Borges and memetics: the immortality of ideas

Rhetoric Bates College, 1985

The interest in pursuing further studies concerning Jorge Luis Borges was born out of my attraction to the problematic relationship between reality and fiction. While believing that writing is ultimately an expression of the self, it was necessary for me to understand Borges’s fictional world to come to grips with his short story “The Other” (1980). Borges’s fictional world is essentially based on his conception of art as an illusion. Identity, individuality, and time are also illusory. Identity exists inasmuch as every man is also another man and even all men. Time is past, present and future existing simultaneously. The universe is considered as a total oneness in which individuality is a mere illusion. Since, as Borges states, “the ego is the past, the present, and also (…) the future”, reality as the reflection of an ego becomes dubious and uncertain. However, man has the need to understand the world in which he lives. By reading Borges, and by studying “The Other” in specific, I have come to realize that man understands his world according to his own reality. Borges’s main purpose in confounding the boundaries between reality and dream in his fiction is to enable man to create his own reality according to the laws which he can know. As such, different realities may exist to different men.

Latin American Literary Review

The following essay explores the issues of idealism, ontology, and the fantastical in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. Borges' fascination with philosophical idealism began when he was introduced to philosophy as a child by his father, the thinker within this school who most influenced him being, as he admits, George Berkeley. Examining Borges' attitude towards Berkeley's radical idealism, the discussion focuses on its ontological dimension, demonstrating how Berkeley engages in a reductivist move in which ontology-in its Greek, Parmenidean sense-is replaced by epistemological processes in light of the dictum esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived"). Within this framework, the question of the ontological status of the fantastical object in the Borgesian text is investigated, idealistic and fantastical objects being analyzed and compared in his short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In a more general sense this comparison demonstrates that, considered from an ontological perspective, literary fantastical objects are not in fact idealistic objects but more closely resemble the paradoxical objects in Meinong's theory, thus constituting what Todorov calls the "hesitation experienced by a person [reader] who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event."

