than the state of awareness their immediacy and strangeness and scope can induce. In Borges’ sense, metaphysics is not an abstruse specialty, but the quotidian acts of all our thought, pursued to their consequences and revealed as the wonders they are. All ideas are arbitrary, fantastic, and useful. They should be remembered if forgotten or obscure, subverted if sacred (another form of oblivion), made absurd if banal—all for the sake of intelligence, of perceptibility. Borges’ curious erudition, plausible paradoxes, and restless scrutinies serve those functions, as does his very readable style (that worn epithet must be revived and used here). Taut and effortless, transparent and mannered, deeply true to the genius of the Spanish language yet heterodox, his rhetoric is also a silent parody and extension of itself. For even certain excesses, the abruptness of certain transitions, the dubiousness of certain obviously sentimental attachments, seem a willful demonstration of the limits of his writing and thought, as if to invite the reader, once he is sufficiently initiated (Borges’ work is never hermetic and is always intended for the reader), to “improve” upon these somewhat Socratic schemes. The activation of thought, shared by author and reader, miraculously effected over fatal distance and time by words whose sense alters and yet lives on, is the real secret promise of the infinite dominion of mind, not its images or finalities, which are expendable. This is the “method” of Borges’ essays, the process both examined and enacted in them, received and passed on, as part of a great chain of being. Hence the essay on Whitman, hence the final epigraph from the seventeenth-century German mystic Angelus Silesius:
Freund, es
ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr willst lesen,
So geh und werde selbst die Schrijt und selbst das Wesen.
Friend, this is enough. If you want to read more,
Go and be yourself the letter and the spirit.
James E. Irby
Princeton
Contents
____
Preface
James E. Irby
Introduction
Jason Wilson
John Updike
Eliot Weinberger
Other Inquisitions
The Wall And The Books
Pascal’s Sphere
The Flower Of Coleridge
The Dream Of Coleridge
Time And J.W. Dunne
The Creation And P.H. Gosse
Dr. Américo Castro Is Alarmed
A Note On Carriego
Our Poor Individualism
Quevedo
Partial Enchantments Of The Quixote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Note On Walt Whitman
Valéry As A Symbol
The Enigma Of Edward Fitzgerald
About Oscar Wilde
On Chesterton
The First Wells
The Biathanatos
Pascal
The Meeting In A Dream
The Analytical Language Of John Wilkins
Kafka And His Precursors
Avatars Of The Tortoise
On The Cult Of Books
The Nightingale Of Keats
The Mirror Of The Enigmas