Borges and Plato: A Game with Shifting Mirrors 9783954870462

Citation preview

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 1 — #1

i

i

Shlomy MUALEM

Borges and Plato A Game with Shifting Mirrors

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 2 — #2

i

i

Ediciones de Iberoamericana Serie A: Historia y crítica de la literatura Serie B: Lingüística Serie C: Historia y Sociedad Serie D: Bibliografías Editado por Mechthild Albert, Walther L. Bernecker, Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Frauke Gewecke, Aníbal González, Jürgen M. Meisel, Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, Katharina Niemeyer A: Historia y crítica de la literatura, 54

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 3 — #3

i

i

Shlomy M

Borges and Plato A Game with Shifting Mirrors

I – V – 

i

i i

i

-JCSBSZ PG $POHSFTT $BUBMPHJOHJO1VCMJDBUJPO %BUB -JCSBSZ PG $POHSFTT $BUBMPHJOHJO1VCMJDBUJPO %BUB .VBMFN 4IMPNZ #PSHFT BOE 1MBUP  B HBNF XJUI TIJGUJOH NJSSPST  4IMPNZ .VBMFN .VBMFN 4IMPNZ Q DN #PSHFT BOE 1MBUP  B HBNF XJUI TIJGUJOH NJSSPST  4IMPNZ .VBMFN *ODMVEFT CJCMJPHSBQIJDBM SFGFSFODFT BOE JOEFY Q DN *4#/  *4#/  *ODMVEFT CJCMJPHSBQIJDBMm SFGFSFODFT BOE JOEFY *4#/ #PSHFT +PSHF -VJT m$SJUJDJTN BOE JOUFSQSFUBUJPO  1MBUPm$SJUJDJTN  m *4#/  BOE JOUFSQSFUBUJPO  .ZUI  -PHPT 1IJMPTPQIZ

* 5JUMF  #PSHFT +PSHF -VJT m$SJUJDJTN BOE JOUFSQSFUBUJPO  1MBUPm$SJUJDJTN   -PHPT 1IJMPTPQIZ * 5JUMF BOE12#; JOUFSQSFUBUJPO  .ZUI hmED 12#;   hmED 

¥ *CFSPBNFSJDBOB  "NPS EF %JPT  m & .BESJE ¥ *CFSPBNFSJDBOB  5FM    m 'BY.BESJE      "NPS EF  %JPT m & 5FM      m 'BY      7FSWVFSU  &MJTBCFUIFOTUS 7FSWVFSU   m % 'SBOLGVSU BN .BJO 5FM     m% m 'BY     &MJTBCFUIFOTUS 'SBOLGVSU BN .BJO 5FM      m 'BY      JOGP!JCFSPBNFSJDBOBMJCSPTDPN m XXXJCFSPBNFSJDBOBOFU JOGP!JCFSPBNFSJDBOBMJCSPTDPN m XXXJCFSPBNFSJDBOBOFU *4#/  *CFSPBNFSJDBOB &EJUPSJBM 7FSWVFSU

*4#/   *CFSPBNFSJDBOB 7FSWVFSU &EJUPSJBM 1VCMJTIJOH 7FSWVFSU $PSQ

e-ISBN 978-39-5487-046-2 *4#/  *CFSPBNFSJDBOB 7FSWVFSU 1VCMJTIJOH $PSQ

%FQÓTJUP -FHBM %FQÓTJUP -FHBM 'SPOUJTQJDF "MGSFEP 4ÃCBU &WF BDDPSEJOH UP *OHSFT PJM PO DBOWBT  Y  DN  XXXBMGSFEPTBCBUDPN 'SPOUJTQJDF "MGSFEP 4ÃCBU &WF BDDPSEJOH UP *OHSFT PJM PO DBOWBT  Y  DN  $PWFS EFTJHO .JDIBFM "DLFSNBOO XXXBMGSFEPTBCBUDPN $PWFS EFTJHO .JDIBFM "DLFSNBOO 5IJT CPPL JT QSJOUFE PO BDJEGSFF QBQFS 5IJT CPPL JT QSJOUFE PO BDJEGSFF QBQFS

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 5 — #5

i

i

“A thinker is very much like a draughtsman whose aim it is to represent all the interrelations between things.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 12.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 6 — #6

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 7 — #7

i

i

A

I wish to thank the Zabludovsky Foundation in Bar-Ilan University for providing financial support for this publication. I am grateful for the sustained and supportive advice of my editors at Iberoamericana Vervuert Publishing, Mrs. Kerstin Houba and Ms. Anne-Kathrin Distler. My warm thanks go to my friend, Mr. Steve Manch, for his proofreading of the manuscript and to Mr. Alfredo Sábat for his kind permission to use his painting on the cover of this book. The following study is based on my Ph.D. dissertation, conducted at the department of Comparative Literature in Bar-Ilan University under the supervision of my late teacher, Prof. Ruth Reichelberg; I humbly dedicate this study - this poem of thoughts - to her beloved memory. Finally, I send my most intimate gratitude to my family who provided the ‘secret and modest’ paradise in which this book was written.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 8 — #8

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 9 — #9

i

i

T  C

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................

7

Abbreviations ..........................................................................................

11

Introduction ............................................................................................

13

Part One: Philosophical Explorations Chapter 1 The Ancient Quarrel: Mythos versus Logos...........................

19

Chapter 2 The Intellectual Instinct: Skepticism and the Quest for Truth

51

Chapter 3 The Eye of the Soul: In Search of the Idea ............................

85

Part Two: Literary Discussions Chapter 4 The Broken Mirror: The Crisis of Artistic Mimesis ..............

125

Chapter 5 The Guided Dream: The Riddle of Poetic Inspiration...........

153

Chapter 6 The Literary Proteus: The Image of the Poet ........................

175

Chapter 7 The Living Labyrinth: Reading and Writing the Book ..........

209

Selected Bibliography ..............................................................................

235

Index of Names .......................................................................................

245

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 10 — #10

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 11 — #11

i

i

A

The following abbreviations have been used to refer to the works of J.L. Borges. Plato’s abbreviations are not included since his dialogues are marked by their name. CF

Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Craft

This Craft of Verse. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu (Ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

SNF

Selected Non-Fictions. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin, 1999.

SP

Selected Poems 1923-1967. London: Penguin, 1985.

TR:I

Textos recobrados 1919-1929. Barcelona: Emecé, 1997.

TR:II

Textos recobrados 1931-1955. Barcelona: Emecé, 2001.

TR:III

Textos recobrados 1956-1986. Barcelona: Emecé, 2003.

OC

Obras completas (4 vols.). Barcelona: Emecé, 1989.

OI

Other Inquisitions. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

11

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 12 — #12

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 13 — #13

i

i

I

It was told that just before his death, Plato had a dream in which he appeared as a marvelous white swan – the bird sacred to the god Apollo – jumping from tree to tree, evading hunters who strove in vain to hunt him down with their arrows. Simmias, one of Socrates’ followers, interpreted the hunters in Plato’s dream to represent those who attempt and fail to decipher his thought.1 I assume that this interpretation of Plato’s dream can be applied to Borges’ labyrinthine work and thought as well. In the present study I intend, figuratively speaking, to let the two swans fly while attempting to observe their heavenly interplay, or rather – if I may use the title of one of Borges’ imaginary books – to track their ‘game with shifting mirrors.’ Indeed, Borges’ ‘philosophical fiction’ and Plato’s ‘intellectual dramas’ are perhaps the most intricate records in Western history of attempts to artfully interweave mythos and logos, argumentation and narrative, thought and imagination. Their juxtaposition first aims to demonstrate the connections between classical and modern literature and thought. Additionally, and more specifically, the Platonic viewpoint will shed light on Borges’ essayist and fictional work, providing what Wittgenstein calls an ‘aspect change’ in considering Borges’ literary and intellectual work as a whole textual corpus. It will show the extent to which Borges’ thought is deeply rooted in classical doctrines and Platonic themes, and this will provide new interpretations to his stories and poems. However, I do not intend to claim that Borges is a ‘Platonic writer,’ but rather, I will strive to show that both of their works stem from the same questions: from the same intellectual tensions. Consequently, dominant Borgesian symbols such as the mirror, the tiger, the double, the other, subjective identity, and the labyrinth will be interpreted as manifestations of Platonic dominant issues, such as the mimetic relation (mimesis), the incessant quest for knowledge (suzêtêsis), and the archetypical paradigm (paradeigma).

1

Olympiodorus In Alcib. Quoted in: J. E. Woodbridge. The Son of Apollo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929, p. 31. Another story compares Plato to a swan in Socrates’ dream: “It is stated that Socrates in a dream saw a swan on his knees, which all at once put forth plumage, and flew away after uttering a loud sweet note. And the next day Plato was introduced as a pupil, and thereupon he recognized in him the swan of his dreams.” (Diogenes Laertius: 3.5). 13

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 14 — #14

i

14

i



I believe that this novel outlook on Borges’ work and thought will challenge the view of Borges as a modern Sophist and a dogmatic skeptic, and instead portray him as a Socratic writer who is driven – besides his aesthetic motives – by what he calls the ‘intellectual instinct.’ This will not reduce Borgesian works to mere philosophic descriptions, but will hopefully contribute to a wider and richer philosophic interpretation of the Borgesian texts while abstaining from the temptations of over-interpretation and over-systematization. My general working hypothesis is that Borges’ and Plato’s works should be considered using a holistic approach. Borges’ admission that he is ‘not a thinker’ does not mean that he is incapable of abstract reflections; it only indicates that he disqualifies systematic thought. I assume that Borges does possess a group of loosely related ideas, like dew on a spiderweb, and that these ideas constitute the philosophical basis or the thematic layer of both his fictional and his literary work. On the other hand, I generally accept the modern approach to Plato’s works, which has increasingly recognized that attention to dramatic or literary details and structures may lead to a richer and more comprehensive interpretation of his dialogues. As Press indicates, this approach comprises three main presumptions:2 (1) that the dramatic and literary characteristics of the Platonic dialogues must be taken into consideration in order to interpret them and to understand Plato’s philosophical thought as it is expressed in them; (2) that the thought rightly attributable to the Platonic dialogues is likely to be something other than the traditional set of dogmas or doctrines that are found both in textbooks and scholarly writings, that is, the philosophical system called ‘Platonism;’ and finally (3) that the dialogues must be understood in their own historical context. In other words, I assume that it would be inappropriate to disregard the intellectual aspect of Borges’ work, to the same extent that it would be inappropriate to overlook the literary aspects of Plato’s oeuvre. In both cases, the attempt to distill systematic thought – nihilistically systematic in Borges’ case, logically systematic in Plato’s – should be replaced by carefully delineating a set of fundamental ideas (which, sometimes, contradict each other – as seen, for instance, in the tension between the concepts of inspiration and artistic representation in Plato’s work). This approach entails two methodical guidelines: a thematic slicing of Plato’s dialogues, and an inner-intertextual investigation of Borges’ texts. The thematic