The Modern Language Review, 1992

This is a book that would have been to Borges's taste. Although he used to pride himself on never having read anything that was written about his life or his work, I am sure he would have read it from beginning to end. This is because it is a book of imaginative erudition, or erudite fantasy, an unusual combination which he used with greater originality than anyone else, so that the genre, though of the greatest antiquity, seems now almost to have been invented by him. Like the strange sect of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which wished secretly to interpolate a fictitious universe into the real one, Borges too, throughout his life as a writer, sought to distil beings, titles and events which his fantasy had forged into the history and literature of reality. Now they are part of them, as consistent and truthful as those which existed in objective time and real life. With true erudition, this dictionary organises, classifies, defines, collates the thousand and one creatures of Borges's imagination, constructing a map, in the minutest detail, of its geographies and constellations. It is an entertaining manual for exploring the vastness and cohesion of the Borgesian oeuvre, an excellent guide to prevent us from getting lost in the labyrinth and to ensure that we always find the way out. M.V.L. vi Foreword by Anthony Burgess I had a strong personal affection for Jorge Luis Borges. This, I think, was reciprocated and reinforced by the fact that we both had the same surname. At a party in the Argentine Embassy in Washington DC, when he was dogged by spies listening for words of disaffection, he and I spoke in Anglo-Saxon. This baffled completely the polyglot agents of a repressive state; it was very Borgesian. His life and his work tended to overlap: his work was magic and he had the face of a magician. His blindness only made him see more. Compared with the blockbusting novelists of our age, Borges must seem to have written practically nothing. But his ficciones, delicate, enigmatic, metaphysical, represent some of the most exquisite probing into the reality that twentieth-century literature has seen. He has created a whole world, and this dictionary serves to indicate how large this world is: we need a gazetteer to find our way round it. It is primarily an intellectual world, and it is built on the oldest of all intellectual dichotomies-the clash between nominalism and idealism. If we are nominalists, we have to say that only particulars are real, and that the universals are no more than words. A nominalist fiction-writer would have to have separate words for all the tigers, oranges, dishwashers and prostitutes in the world, but such a situation could never be handled. Fiction-writers have to use generalities, and this makes them, in the philosophical sense of the term, idealists. Borges is all too aware of his idealism, and a good deal of his work is a slap in the face of the nominalists. Thus when he constructs the Great Library of Babel, it has to be coextensive with the universe, since it contains every possible book, and the books are made, regardless of meaning, out of every possible combination of letters of the alphabet. Take also the character with total recall who wants to write but cannot, since to create logarithms for memories is beyond any man's power. To write his autobiography would require another life. These are some of the metaphysical tricks that Borges plays. The eponym of Doctor Brodie's Report meets a tribe whose language has no words for artefacts. They call a hut a tree and they would have to call a book 'tree' too. Then there is the imaginary planet called Tlön which seems to have been designed by Bishop Berkeley: there is no space or time in it, only succession, and the language has no nouns, since speakers have no conception of matter independent of their perceptions. Evidently such tricks could not be played in a ficción the length of Ulysses or Foreword Middlemarch, and Borges's limitation of form is, by an anomaly, an index of the width of his speculative power. His short stories are not the product of short-windedness, in the manner of the composer Anton Webern, but examples of a wholly original genre whose bulk and resonance depend, by that anomaly again, on an elected brevity. The range of the ficciones, as of the poems, is wide enough not merely to justify the making of a lexicographical guide to them but to render it a necessity. Borges knew the world of the pampas and had read Martin Fierro, but he was a librarian by profession, unashamedly bookish, and had read more widely than any of his contemporaries, even his senior James Joyce. The reading he did nourished his fiction, and some of it was very abstruse. We need a dictionary to get the logarithms of it, and this is the dictionary we need. I welcome it. The last time I saw Borges was in 1982, when we were both guests of the city of Dublin at the Joyce centennial celebrations. He gave a little talk about Joyce's importance after a banquet which was, in the Irish manner, highly bibulous, and most of its guests, who did not know who the hell he was, talked throughout his discourse. That, we may say, was the response of the great philistine world. Borges remains a taste to be cultivated, a name known and even feared but not destined to be popular. But he was no hermetic man. I drank Irish whiskey with him in the rowdy bar of the Ormonde Hotel and he said: 'What a beautiful word is mist.' I forbore to say that in German it meant manure. He would have reconciled the disparities without trouble and, if his writing days had not been done, made a ficción out of it. He was all magic. Let us not pretend that Borges, for all his personal approachability, was ever easy to approach as a writer. Even when we think that we fully understand, we are often led astray by our failure to identify a reference, an allusion, a carefully planted ambiguity. That is where this dictionary comes in. We have needed it for a long time, and new readers of the master as well as old will bless its compilers. It is also, vii apart from its value as an aid, compulsively readable in itself. The blind Borges would have loved to have had it read out to him. That is, alas, one chance our lexicographers have missed. But they certainly help the rest of us. A.B. ix now available online as the Finder's Guide in the Borges Centre, University of Pittsburg webpage. The critical literature on Borges has soared in the last decades and it is no longer possible to claim familiarity with it all; for the purposes of this revision we now add Borges, a life, by Edwin Williamson and Antonio Fernández Ferrer, Ficciones de Borges, En las galerías del laberinto, and refer the reader to the constantly updated section on Criticism in the Finder's Guide. This revised version of the Dictionary would not have been possible without Daniel Balderston's committed support or the expert and efficient editing of Gustavo Quintero Vera. To all those colleagues and friends for whom we always had a question, our warmest thanks. Since they make up most of the people we know, it is impossible for them to be named individually, nor can we list the many scholars all over the world who have generously replied to our numerous recondite inquiries, but our deepest appreciation goes to them. Needless to say, a work such as this is a magnet for errors; the responsibility for them rests solely with us.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature Revue Canadienne De Litterature Comparee, 2011