2

Press, G.A. (Ed.). Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993, pp. 5-6.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 15 — #15

i

  :     

i

15

slicing of Plato’s work means that while dealing with a certain Platonic issue (e.g., the nature of the book), I will focus on the set of the dialogues that discuss or manifest this issue in a detailed manner, without overlooking the conceptual inconsistencies between them and with special attention given to their dramatic aspects. The inner-intertextual investigation of Borges’ work means that I will highlight the meaning of key concepts in his works (e.g., ‘labyrinth,’ ‘aesthetic event,’ and ‘eternity’) based on his own reflection – sometimes imperfect, inconsistent, or even paradoxical – regarding these concepts. In this way, his own abstract writing will serve as an Ariadne’s thread to his fictional and poetic texts, so that the quite complex internal relations between his theoretical and fictional writing, between his thought and imagination, will be revealed. My last and most general working hypothesis is quite obvious: that an adequate textual comparison will reveal both the similarities and dissimilarities of the compared texts, and that it will shed new light on both sides of the comparison. Consequently, I assume that, following the present study, Borges’ texts will gain some Platonic tinge, whereas Plato’s dialogues will appear as somewhat Borgesian. The book comprises two parts. Part I, including Chapters 1 to 3, deals with metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological questions. Chapter 1 deals with the interrelations between logos and mythos, pointing out, first, how Borges and Plato theoretically conceived the relations between these concepts, and second, how each of them uniquely interweaves these aspects into his work. Chapter 2 focuses on Skepticism and the quest for knowledge. Based on a dichotomy between dogmatic and methodic skepticism, it highlights Plato’s notion of suzêtêsis (ongoing shared search) and compares it to Borges’ notion of the ‘intellectual instinct’ (el instinto intelectual) that forms the basis of his pivotal symbol of the labyrinth. Chapter 3 investigates Plato’s theory of the archetypes, focusing on the tension between the concepts idea and eidos, which draws a complex connection among ontology, epistemology, and sight; the second part probes Borges’ attitude toward Platonic realism and its effect on his thought and writing, as well as his more personal views of blindness, sight, and thought, which are related to the theme of the archetype or the general form. Whereas Part I of the book deals with pure philosophical notions, Part II – including Chapters 4 to 7 – focuses on aesthetical and literary themes. Chapter 4 discusses the nature of artistic representation. Based on Plato’s critical approach to mimetic arts in the Republic, it delineates the Borgesian crisis of artistic representation and his shift from the ideal of total expression to a more modest principle of allusion. Chapter 5 deals with artistic inspiration, focusing on Plato’s discussion in the Ion, which strictly conceives the inspiration of the poet as a pas-

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 16 — #16

i

i



16

sive, irrational, and unreflective act that opposes the active investigation of the philosopher. The second part demonstrates the Borgesian dichotomy between Plato’s irrational inspiration and Edgar Allan Poe’s purely rational philosophy of composition, and it points out Borges’ tendency to finally combine the theories, applying them to his own experience of inspiration. Chapter 6 investigates the nature of the identity of the artistic creator. It shows how Plato, when considering the poet’s personality, moves from the symbol of the demiourgos (wise craftsman) to the mythical image of the multi-formed Egyptian god Proteus. This shift can be compared to the severe Borgesian tension that exists between narrative identity and subjectivity, between “Borges” and the “I,” which is manifested in his essays, stories, and poems through the images of Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare. Chapter 7 probes the notions of the book, reading, and writing as seen in Plato’s Phaedrus, vis-à-vis Borges’ cult of books and his peculiar notion of the aesthetic event. In order to make my discussions easier to read, I used English translations for both Plato and Borges’ quotations. Nonetheless, I underscored the Greek etymological meaning for all the Platonic key concepts, and regarding quotations of Borgesian poems, I added the Spanish original in a footnote. I believe that, besides its methodical aspects, this textual English-based approach will be useful in exposing Borges’ and Plato’s works to wider circles of readers and thus it might encourage a fruitful cross-disciplinary dialogue. Borges indicates that the reader has the privilege of extending the thoughts of the writer and to enrich the meaning of the text that he reads. I hope that in this study, which was written with deep intellectual pleasure, I have managed to handle this privilege properly. Lastly, I aspire that my investigation has fairly escaped the gloomy faith of (to use Borges’ criticism of books in aesthetics) ‘astronomers who never looked at the stars;’ that my reading has revealed, to some extent, ‘the modest and secret complexity’ (la modesta y secreta complejidad)3 of Borges’ work. Bar-Ilan University April, 2011

3

OC: II, 236.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 17 — #17

i

i

Part I

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 18 — #18

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 19 — #19

i

i

C  The Ancient Quarrel: Mythos versus Logos

I suppose there is no essential difference between philosophy and poetry, since both stand for the same kind of puzzlement. Except that in the case of philosophy the answer is given in a logical way, and in the case of poetry you use metaphors. (Borges at Eighty 17)

When Borges was asked whether there is any part of Plato’s work he was particularly interested in, he replied: “With Plato, you feel that he would reason in an abstract way and would also use myth. He would do those two things at the same time.”1 Indeed, there is no doubt that Plato was the most ingenious mythological- philosopher in Western thought, a thinker who managed to artfully interweave logos and mythos in his dialogues.2 Socrates justifies the use of myth in philosophical discourse while discussing the nature of falsehood in the second Book of the Republic: since we do not know what actually happened in the past, he says, mythos can be most useful in constructing an account by likening the false to the true as much as possible (382c). Likewise, Borges remarkably integrates philosophy, theology, and fantastic literature in his writing. This tendency crowned him with the title “literary philosopher” and urged some critics to define his stories as “metaphysical similes.”3 It seems, thus, that Borges and

1

2

3

Yates, Donald. “A Colloquy with Jorge Luis Borges” (1976). In: Burgin, Richard (Ed.). Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998, p. 160. Other prominent mythological philosophers in Western thought are Parmenides, who opens his philosophical poem with a description of his mythical-mystical voyage to the realm of the gods, and Nietzsche, especially in his Bible-like book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. On Borges as a literary philosopher, along with Calvino and Eco, see: Gracia, J. E., Korsmeyer, C., and Gasché, R. (Eds.). Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco. NY: Routledge, 2002, chapter 1. 19

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 20 — #20

i

20

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

Plato share a firm common denominator by being writers who work in the twilight zone in which mythos and logos interact and mingle. On the other hand, it is in Plato’s work that mythos has become the ‘other’ of logos, the irrational and uncritical speech that shares no common grounds with the contemplative quest of the ‘lover of wisdom.’ This separation between mythos and logos is the basis of the sharp Platonic distinction between philosophy and poetry. As for Borges, despite his frequent use of philosophical systems in his writing, he consistently tends to underestimate the philosophical value of his work.4 Therefore, we observe a fundamental tension in both cases: both Borges and Plato are inclined to combine mythos and logos in their praxis, while insisting that these notions be essentially separated in their contemplation. The aim of the following chapter is to clarify the function, the tension, and the entangled interconnections between mythos and logos in their works. Etymologically, the Greek word logos is derived from the verb legein (to collect, to gather), and it was used in the Archaic and Classical periods to indicate ‘speech,’ ‘account,’ ‘definition,’ and also ‘a thing’ and, generally, ‘reason’.5 The Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus goes further and considers logos as the supreme principle of the universe; this tension between the subjective and the objective meanings of logos is clearly expressed in his Fragment B50: “Listening not to me, but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.” Here, he distinguishes between his own logos and the general logos that communicates through his words. Logos is thus presented in Presocratic thought as a general principle, reflected in human words and thoughts.6 This notion is the forerunner of the Platonic view in which logos is grasped as a true account of the nature of a thing (Theaetetus 208c) and of his depiction of the philosopher as the one ‘who follows the footsteps of logos’ (Crito 46a). Mythos, on the other hand, etymologically means a specific kind of “speech.” In the Iliad it is “a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length, usually

4

5

6

For instance, in an introduction to an anthology of his poems, he admits: “I cannot say whether my work is poetry or not, I can only say that my appeal is to the imagination. I am not a thinker. I am merely a man who has tried to explore the literary possibilities of metaphysics and of religion” (Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Poems 1923-1967. London: Penguin Books, 1985, p. xiii). See: Peters, F. E. Greek Philosophical Terms. NY: NY University Press, 1967, pp. 110111. Mortley, Raoul. From Word to Silence. Vol. I. Bonn: Hanstein, 1986, p. 18.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 21 — #21

i

  :     

i

21

in public, with a focus on full attention to every detail.”7 Generally, in the Presocratic period this notion was used to denote a special category of speech that implies power and efficacy: an authoritative speech-act.8 It was only with the rise of the abstract discourse of philosophy (and, what goes hand in hand, the articulation of textual writing which supplements the oral utterance) that mythos became a negative notion.9 More specifically, the undermining process of the mythos began with Herodotus and Pindar and culminated in Plato’s dialogues. Gradually, mythos became the obscure irrational “other” that opposes the rational bright logos, the unreflective and inaccurate narrative that opposes the clear-cut analytical account of philosophy. At the same time, philosophers who retained a highly critical view of the mythos continued to use it in their own theoretical writing, preserving it as a shadow of its former self (Morgan 16-26). This rejection-attraction ambivalence of early philosophy toward mythos has drawn the attention of classical scholars. What is the justification, they ask, of incorporating the mythos into abstract writing while disparaging it as irrational and harmful? Morgan claims that, first of all, myth and philosophy are “dynamic, not static categories” so that the boundary between myth and philosophy must continually be redrawn. According to her view, the mythological world of the poets is the larger cultural context inside which early philosophy operated. Thus, myths appeared to be an important medium for early philosophers “to think through problems of literary, social, and linguistic convention” (Morgan 5). In other words, myths are taken to be the womb of the philosophic embryo. Apart from this contextual interpretation, Morgan supplies two concrete justifications for the extensive use of myths in philosophical writing. The first can be called the honeyed cup approach. In this approach, myths “add color to the dry, technical, and forbidding content of philosophical discourse.” They soften the severe traits of philosophy, but, at the same time, they are essentially separable from the content of philosophical discourse (Morgan 4). This view presumes that philosophical discourse is essentially purely analytical, whereas mythical expression serves as a mere ornamentation, lacking any kind of noetic quality. This seems to be

7

8

9

Martin, R. P. Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 12. Morgan, Kathryn. Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 18. An analysis of the distinction between the prose of philosophical writing and the poetic utterance of mythos will be discussed at length in Chapter 7, in the framework of Havelock’s study Preface to Plato.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 22 — #22

i

22

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

a too self-conscious and manipulative approach for the rather naïve Presocratic thinker, although it may be compatible indeed with the highly ingenious writing of Plato. The second justification is more flexible and it endows mythos with some intellectual value. Its upholders assume that mythical rhetoric manages to express, somehow, what scientific language cannot, and that it takes over where philosophy proper leaves off (ibid.). According to this view, the use of mythos is internally related to the limitedness of theoretical utterance: mythos can serve, for instance, to communicate the ineffable traits of transcendental realms and the qualities of metaphysical knowledge. There is no doubt that the most intricate expression of this rejection-attraction ambivalence is manifested in Plato’s dialogues. As previously mentioned, Plato is the most critical philosopher of mythos and, at the same time, the preeminent mythical-philosopher of Western thought (Percy Shelley considers him as the ‘prince of the poets’ in his treatise Defense of Poetry). In fact, the harsh criticism of mythos is rooted in Plato’s dichotomy of aesthesis and noesis. The notion of aesthesis was quite ambiguous in Presocratic thought, indicating both ‘perception’ and ‘sensation.’ It is only in Plato’s philosophy that aesthesis became the complete antithesis of noesis: from that time onward, aistheton only denoted sensual perception of appearance that leads to assumptions (doxa), whereas noeton refers to pure cognitive perception, which directs the mind toward the true knowledge (episte¯me¯) of the idea (Peters 9-15). Aistheton and noeton thus became two distinct and opposite activities. Consequently, Plato conceived logos as the exclusive sphere of the intellectual activity of noeton, whereas mythos pertained to the emotional and sensual sphere of aistheton. The relation of logos to noeton will be dealt with at length later, while analyzing the Platonic metaphor of ‘the eye of the soul.’ In the present discussion, I will consider Plato’s use of mythos in his philosophical writing and will focus on his view of the relation between logos and mythos, as expressed in what he calls the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry. Plato’s use of mythos can be clarified in the context of his dialogic writing. As is well known, the Platonic dialogues are in the form of dramatic discussions carried out among various interlocutors. The dominant character is, no doubt, Socrates, but the voice of Plato himself is never explicitly heard.10 Up until the late 19th century, Plato’s dialogic mode of writing was considered as a mere ornamentation of the serious Platonic philosophy. Serious Hegelian Scholars such as

10

The Image of Socrates and the ‘Socratic problem’ (the methodological problem of distinguishing Socrates from Plato) will be discussed at length in the following chapter.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 23 — #23

i

  :     

i

23

Edward Zeller have assumed that every philosopher must sustain an analytic and coherent system of argumentation and hence that the principal task of the commentator of the Platonic work is to distill a pure system of abstract thoughts from the carnivalesque dialogues, peeling away their dramatic aspects. It is not surprising that this group of scholars was particularly displeased with the Platonic varied use of mythos and of Plato’s multi-layered literary writing, and that they strove to distill the true core of ‘Platonism.’ Generally, this approach comprises three leading schools: (1) Geneticism, which assumes that Plato’s thought developed throughout the dialogues (Tigerstedt 1977: 25-51); (2) Unitarism, which assumes that Plato upholds a unitary philosophy that is, for didactic reasons, gradually revealed throughout the dialogues (ibid. 52-63) ; and (3) Esoterism, which supposes, based on Plato’s Seventh Epistle and some scattered remarks of his disciples, that Plato possesses an esoteric theory that was clandestinely studied in the Academy and is only vaguely hinted at in his dialogues (ibid. 63-85).11 The common ground of these schools was the fact that they undertook the task of separating the peer of Platonic mythos from the core of Platonic logos. It was Schleiermacher who, in the late 19th century, initiated the novel “literary approach” to Plato’s work. His methodological surmise was that every detail of the carefully written dialogues contributes to the meaning of the whole. Thus, Plato’s work should be observed as an organic whole (as Plato himself demands in Phaedrus 264c), that is, as a literary-philosophical unit.12 Scholars supporting this new approach have come to realize that careful attention to dramatic or literary details and structures of the dialogues yields a richer and, from their viewpoint, a more comprehensive interpretation of Plato’s text. G. A. Press indicates three main guiding principles of this modern ‘literary’ approach to Plato’s work:13 (1) Dramatic and literary characteristics of the dialogues must be taken into consideration in order to interpret them, to understand Plato’s philosophical thought as it is expressed in them. What is said cannot be

11

12

13

The upholders of the thesis of Esoterism tend to overstress the only documentation on the subject: the records of Proclus, Aristoxenus, and Themistius concerning Plato’s public lecture on the Good, in which he is said to identify the Good with the One. See: Tigerstedt, ibid., pp. 70-74. On the new ‘literary’ approach to Plato’s work in its relation to other traditional schools, see: Blondell, Ruby. The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002, pp. 4 ff. Press, G.A. (Ed.). Plato’s Dialogue: New Studies and Interpretations. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993, pp. 5-6. See also detailed analysis in: Clay, Diskin. Platonic Questions. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, pp. 79-116.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 24 — #24

i

24

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

separated from the circumstances in which it is said. The investigation of the dramatic form is therefore an integral part of the commentary of Plato’s intention; (2) The thought rightly attributable to the dialogues is likely to be something other than the traditional set of dogmas or doctrines that are found in both textbooks and scholarly writings, namely, the philosophical system called Platonism. According to this view, Plato’s main goal in using dramatic writing is to avoid dogmatism and to stimulate the reader to actively participate in the discussion. This is in line with the Platonic analogy between dialectics and the art of midwifery (Theaetetus 149a-151d), which will be discussed at length in the following chapter.14 (3) In order to clarify Plato’s exact intention, one must understand the dialogues in their own historical context. Plato’s work should therefore be compared with genres such as Greek comedies, tragedies, and epics as well as with Presocratic and other abstract treatises. These principles indicate that the main task of the commentator is to display the intricate Platonic interplay of logos and mythos, of narrative and pure argumentation, and to expose the intertextual relations between the dialogues and other Greek texts. One of the dominant questions evoked by this approach is the justification and the modus operandi of Plato’s use of mythos in his work. This point needs further clarification. As indicated earlier, in sharp contradiction to his harsh criticism of mythos, Plato does not exclude mythos from his philosophical writing altogether; on the contrary, he uses it frequently and with much variation. The fact that the boundary between Platonic mythos and logos is significantly vague has puzzled scholars who undertook the task of classifying the Platonic myth.15 Moreover, since Plato uses his mythos vocabulary in such a variety of circumstances, it is hard to formulate even a simple definition of the Platonic myth.16 Nevertheless, following a careful textual examination, Kathryn Morgan managed to distinguish three types of mythos in Plato’s oeuvre: traditional, educational, and philosophi-

14

15

16

On the Platonic conception of philosophy as midwifery, see: Tomin, Julius. “Socratic Midwifery.” In: The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 37, No. 1. (1987), pp. 97-102; Sedley, D. N. The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato’s Theaetetus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. See: Elias, J.A. Plato’s Defence of Poetry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984, pp. 75-118. For instance, Zaslavsky assumes that the only possible criterion for identifying Platonic myth is Plato’s own definition of a text as a mythos. See: Zaslavsky, R. Platonic Myth and Platonic Writing. Washington: University of America, 1981, pp. 12-14. See also Morgan’s criticism of this methodology as naïve, and her alternative suggestion of contextual reading (Morgan 156-161).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 25 — #25

i

  :     

i

25

cal myth (Morgan 162 ff.). (1) Traditional myth is the largest category of mythos vocabulary in the Platonic corpus. This class comprises an account, usually of Socrates, of tales told by poets, rhapsodists, old wives, and other storytellers. It is usually ascribed to preeminent poets, especially Homer and Hesiod. Such tales were often criticized by Socrates, explicitly or implicitly, because of their ethically misleading content, and in Books II-III of the Republic they are mercilessly censored by the king-philosopher of the state. (2) Educational myth is discussed at length in the third Book of the Republic. Here Plato presumes that it is the role of the storytellers to educate the young citizens of the ideal state, since children are incapable of abstract thinking. Since children are still incapable of logos, it is acceptable that they are to be educated by the ‘useful lies’ of the mythos. Mythos is thus seen as an indirect mode of ethical and social learning. Plato emphasizes that this learning should be conducted and supervised by the king-philosopher, who possesses genuine knowledge of the truth. Here, too, logos subordinates mythos. Educational myth is thus conceived as a mode of persuasive rhetoric. The philosopher may use, for instance, ‘noble lies’ for the benefit of the state (Republic 414 b-c). (3) The third mode of mythos is, no doubt, the most intricate of all: it is the philosophical myth, Plato’s own literary invention. According to Morgan, the philosophical myth is tied in Plato’s work “to the rational arguments which surround it, draws its strength from that context, and can influence the progression and formulation of philosophical discussion” (p. 161). It usually follows a long analytical discussion and reflects its conclusion. Its aim is essentially cognitive: it should direct the attention of the listener to metaphysical truth, away from the decisive spectacles of the world of appearances. At the same time, philosophic myth develops in the listener a reflective view of the philosophical discourse; thus, it stimulates critical questioning – in opposition to the unreflective audience of the traditional myth (p. 163). Hence, the philosophical myth is Plato’s most salient mode of merging mythos and logos. In general, Smith discerns five functions of the philosophical myth in the dialogues:17 (1) they are playful in a way that is vital to philosophy;18 (2) they provide hypotheses for critical examination; (3) they keep the dialogues undogmatic, and their meaning flexible and multilayered; (4) they shift the reader’s attention to the transcendental realm of Forms, which exceed abstract utterance, similar to the symbolic or metaphoric