Th e Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borgès occupies a unique position in the world of letters, as much as that very idea would be an anathema to him. He belongs in some ways to the generation of the Latin American "boom" writers, whose fi ction is oft en described as that of "magical realism," but his work diverges from theirs in its theoretical implications. For a long time he was considered quintessentially "modernist," but is now also cited as a "postmodernist." Borgès' work exhibits characteristics of all of these, but in fact, Borgès resists our attempts to classify him and has proved to be a writer of multiple times and spaces. Borgès' writing in fact revives a complex literary and cultural heritage, and even as it may suggest other arts, such as the weaving of a vast tapestry, or the creation of an elaborate musical score, or even the techtonics of avant-garde architecture, his writing may fi nd its best analogies in modern physics. Borgès is praised for his erudition and his irony, admired for his arcane storytelling, his irony and playfulness, but he is considered a bizarre writer who lived in his own world, a solipsistic, hermetic world of signs and symbols, removed from history and modern realities. Of course Borgès assisted in the creation of his various personas, donning masks which allowed him to live many lives at once, a strategy which ironically attracted more attention to the act of authorship than he claimed to seek. But perhaps we as readers have been presumptuous in our desire to establish fi rm reference points from which to understand his literary enterprise: as his fables have told us so oft en, there are no stable beginnings or endings, and all limits are also windows upon other worlds. Indeed, perhaps the very undecidability of meaning, so prevalent in Borgès' texts, the spirit of endless transcoding, akin to "infi nite semiosis" in which meaning remains in constant suspension or deferral, can make us feel less guilty, less heretical, in reading Borgès in ways that he may not have himself intended.

Mind, 1970

THE CASE OF BORGES I. Borges the Artist and Borges the Thinker A LEADING historian confessed to me once that while he had been acting editor of the journal devoted to his sub-specialism he had one constant nightmare: he feared he might accept for publication a fabricated paper with fabricated documentation, so vast even a historical sub-specialism is. The nightmare represents not merely an expression of anxiety due to ignorance of certain areas-it expresses the terrible idea that the Cartesian demon can fake any symptom of reality and pass for real by any touchstone. Jorge Luis Borges is working for decades now on the execution of the nightmare. Perhaps his most celebrated instance is " Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ". It would take much work to sift the fabricated references in Borges' works from the ones deliberately misread from the over-emphasis on an author's casual remark, etc. 288 CRITICAL NOTICES: This, of course, is part of the game, for Borges wishes to shake in his reader the commonsensical confidence that one knows the difference between dream and reality-be this confidence based on any intuition or on any criterion to demarcate the two. Consequently, it is very hard to demarcate Borges' stories from Borges' essays. If we read the story ' Funes the Memorious ' we may view it as a short story or as a thought experiment about a Lockian mind with total recall. Now that A. R. Luria has published an empirical study of such a mind, one need not vindicate Borges, but may draw attention to additional treasures buried in his stories and essays. Normally one separates stories and essays functionally. The artist's task is to explore the emotional-experiential dimension. When a writer explores a new vision of the world in order to open up a new feeling, a new attitude, he is writing as an artist. As an artist he can also take a platitude and enhance it so as to make you feel its full significance. As an essayist he would rather draw from the platitude conclusions unexpected and unplatitudinous, or he would take an unnoticed fact or an outlandish thesis and show its merit and significance. This demarcation is not clear-cut. In particular, there is the area of overlap. Butler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited include essays thoughtful in their defence or mock-defence of outlandish theses, but also pregnant with a quaint atmosphere peculiar to these novels. So are most of Borges' writings. Like Butler, Shaw, and others, he uses a literary medium to advocate an unpopular philosophy. Like them he is in danger of being valued as a writer of note but as an advocate of a shallow philosophy. The philosophy he advocates is a variant of Schopenhauer's, and much akin to that of Erwin Schrodinger, well-known as a physicist but hardly as the accomplished writer and the intriguing philosopher that he was. It is the Schopenhauerian principle in Borges which makes him wonder what is real and what is illusory in our common experience. And it is this which makes him deliberately blur the borderline between his fiction and his essays: as if in order to imitate nature he blurs the boundary between reality and dream. The result may easily be that his essays be deemed a new form of fiction: besides the reportage novel we may see the non-fiction novel. The English translation of Borges' essays, Other Inquisitions, includes a prefatory essay of over seven pages, by James E. Irby of Princeton. His thesis is that all Borges' essays are works of fiction, in the sense in which Borges' beliefs are ' clearly not ' the ones seemingly advocated in the essays. This, I am tempted to say, is 'clearly' an indication of Irby's reluctance to accept Borges' challenge. In particular he apparently comforts himself by reference to the fact that Borges himself is dominated by skepticism. This would not be the first time that the challenger's skepticism is used as an excuse to maintain one's dogmatism. But, frankly, I do not think Irby's dismissal of Borges the thinker is rooted in dogmatism; more likely it is rooted in