17

18

Smith, J.E. “Plato’s Use of Myth in the Education of the Philosophic Man.” In Phoenix 40 (1986): pp. 20-34. On myth and playfulness in Plato, see also: Morgan pp. 168-178. Plato’s notion of writing as a play will be minutely analyzed in Chapter 7.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 26 — #26

i

26

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

writing of the mystics; and (5) they combine and distill the thematic aspects of the dialogues. An example of Plato’s use of the philosophical myth can be derived from Phaedo, which Borges praises as an exemplary blend of logos and mythos. The dialogue depicts the last day of Socrates, during which the dying philosopher manifests a long analytical argument concerning the immortality of the soul. Following a detailed presentation, Socrates moves from logos to mythos, mentioning an ancient legend regarding the judgment of the souls in the afterlife in the land of the dead, the Hades: Now when the dead have come to the place where each is led by his genius, first they are judged and sentenced, as they have lived piously, or not. And those who are found to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the Acheron and, embarking upon vessels provided for them, arrive in them at the lake; there they dwell and are purified, and if they have done any wrong they are absolved by paying the penalty for their wrong doings, and for their good deeds they receive rewards, each according to his merits. But those who appear to be incurable, on account of the greatness of their wrong doings, because they committed many great deeds of sacrilege, or wicked and abominable murders, or any other such crimes, are cast by their fitting destiny into Tartarus, whence they never emerge. Those, however, who are curable but are found to have committed great sins – who have, for example, in a moment of passion done some act of violence against father or mother and have lived in repentance the rest of their lives, or who have slain some other person under similar conditions – these needs must be thrown into Tartarus, and when they have been there a year the wave casts them out, the homicides by way of Cocytus, those who have outraged their parents by way of Pyriphlegethon. And when they have been brought by the current to the Acherusian lake, they shout and cry out, calling to those whom they have slain or outraged, begging and beseeching them to be gracious and to let them come out into the lake; and if they prevail they come out and cease from their ills, but if not, they are borne away again to the Tartarus, and thence back into the rivers, and this goes on until they prevail upon those whom they have wronged; for this is the penalty imposed upon them by the judges. But those who are found to have excelled in holy living are freed from these regions within the earth and are released as from prisons; they mount upwards into their pure abode and dwell upon the earth. And of these, all who have duly purified themselves by philosophy live henceforth altogether without bodies, and pass to still more beautiful abodes, which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough. (Phaedo 113d-114c)

Socrates elucidates without hesitation the philosophical moral of this myth, relating it to his former analytical arguments concerning the immortality of the soul: “But, Simmias, because of all these things which we have recounted we ought to do our best to acquire virtue and wisdom in life. For the prize is fair

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 27 — #27

i

  :     

i

27

and the hope great.” At the same time, he critically examines the validity of the myth: Now it would not be fitting for a man of sense to maintain that all this is just as I have described it, but that this or something like it is true concerning our souls and their abodes, since the soul is shown to be immortal, I think he may properly and worthily venture to believe, for the venture is well worthwhile; and he ought to repeat such things to himself as if they were magic charms, which is the reason why I have been lengthening out the story so long. (Phaedo 114d)

In this case, philosophical myth reflects and illustrates the conclusions of the former theoretical discussion concerning the immortality of the soul. Its function is thus purely cognitive, directing the contemplative attention of the listener to philosophical truth. At the same time, one realizes that Plato does not refrain from having the reader critically contemplate the firmness of the argumentations just presented. This move is in sharp contrast to the traditional unreflective myth. In addition, the philosophical myth serves to indirectly express ineffable metaphysical premises (Elias 36). It is possible that Plato’s awareness of the inability of philosophical language to fully express the transcendental realm of the Ideas led him to use the vague metaphoric language of mythos. Put simply, the poetic language of myth begins when the analytical prose of philosophy ends. Thus, Plato’s use of philosophical myth functions both as a parody and an exhortation of the old unreflective traditional myths. Simultaneously, it probably manifests his harsh awareness of the expressive limitedness of the new philosophical medium. As Morgan puts it in the conclusion of her discussion, Plato’s interweaving of mythos and logos indicates his striving for ever-increasing degrees of linguistic precision, in addition to his recognition that his project is incomplete and his discourse imperfect. Thus, Platonic mythoi “adumbrate the (currently) inexpressible, remind us of its presence, and keep alive the awareness that philosophical discourse itself is a constructed account of reality” (p. 291). Another unique aspect of Plato’s complex merging of logos and mythos is his notorious declaration of the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.’ Here, the philosophy-poetry feud reflects and intensifies the logos-mythos dichotomy. In Book X of the Republic, Plato writes the words that initiated an ongoing dispute in Western culture:19

19

See also: Rosen, S. The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought. NY: Routledge, 1988; Levin, S. B. The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 28 — #28

i

28

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS Let us, then, conclude our return to the topic of poetry and our apology, and affirm that we really had good grounds then for dismissing her from our city, since such was her character. For reason constrained us. And let us further say to her, lest she condemn us for harshness and rusticity, that there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry. For such expressions as ‘the yelping hound barking at her master’ and ‘mighty in the idle babble of fools,’ and ‘the mob that masters those who are too wise for their own good,’ and ‘the subtle thinkers who reason, that after all they are poor’ and countless others are tokens of this ancient enmity. (607b-c)

In fact, there are no other references in ancient texts to the supportive quotations given here.20 Moreover, there are negligible traces of this ‘ancient quarrel’ in the existing fragments of Greek poetry, comedy, and drama.21 This is because philosophy was at Plato’s time quite an esoteric activity, conducted by a small group of upper class Athenian intellectuals. Even Aristophanes’ harsh attack on Socrates in the Clouds is actually directed at Socrates ad-hominem, condemning him as impractical and socially useless and presenting him more as a weird Sophist than as a philosopher. As Nightingale remarks, “the references to (what we now refer to as) philosophers and sophists in old Comedy are not that numerous, and they hardly encourage the view that the comic playwrights had identified a large and cohesive group of thinkers as rivals of the poets” (p. 62); the same goes for old Drama. Concordantly, there is no evidence in the contemplative writings of the Presocratics of an overt repudiation of poetry as a whole (ibid. 64 ff.). What motives led Plato to declare an illusionary feud? According to Havelock, the starting point of any understanding of this viewpoint is clarifying the role of poetry in classical Athens: “poetry was not ‘literature’ but rather a political and social necessity. It was not an art form, nor a creation of the private imagination, but an encyclopedia maintained by cooperative effort on the part of the ‘best Greek polities’.”22 In fact, the whole Greek education was based on mousike, ‘the arts of the Muses,’ which comprised poetry, music, and dance. The education of the children was also based on poetry, which was an essential part of the educational process, aimed at forming a harmonious personality.23 According to this view, poetry was learned not so much because of its aesthetic

20

21

22

23

Wilamowitz assumes that these quotations are taken from Sophron, but there is no direct documentation to support this claim. Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. Genres in Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1995, pp. 60-61. Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1982, p. 65. I will discuss the status of the Greek poet in detail in Chapter 6. Murray, Penelope. Plato on Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1996, p. 15.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 29 — #29

i

  :     

i

29

qualities, as much as for its moral effect, and it was the task of the poets to provide the Athenian youngsters with heroes and role models. Accordingly, the mature Athenian citizen frequently participated in collective poetical events, such as festivals and theatre performances, as described in Plato’s Ion (530 b). Even the aristocratic banquets were replete with poetic activities and quotations, as manifested in Plato’s Symposium. In short, as Murray put it, “Greek was indeed a ‘song culture’ until well into the fifth century B.C.” (p. 17). Moreover, the Athenians highly revered their poets. The Greek poet, represented mainly by the legendary images of Homer and Hesiod, was considered as the utmost ethical and epistemological authority. Additionally, until Plato’s time there was actually no use of the term “philosophy” as indicating separate intellectual activity; it was Plato himself who first used this term to denote systematic pursuit of abstract truth. In Presocratic Athens, the term philosophia was used to indicate, in general, “intellectual cultivation,” and it included a variety of intellectual activities such as sophism and even poetry. As Nightingale remarks, philosophy was indeed “no match for venerable poetry in Plato’s period.” (p. 61). These textual and historical analyses provide an important insight: Plato established the new intellectual (and a quite esoteric) system called philosophy and presented it as the ancient rival of the most authoritative and revered activity of his time. Put simply: the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry is a Platonic myth. Additionally, he supports this myth by four well-known analytical arguments presented at length in the Republic: (1) metaphysical argument: Poetry is a third-rate imitation of the Truth24 , whereas philosophy is a method that directs the “souls’ eye” to directly observe it (Book X); (2) moral argument: Poetry depicts immoral deeds of mythical heroes and Olympic Gods. This improper depiction undermines the ethical infrastructure of society. The philosopher, in a contradictory manner, possesses real knowledge of the Idea of the Good and strives to establish an equitable social order that will reflect eternal justice (Book III); (3) psychological argument: Poetry nurtures the lower beastly faculties of the soul (symbolized by the image of a multi-headed monster), whereas philosophy subordinates these parts to reason and thus manages to establish justice in the soul (Book IX); (4) epistemological argument: The poet holds no real knowledge of the Truth. He is ecstatically dominated by divine inspiration, having no reflective awareness of what he says. It is only the philosopher who directly observes the Truth and possesses real knowledge (episte¯me¯), and who consequently deserves

24

I write ‘Truth’ in capital letter, here and henceforth, in order to denote metaphysical validity rather than empirical facts.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 30 — #30

i

30

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

to be the king of the ideal state (Republic VII, X). This set of arguments underpins the previously mentioned ‘ancient quarrel’ declaration, and serves to justify its notorious outcomes: the censorship of poetry and the banishment of the great poets from the ideal state (Republic 398a). Yet Plato concludes his claim with a rather hesitative attitude: “But nevertheless let it be declared that if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell. But all the same it would be impious to betray what we believe to be the truth.” (607c). Nightingale justly infers that Plato’s entire argument against poetry is designed to differentiate philosophy from poetry. Here, the newborn system of philosophy is negatively defined as the ultimate opposite of poetry (p. 67).25 From this viewpoint, it turns out that the whole Platonic ‘ancient quarrel’ discussion, including its set of analytical arguments, is essentially a rhetorical move. From the viewpoint of the logos-mythos dichotomy, it can be deduced that Plato strives to undermine the traditional mythos, as told by the inspired poets, and to raise on its ruins the new mythos: the mythos of logos. This new mythos of logos contains a hero (the philosopher, represented by the image of Socrates), an orderly worldview (the right way of living is to follow the footsteps of logos), a villain (poetry and traditional mythos, represented by Homer), a task (the pursuit of ultimate Truth), a utopia (the ideal state), and finally, a prize (observing the marvelous Idea that leads to some kind of an existential redemption). In conclusion, Plato’s view of the relations between logos and mythos is as follows: he considers logos as rational and contemplative, whereas mythos is considered irrational, uncritical, and, consequently, potentially harmful. Mythos thus becomes the ultimate ‘other’ of philosophy and the antithesis of bright logos. At the same time, he variously and frequently uses mythos in his own philosophical writing; this constitutes the genre of philosophical myth as an ultimate combination of mythos and logos. It is probable that the use of mythos in the Platonic texts aims at keeping the discussion undogmatic as well as coping with the limitations of rational utterance. On this basis, and considering this mythos-logos antithesis, Plato proclaims an ‘ancient quarrel’ between poetry and philosophy, composing a new ‘mythos of logos.’ Thus, while he takes great pains to keep mythos and logos

25

Wordsworth partakes the quarrel and fights Plato back in his poem “A Poet’s Epitaph”: “Philosopher! A fingering slave, / One that would peep and botanize / Upon his mother’s grave” (Shorey’s remark).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 31 — #31

i

  :     

i

31

separate in his arguments, he ingeniously interweaves them in his writing. Let us now turn to examine the interplay of logos and mythos in the work of Borges. In an interview carried out at Indiana University in 1976, Borges admits: “Yet, for myself, I know I am not a thinker, except in the sense of being very puzzled over things. I try to find interpretations and I generally find them by letting the author do my thinking for me. But I think that I use thinking for literary purposes. I think of myself primarily as being a man of letters.”26 In accordance with this statement, he acknowledges in the often-quoted epilogue of his most important theoretical book Other Inquisitions (1952) his inclination to “evaluate religious or philosophical ideas on the basis of their aesthetic worth and even for what is singular and marvelous about them.” (OC: II, 153. my translation). At first sight, one readily notes that Borges and Plato share the same inclination to combine in their works philosophy and literature, mythos and logos. As previously shown, Plato uses mythos in the service of logos; Borges confesses that he does the opposite. But what is Borges’ exact view of logos and mythos? And what is his actual modus operandi while interweaving them in his writing? The following section will examine these questions in relation to Plato’s perspective. First, Borges’ view of Plato’s use of myth should be clarified. During a dialogue between Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari carried out in 1984, the latter remarks that while Eastern philosophy actually began with Plato, many thinkers consider Aristotle as their starting point. Borges responds: Well I think that in any case they [Plato and Aristotle] represent for us two very distinct ideas. The fact is that one thinks, well, that Aristotle is a man who thinks by means of reason. Alternatively, Plato thinks, in addition to reason, by means of myth… And this can be seen in the ultimate dialogue of Socrates [Phaedo]: it seems that Plato uses here, in the same time, reasoning and myth. Nevertheless, after Aristotle we use either this system or the other, don’t we? We are no longer capable of using both systems.27

Borges repeats here his view of Plato as a writer whose particular quality is the merging of mythos and logos. He poses Plato vis-à-vis Aristotle, considering the latter as the representative of pure reasoning who is responsible for completely separating mythos and logos. In his essay “From Allegories to Novels” (1949) Borges elucidates the antithesis: “the history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses [Plato’s and Aristotle’s]

26

27

Barnstone, Willis (Ed.). Borges at Eighty: Conversations. Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1982, p. 92 (thereinafter: Eighty). Ferrari, Osvaldo. En diálogo. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005, pp. 47-48 (my translation).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 32 — #32

i

32

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality” (SNF 339). But what exactly are these ‘two distinct ways of intuiting reality?’ It is clear that the one, related to Aristotle, is pure logos, whereas the other, the Platonic, combines reasoning with mythos. But a further clarification seems to be warranted. A remark of Borges in his essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne may serve as a key: “There are writers who think by means of pictures (say, Shakespeare, John Dunn, or Victor Hugo) and there are writers who think by means of abstractions (Julian Bende or Bertrand Russell); in principle, both groups deserve the same appreciation” (OC: II, 51; my translation). Borges does not assume that one mode excels over the other: pictorial and abstract thinking are epistemologically and aesthetically equivalent. The most important thing for a writer, in his view, is to stick to his genuine mode of thinking: “But whenever an abstract thinker, one who thinks by means of systematic argumentation, yearns to be also an imaginary thinker or to be considered as a man of imagination,… in these cases we can discern a logical process which was ornamented or masked by the writer ‘in order to embarrass the understanding of the reader,’ as Wordsworth puts it” (ibid.). It is clear that Borges considers Aristotle as the representative of the abstract thinking group. Additionally, in his former essay, he chooses Hawthorne as a representative case of the imaginary writer, as one who “thinks with images, by intuition, as women do, and not by dialectical mechanism.” As for Plato, he pertains to both groups simultaneously, being able to use both abstract and pictorial thinking in his writing. In other words, Aristotle is the representative of sheer logos, the abstract way of perceiving reality whereas Plato is praised for being able to mesh logos and mythos, which makes him a philosophical representative of mythos, or pictorial and intuitive thinking. This is in line with, and probably influenced by, Arthur Schopenhauer’s views. In the third part of his book The World as Will and Representation, the German thinker, who was deeply admired by Borges, distinguishes between two essentially different modes of thinking: the scientific, which is subordinate to the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ (i.e., the law of causality) and the artistic, intuitive mode. Schopenhauer ascribes these two modes to Aristotle and Plato: The method of consideration that follows the principle of sufficient reason is the rational method, and it alone is valid and useful in practical life and in science. The method of consideration that looks away from the content of this principle is the method of the genius, which is valid and useful in art alone. The first is Aristotle’s method; the second is, on the whole, Plato’s. The first is like the mighty storm, rushing along without beginning or aim, bending, agitating, and carrying everything away with it; the second is like the silent sunbeam, cutting through the path of the storm, and quite unmoved by

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 33 — #33

i

  :     

i

33

it. The first is like the innumerable violently agitated drops of the waterfall, constantly changing and never for a moment at rest; the second is like the rainbow silently resting on this raging torrent.28

Schopenhauer subscribes to the artistic mode of thought, preferring Plato over Aristotle. He speaks of a science-art dichotomy whereas Borges speaks of reasoning-pictorial dichotomy. The basis is the same: in both cases Plato and Aristotle represent the logos-mythos antithesis. Borges and Schopenhauer also share a deep respect for Plato’s ability to mesh mythos and abstract thinking. In fact, Schopenhauer considered himself as the only ‘artistic philosopher’ in Western thought, alongside Plato.29 As for Borges, in the dialogue with Ferrari he remarks: As for me, personally, I believe I am almost incapable of thinking by means of reasoning; it seems that I – being aware of the fallibility of the methodic way of thinking – tend to think, well, by means of the myth, or in any case, by dreaming, by my own inventions … or by intuition. But I still know that the other system is much more rigorous, and I try to reason, although I do not know whether I am capable of doing so; but they say of me that I am capable of dreaming, and I hope I am indeed. Eventually, I am not a thinker; I am a mere storyteller, a mere poet. Well, I resign myself to this destiny, which certainly does not have to be taken as inferior to the other. (Ferrari 48; my translation)

Borges manifests here an ambivalent approach towards logos: he is aware of its fallibility and acknowledges its rigorous method. He considers himself as incapable of reasoning, but here, too, he speaks with hesitation. He relates himself, essentially, to the mythos, that is, to dreaming and to the poetic faith; in accordance with Plato, he ascribes mythos to poetry and logos to reasoning and philosophy. But he differs from the Greek philosopher by insisting that mythos is by no means inferior to logos. In addition, in a lecture given at Harvard in 1968 Borges admits that, in his view, poetic utterance has a greater effect than pure argumentation: from a pragmatic point of view, the suggestive mythos surpasses the all-too-bright sharpness of logos:

28

29

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Tr. E. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969, p. 185. “My philosophy,” says Schopenhauer, “must be distinguished from all preceding ones, with the exception of Plato’s, in that it is not a science but an art.” (quoted in: Schaeffer, J. M. Art of the Modern Age. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2000, p.189).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 34 — #34

i

34

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS As I understand it, anything suggestive is far more effective than anything laid down. Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement. Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody. They convince nobody because they are presented as arguments. Then we look at them, we weigh them, we turn them over, and we decide against them. But when something is merely said or – better still – hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it. I remember reading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin Buber – I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then, when I went to Buenos Aires I found …, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments. (Craft 31-32)

The pictorial metaphor overpowers argumentation since it appeals to imagination, not to reasoning. Here, Borges strongly disagrees with Plato, who fervently distinguishes imagination, the lower part of human consciousness, from pure contemplation (the noeton).30 The bone of contention between Borges and Plato refers, then, to the very core of logos: the ability to persuade and endow tenable knowledge by means of abstract reasoning; it is about the nature of abstract definitions as a means to, and a mark of, true knowledge. This demand of general definitions, the raison d’être of the Platonic method of dialektike¯, is dominant throughout Plato’s dialogues. It is also the focal point of (what is considered to be) the group of Plato’s early dialogues. Here, every dialogue is about a search of Socrates and his interlocutor for a general – that is, comprehensive and abstract – definition of notions such as piety, courage, and justice.31 For instance, in the Laches, Socrates asks, following a list of various circumstances in which courage is shown: “What is it that, being in all these things, is the same?” (191e).32 According to Ross’ authoritative study, this Socratic quest for an abstract definition was the seed of Plato’s most important metaphysical doctrine, the theory of Ideas, which will be dealt with in Chapter 3 (Ross 14). As seen, Borges does not conceive this abstract-definition orientation as the ultimate means of conviction. This is what he means when he speaks of the ‘feebleness’ of

30

31

32

See, for instance, Plato’s “parable of the divided line” in Republic, Book VI. Plato’s epistemology will be discussed in the next chapter. A detailed discussion of the Socratic method of investigation, aimed at an abstract definition (the Socratic elenchus), will be conducted in the next chapter. In his Philosophical investigation, Wittgenstein criticizes this Socratic quest, regarding it as an indication of man’s “craving for generality,” which has led to the illusive perplexities of philosophy.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 35 — #35

i

  :     

i

35

the methodic approach. Moreover, in a lecture given at Harvard he continues this theme and disapproves of the very possibility of providing abstract definitions: To end up I would like to say that we make [a] very common mistake when we think that we’re ignorant of something because we are unable to define it. If we are in a Chestertonian mood (one of the very best moods to be in, I think), we might say that we can define something only when we know nothing about it. For example, if I have to define poetry, and if I feel rather shaky about it, if I’m not too sure about it, I say something like: “Poetry is the expression of the beautiful through the medium of words artfully woven together.” This definition may be good enough for a dictionary or for a textbook, but we all feel that it is rather feeble… This is that we know what poetry is. We know it so well that we cannot define it in other words… (Craft 17-18)

In accordance with Saint Augustine’s paradoxical remark about the nature of time, Borges assumes that it is possible to know what poetry is as long as we do not attempt to define it abstractly. According to this viewpoint, abstract reasoning that aims at theoretical definitions obstructs genuine knowledge. Elsewhere, in a similar discussion with Roberto Alifano regarding the inability to abstractly define poetry, Borges mentions Plato as a thinker who provides an alternative path to the quest for abstract definition (it is possible that he distinguishes here between Plato the narrator and the claims expressed in his dialogues by Socrates): It seems to me that the only possible definition [of poetry] would be Plato’s, precisely because it is not a definition, but a poetic act. When he refers to poetry he says: ‘That light substance, winged and secret.’ That, I believe, can define poetry to a certain extent, since it doesn’t confine it to a rigid mold.33

Plato was probably highly aware of impossibility to abstractly speak about metaphysical reality; thus, when he referred to these points in his discussions he frequently turned to the language of mythos.34 On the other hand, it is clear that Borges tends to adopt what can be called the ‘definition-by-mythos’ principle, that is, to the priority of indirect depiction by means of metaphor over abstract

33

34

Alifano, Roberto. Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges. Tr. Nicomedes Suarez Arauz. New York: Grove Press, 1984, p. 37. The Platonic quotation is taken from Ion (534b). Plato refers here to the poet and not to poetry in general. It is possible that the tension between the quest for abstract definitions and an awareness of the limitations of this quest distinguishes Socratic from Platonic philosophies. See especially Plato’s reservation about the attempt to abstractly express his philosophy in a treatise, in the Seventh Epistle.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 36 — #36

i

36

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

definition (note that he does not doubt the very legitimacy of the quest for truth). He relates this principle not only to transcendental entities, as Plato does, but to all essential things: “This is that we know what poetry is,” he accentuates, “We know it so well that we cannot define it in other words, even as we cannot define the taste of coffee, the color red or yellow, or the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, of the sunrise, of the sunset, or of our love to our country. These things are so deep in us that they can be expressed only by those common symbols that we share” (Craft 18). Borges variedly expresses in his fictional writing his reservations about abstract definitions. For instance, in the story “Death and the Compass” (1944) he portrays the detective Eric Lönnrot, who “thought of himself as a reasoning machine, as Auguste Dupin, but there was something of the adventurer in him, even something of the gambler” (SF 146). Lönnrot is the pure thinker, a man who, to use Socrates’ metaphor, fervently “follows the footsteps of logos.” Using his pure reasoning, he manages to easily decipher the geometrical pattern that is the basis of three crime scenes, the pattern of the rhombus, thus foreseeing the exact time and place of the forthcoming fourth crime. He arrives at the scene of the crime only to realize that he, himself, is to be the fourth victim. Before shooting him down, the criminal, Red Scharlach, remarks: “I knew you would add the missing point, the point that makes a perfect rhombus, the point that fixes the place where a precise death awaits you. I have done all this, Erik Lönnrot, planned all this, in order to draw you to the solitude of Triste-le-Roy” (SF 156). The act of ‘following the footsteps of logos’ led Lönnrot to his own death; Socrates shared the very same destiny.35 Moving to another story, in “Averroës’ Search” (1949), Borges portrays an Arabian philosopher, a commentator of Aristotle, who is hopelessly on the lookout for a definition for the terms ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’. This frustrating incapacity to define by means of logos also appears in the poem “The Moon” (1960),

35

Aizenberg analyzes the image of Eric Lönnrot as a representative, and a criticism, of Spinoza’s pure rationalistic approach. “Instead of guiding him to knowledge and happiness,” she stresses, “Lönnrot’s pure logic confronts him with error and death: his reasoned deduction does not provide the solution to the mystery since they are to a large extent wrong.” (In: Aizenberg, Edna. The Jewish Presence in Borges. Ann Arbor: Columbia University, University Microfilms International, 1981, p. 279.) Note that in this story the criminal Red Scharlach also uses deductive reasoning in order to trap detective Lönnrot. Thus, the story is not an attack on the possibility of abstract reasoning per se, but on deductive reasoning as a total and exclusive mode of perception, as seen in the case of Lönnrot, the pure intellectual.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 37 — #37

i

  :     

i

37

and in the stories “The Aleph” (1949), “The Sect of the Phoenix” (1944), “Two kings and Two Labyrinths” (1960), and “A Theologian in Death” (1935). A marvelous illustration of the abyssal gap between logos and reality is given in the witty parable “On Exactitude in Science” (1960): …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations, who were not so fond of the study of cartography as their forebears had been, saw that that map was useless, and not without some pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and winters. In the deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in all the land there is no other relic of the disciplines of geography. (CF 325)

The yearning for a comprehensive depiction of the essence of reality is symbolized here by the attempt to create a totally exact map of the Empire. But this kind of map, if realized, is useless. Borges manages, in a brilliant act of reductionad-absurdum, to illustrate the feebleness of this approach. Even so, vis-à-vis this critical stance he displays in the story “Funes the Memorious” (1944) the necessity of abstract thinking in human existence. Here we learn about the unbearable fate of Ireneo Funes, the miserable man who owns total memory but who lacks any capacity for abstract reasoning: No one…has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Ireneo, day and night… He would also imagine himself at the bottom of a river, rocked (and negated) by the current. He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars – and they were virtually immediate particulars. (SF 137)

Despite the harsh criticism of logos and the awareness of its limitations, Borges appears to be not willing to relinquish it altogether. The tragic fate of Funes indicates that it is simply impossible to live without abstractions. This Borgesian positive approach towards logos is also illustrated by his deep impression of the ultra-rationalist philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. When speaking of Spinoza, Borges praises him for having managed to dedicate his life to pure reasoning. Thus, when Borges was asked in the Cuestionario Proust (1976) who his favorite historical figures are, he replied, “Spinoza, who lived dedicating his

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 38 — #38

i

38

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

life to abstract thinking” (TR: III, 345; my translation).36 Moreover, in a conference dedicated to Spinoza, delivered in 1967, Borges refers to him as the most admired philosopher in Western philosophy, stating that “We cannot say that he [Spinoza] forsook his personal happiness; rather, we should envy his bliss, for there is no greater joy, I believe, than the exercise of one’s intelligence, particularly when that intelligence belonged to Baruch or Benedict Spinoza. I have no doubt that this modest, frugal man was a happy man, so there is no need for us to pity him.”37 Finally, in one of his two poems on Spinoza, he writes with deep esteem that lacks any trace of irony (1964): Here in the twilight the translucent hands Of the Jew polishing the crystal glass. The dying afternoon is cold with bands Of fear. The hands and space of hyacinth Paling in the confines of the ghetto walls Barely exists for the quite man who stalls There, dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth. Fame doesn’t trouble him (that reflection of Dreams in the dream of another mirror), nor love, The timid love [of] women. Gone the bars, He is free, from metaphor and myth, to sit Polishing a stubborn lens: the infinite Map of the One who now is all His stars.38

36

37

38

Once, as Miguel Enguídanos recalls, Borges even considered abandoning literary engagement and devoting the rest of his life “to the study of Spinoza and the Old Norse sagas” (Eighty 97). Borges, Jorge Luis. “Baruj Spinoza,” In: Aizenberg, E. (Ed.). Borges and His Successors. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990, p. 280. Similarly, in the story “The God’s Script” (1949) Borges describes how the priest Tzinacán cries out, following his vision of the universe: “O joy of understanding, greater than the joy of imagining, greater the joy of feeling! I saw the universe and saw its secret designs” (SF 253). Note that Spinoza also relates, in the final section of his Ethics, the greatest pleasure with the highest rank of consciousness: “The highest virtue of the mind is to know God, or to understand things by the third kind of knowledge, and this virtue is greater in proportion as the mind knows things more by the said kind of knowledge: consequently, he who knows things by this kind of knowledge passes to the summit of human perfection, and is therefore affected by the highest pleasure, such pleasure being accompanied by the idea of himself and his own virtue; thus, from this kind of knowledge arises the highest possible acquiescence.” (Ethics, V: xxvii, proof. (Tr. by Elwes)). “Las traslúcides manos del judío / Labran en la penumbra los cristales / Y la tarde que muere es miedo y frío. / (Las tardes a las tardes son iguales.) / Las manos y el espacio de

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 39 — #39

i

  :     

i

39

Borges’ admiration of Spinoza – the total rational philosopher who utilized in his writing the geometrical method (more geometrico), which is the exact opposite of mythical expression – signifies that his criticism of logos is not dogmatically negative. The core of this criticism is illuminated in Borges’ conversation with Ferrari. Ferrari points at the tendency of some modern Western philosophers, like Wittgenstein, to move from analytical reasoning to mystical or religious contemplations. Borges reacts: Yes, possibly when someone practices reason exclusively, he ends up being skeptical towards it, Doesn’t he? For it seems that every person arrives at a point when he doubts what he knows well; for instance, the poets in relation to language: they easily become skeptical towards language precisely because they manage to handle it and thus they become aware of its limits. (Ferrari 48; my translation)

Logos is thus perceived by Borges as an intellectual tool, like language, and the mastery use of that tool brings about an awareness of its limitations. In other words, Borges’ conception of logos, his attraction-rejection approach toward pure reasoning, seems to be much more ambivalent than totally negative. I assume that he tends to accept it as a tool, but to reject it as the only tool of consciousness. Mythos, on the other hand, is repeatedly related by Borges to the word “sueño” (dream). Consonantly, in a lecture given at Indiana University in 1980, Borges admits that literature, as well as his own writing, pertains in essence to dreaming: The idea of the world as a dream is not alien to me, but I know that I have to enrich the dream, I have to add something to the dream. Let’s say, I have to add patterns to the dream… What I like – there is a fine word in English – is to dream away, to let myself go dreaming. That’s what I really enjoy… But really, I think of a writer as a man who is continually dreaming. I am continually dreaming, and I may be dreaming [about] you at the present moment for all I know. (Eighty 164)39

39

jacinto / Que palidece en el confín del Ghetto / Casi no existen para el hombre quito / Que está soñando un claro laberinto. / No lo turba la fama, ese reflejo / De sueños en el sueño de otro espejo, / Ni el temeroso amor de las doncellas. / Libre de la metáfora y del mito, / Labra un arduo o crystal: el infinito / Mapa de Aquél que es todas Sus estrellas” (SP 228). Another poem on Spinoza appears in La moneda de Hierro (OC: III, 151). In another lecture, given the same year, he was asked how he works as a writer, and replied: “But I work all day and all night. All day I am scheming days and fables. And at night I am dreaming and that’s the same thing, going on.” (Eighty 132). The theme of dreaming is related, philosophically, to Idealism and to the question of poetic inspiration. These topics will be carefully handled in Chapter 5.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 40 — #40

i

40

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

Thus, we find in the Borgesian worldview dreaming, mythos, and literature on the one hand, and logos, vigilance, and philosophy on the other. This view reflects Plato’s stance. Whereas Plato unequivocally prefers the second group, Borges underscores the indispensability of the first to human existence: “I remember that Schopenhauer… said that, fortunately for us, our life is broken up by sleep. If there were no sleep, living would be unbearable, and we would not be able to contain pleasure; perhaps there would be no pleasure. The totality of Being is unattainable to us. All is given to us, but, thankfully, gradually” (Alifano 64). Thus, it can be plausibly deduced that Borges embraces mythos without hesitation, while maintaining an ambivalent approach toward logos – exactly opposite to Plato who solemnly extolled logos and held a bivalent relationship toward poetry and myth. Perhaps it is precisely this ambivalent and complex approach that led Borges to interweave logos and mythos in his work in order to produce, through their brisk synergy, greater affect on the reader. It was shown in the former section that one of the most prominent traits of Plato’s writing is the interplay of logos and mythos, a tendency that reaches its apex in the literary invention of the philosophical myth. Similarly, Borges, the weaver of dreams, uses philosophical and theological sewing threads in his needlecraft.40 Parallel to Plato’s hybrid genre, the philosophical myth, Borges interweaves logos and mythos, argumentations and pictures, dreams and reasoning, in two specific genres: the fictional essay in his prose and the intellectual poem in his verse. It is worthwhile to discuss each of them separately. In the prologue to his book The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), republished in the prologue of Fictions (1944), he depicts the gist of the fictional essay: It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. That was Carlyle’s procedure in Sartor Resartus, Butler’s in The Fair Heaven - though those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books. (CF 67)

40

Accordingly, John Updike remarks that “[Borges’] stories have the close texture of argument and his critical articles have the suspense and tension of fiction.” (Quoted in: Alazraki, J. (Ed.). Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges. Boston: G. K. Hall: 1987, p. 11).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 41 — #41

i

  :     

i

41

Actually, the idea of using fictional facts was not alien to the young Borges. As early as 1933, he worked as a literary editor in the Argentinean newspaper Crítica, which occasionally invented and published imaginary news. According to Monegal, once the newspaper went so far as to report an imaginary uprising among the Chaco Indians in northern Argentina (Monegal 251). Borges himself has used false attributions, distortion of sources, and fictitious biographies already in his early book A Universal History of Infamy (1935); this tendency is linked, no doubt, to his idealistic bias, which will be analyzed in the following chapters. In one of his early essays he tries to justify this tendency, assuming that “even a false fact can be truthful regarded as a symbol” (OC: II, 252; my translation). Nevertheless, in the aforementioned prologue he specifically mentions Butler and Carlyle as the literary forefathers of the fictional essay. Carlyle’s biography Sartor Resartus, which contains wide-ranging excerpts from a non-existent book, deserves special attention. Besides the fact that Carlyle’s work exposed young Borges to the influential philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he also seems to have, as Monegal remarks, “developed a format that Borges would take to its most delicate consequences: the fake review of an imaginary work by a non-existent writer” (Monegal 130). Thus, following Carlyle’s exemplar, Borges included in The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) a section called “notes upon imaginary books,” which comprised some of his most famous fictional-essays: “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim.” The latter was actually the earliest, already published in the book A History of Eternity in 1936. In his “Autobiographical Essay,” Borges reflects on the writing of this text: My next story, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” written in 1935, is both a hoax and a pseudo-essay. It purported to be a review of a book published originally in Bombay three years earlier. It endowed its fake second edition with a real publisher, Victor Gollancz, and a preface by a real writer, Dorothy L. Sayers. But the author and the book are entirely my own invention. I gave the plot and details of some chapters – borrowing from Kipling and working in the twelfth-century Persian mystic Farid udDin Attar – and then carefully pointed out its shortcomings. The story appeared the next year in a volume of my essays, A History of Eternity, buried at the back of the book together with an article on the “Art of Insult.” Those who read “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” took it at face value, and one of my friends [Adolfo Bioy Casares] even ordered a copy from London. It was not until 1942 that I openly published it as a short story in my first story collection, The Garden of Forking Paths. Perhaps I have been unfair to this story; it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 42 — #42

i

42

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based.41

“The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” thus manifests the literary pattern of Borges’ fictional essay, and, in general, of his short stories. Its title is alleged to belong to a novel written by the fictitious Bombay attorney, Mir Bahadur Ali. Following a few introductory remarks on the publication and the acceptance of the novel, Borges offers a synopsis of the nonexistent plot in line with his aforementioned view that instead of writing vast books, it is better to pretend that they already exist and offer a commentary on them: The plot itself is this: a man (the unbelieving, fleeing law student we have met) falls among people of the lowest, vile sort and accommodates himself to them, in a kind of contest of iniquity. Suddenly…the law student perceives some mitigation of the evil: a moment of tenderness, of exaltation, of silence, in one of the abominable men. “It was as though a more complex interlocutor had spoken.” He knows that the wretch with whom he is conversing is incapable of that momentary decency; thus, the law student hypothesizes that the vile man before him has reflected a friend. Rethinking the problem, he comes to a mysterious conclusion: somewhere in the world there is a man from whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates; somewhere in the world there is a man who is equal to this brightness. The law student resolves to devote his life to searching out that man. (SF 84)

Instead of a plot, we have here what can be called a ‘meta-plot,’ an outline of a plot. Then Borges proceeds to a more general account of the book, a synopsis of the synopsis, which is “the insatiable search for a soul by means of the delicate glimmerings or reflections this soul has left in others…The more closely the men interrogated by the law student have known Al-Mu’tasim, the greater is their portion of divinity, but the reader knows that they themselves are but mirrors” (ibid.). Thereafter, he critically examines the book’s distinct modes of writing. Comparing the literary qualities of the two ‘editions’ of the book, he points at the superiority of the first symbolic version over the second vulgar allegorical one. He concludes his review by indicating the points of concurrence between

41

Borges, Jorge Luis. “An Autobiographical Essay” (In: Alazraki Critical Essays 43). Hopefully, this Borgesian biography is not fictional… It is interesting to note that in the prologue to the third volume of his Obras Completas (1974), Borges wrote an imaginary résumé of himself, which is alleged to be published in the Enciclopedia Sudamericana in 2074. Here he writes, inter alia, “he always feared that he would be declared an impostor or a bungler or a singular blend of both” (OC: II, 500; my translation).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 43 — #43

i

  :     

i

43

Bahadur’s novel and the Persian mystic Far¯ıd al-d¯ın Att¯ar’s classic Conference of the Birds. It is interesting to note that he displays here, in fact, a complex set of Platonic reflections: the reflection within the plot (in which every soul is but a reflection of another, superior one) illustrates the reflection of the writing-pattern (in which the present story is a reflection of the Indian novel, which is a reflection of Att¯ar’s book); perhaps this is what Borges alludes to in the book’s subtitle “A Game with Shifting Mirrors” (which serves as the subtitle of the present book, too). Generally speaking, it seems that the pattern of the fictional essay enables Borges to combine literary and critical writings, while releasing himself from the laborious task of writing vast books. The use of the abstract mode of writing also endows him with complete freedom of imagination, allowing him to invent not only the plot and the characters but also its narrator, publication, literary sources, and history of acceptance.42 Finally, I suppose that, in a manner that evokes Einstein’s famous gedankenexperiment, this pattern enables Borges to blend what he considers to be the two fundamental modes of human perception: the pictorial intuitive mode of imagination and the argumentation of abstract thought. Thus, the ‘fictional essay’ writing-pattern is an exemplary interfusion of mythos and logos, which widens the aesthetic effect on the reader and, at the same time, broadens the narrator’s imagination. In addition, in Borges’ poetry this logos-mythos blend is realized by the pattern of what he calls “intellectual poetry.” He specifies the literary aspects of this pattern in the prologue to his book of poems The Cipher (1981): The making of literature can teach us to avoid blunders, not to be worthy of discoveries. It reveals to us our impossibilities, our strict limits… My luck lies in what might be called intellectual poetry. The term is almost an oxymoron; the intellect (wakefulness) thinks by means of abstractions; poetry (dream) by means of images, myths, or fables. Intellectual poetry should pleasingly interweave these two processes. That is what Plato did in his Dialogues; so too Francis Bacon did in his enumeration of the idols of the tribes, the marketplace, the cavern, and the theater. The master of this genre is, in my opinion, Emerson; others have also tried their hand, with varying degrees of success, such as Browning and Frost, Unamuno, and I am told, Paul Valéry. (SP 421)

Intellectual poetry, an oxymoronic notion, interweaves myth-poetry-dream and reasoning-argumentation-wakefulness. Plato is mentioned, naturally, as one

42

Cf. Borges’ prologue to his Brodie’s Report (1970): “I have set my stories at some distance in both time and space. Imagination has more freedom to work, that way.” (SF 347).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 44 — #44

i

44

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

of its precursors. In order to clarify the nature of this genre, Borges provides two antithetic examples of writing. One, conducted by Freyre, is purely verbal poetry: it does not mean a thing; as music, it says everything. It is a purely musical articulation bearing no abstract meaning, or rather, its music is its meaning and its effect on the reader is purely emotional. This type, which is in line with the movement of 19th century French symbolism, coincides with Borges’ general notion of poetry, according to which, the cognitive meaning is really something external, added to the verse (Craft 84). The other example is taken from Fray Luis de León. Here there exists not one single image, not one beautiful word, which is not an abstraction: the entire poem is a set of abstract symbols, which makes it an intellectual construction that draws the attention of the reader’s reasoning besides his emotions. Then Borges concludes that his own intellectual poetry “seeks out, not without some uncertainty, a middle way” between these types – as Plato does in his dialogues, moving to-and-fro between logos and mythos. A good example of the Borgesian intellectual poetry can be seen in the poem “Beppo”, taken from The Cipher (1981). Note how the verbal music is delicately interwoven with the highly abstract Platonic discussion of the ontological essence of reflectivity: The celibate white cat surveys himself In the mirror’s clear-eyed glass, Not suspecting that the whiteness facing him And those gold eyes that he’s not seen before In ramblings through the house are his own likeness. Who is to tell him the cat observing him Is only the mirror’s way of dreaming? I remind myself that these concordant cats – The one of glass, the one with warm blood coursing – Are both mere simulacra granted time By a timeless archetype. In the Enneads Plotinus, himself a shade, has said as much. Of what Adam predating paradise, Of what inscrutable divinity Are all of us a broken mirror-image? (SP 427)43

43

El gato blanco y célibe se mira / En la lúcida luna del espejo / Y no puede saber que esa blancura / Y esos ojos de oro que no ha visto / Nunca en la casa son su propria imagen. / ¿Quién le dirá que el otro que lo observa / Es apenas un sueño del espejo? / Me digo que esos gatos armoniosos, / El de crystal y el de caliente sangre, / Son simulacros que concede al tiempo / Un arquetipo eterno. Así lo afirma, / sombra también, Plotino en las

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 45 — #45

i

  :     

i

45

Generally speaking, the Borgesian intellectual poetry combines verbal music and abstractions, constituting a via media between mythos and logos. It is thus, in essence, a poetic version of the genre of the fictional essay, and a lyrical variation of Plato’s intellectual dramas. As such, it combines the two modes of human perception, the pictorial and the abstract, offering the reader a more complex experience of reading. Let us conclude the track of our discussion. The most prominent point of agreement between Borges and Plato is the fact that they persistently tend to intertwine mythos and logos, and this tendency is the most salient trait of their writings. Yet there is substantial dissimilarity between them. Regarding Plato, it is in his dialogues that the mythos-logos dichotomy is constructed, based on a set of analytical arguments, and this dichotomy underpins the ‘ancient quarrel’ (actually a Platonic myth) between preeminent poetry and the newborn philosophy. Plato constantly strives to undermine the status of poetic mythos and to build on its ruins the new mythos: the bright mythos of logos. In criticizing traditional myth, Plato manifests mythos as the ‘other’ philosophy. In the same breath, he variously and frequently uses mythos in his philosophical writing, inventing the “philosophical myth” as the ultimate integration of mythos and logos. This integration aims at keeping the discussion undogmatic and copes with the limitations of rational argumentation. Thus, Plato strictly tends to distinguish mythos from logos in his arguments, while artfully interweaving them in his writing. With respect to Borges, he frequently praises Plato for combining logos and mythos. Similarly to Plato, he articulates the dichotomy of mythos-dreamimagination versus logos-wakefulness-argumentation. He also considers mythos and logos as two essentially different types of human perception, in agreement with Plato’s dichotomy. And he considers himself as a writer who pertains, in essence, to the realm of mythos, a ‘weaver of dreams.’ He bases his personal preference of mythos over logos on his critique of abstract definitions: the only proper way of ‘defining’ essential things is the poetic expression of the mythos. Nevertheless, in his writing he artfully interweaves logos and mythos, developing two unique literary genres: the fictional essay in his prose writing and the intellectual poem in his verse. In a more comparative manner, it is clear that Borges and Plato uphold antithetic stances concerning the interrelations between logos and mythos; Borges subordinates the former to the latter whereas Plato does the opposite. How-

Ennéadas. / ¿De qué Adán anterior al paraíso, / de qué divinidad indescifrable / somos los hombres un espejo roto? (OC: III, 295).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 46 — #46

i

46

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

ever, both of them seem to maintain an ambivalent relationship toward the other pole: Plato highly reveres the ‘magical spell’ of mythos and Borges acknowledges the indispensability and rigidity of logos, expressing his reverence toward pure thinkers such as Spinoza. As previously demonstrated, in interweaving logos and mythos in their writing, Borges and Plato produce double-faced texts that are perceived as ‘metaphysical similes’ or ‘intellectual dramas’: Borges is perhaps the most philosophical narrator of Western literary history, whereas Plato is, in the words of Shelley, “the prince of the poets,” the ultimate mythical philosopher.44 It can also be said that Borges’ writing represents a point in Western intellectual history wherein the antithesis between logos and mythos, which was actually generated by Plato’s arguments, solemnly collapses; it is a point of return from the Aristotelian logocentrism back to the Platonic mytho-logos compound, to a more comprehensive mode of perceiving reality and writing. And yet the most fundamental question still remains unanswered; “siempre se pierde lo esencial” (“it is always the essential thing that is lost”), says Borges (OC, II: 196). Why do Borges and Plato use so extensively in their writings, de facto, doctrines that are harshly criticized by them as fallible and elusive (in Borges’ case it is the logos, in Plato’s – the mythos)? What is the justification for the gap between theory and practice in both cases? A simple answer will be pragmatic: they use ‘the other’ in order to gain some textual or intellectual benefit: Plato uses mythos to promote the status of his newborn philosophy; Borges uses logos to expand the literary possibilities and the aesthetical effects of his text. Such a justification seems to be quite plausible. Nevertheless, I assume that there is a deeper, more intrinsic justification. I suggest that Borges and Plato realized that logos and mythos are deeply interconnected in man’s consciousness, and that it is harmful to separate imagination from reasoning. This principle of interconnectedness of logos and mythos can be best understood by an analogy to a key-notion in Chinese Taoist philosophy. In Taoism, the fundamental aspects of reality are called yin (the feminine) and yang (the masculine). In the ancient book of Taoist philosophy, the Tao Te Ching, it is recognized that yin and yang are inherently in-

44

Frank Gado’s notion of ‘Philosophical fiction’ may be useful in clarifying the unique quality of Borges’ and Plato’s writing. As he puts it, “Philosophical fiction… may be said to challenge the validity of pieties or, at the very least, to venture beyond a system of belief’s familiar track; its core lies in intrinsic ambivalence, not certainty, and its power arises from the dubiety exposes, not from proffered solution” (Gado, Frank. “Towards a Definition of the Philosophic in Literature.” In: Strelka, J. (Ed.). Literary Criticism and Philosophy. University Park: Penn U. Press, 1983, p. 167). The ‘intrinsic ambivalence’ is, in my view, the outcome of the interplay between mythos and logos.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 47 — #47

i

  :     

i

47

terconnected and interdependent, despite the fact that the yin surpasses the yang. The yin cannot exist without the yang and vice versa (the notions indicate, etymologically, the front side and the backside of a mountain). The interdependence of yin and yang is called “hseng sheng,” “the principle of mutual arising.” It is precisely this mutual arising of the two opponents that manifests the chi, the élan vital of the universe. This principle is elegantly displayed in the classical Taoist treatise Lu-shih chun chiu, (3rd century B.C.): The two energies [yin and yang] transform themselves, one rising upward and the other descending downwards; they merge again and give rise to forms. They separate and merge again. When they are separate, they merge; when they are merged, they separate. That is the never-ending course of Heaven and Earth. Each end is followed by a beginning; each extreme by a transformation into its opposite…”45

The interplay between the fundamental forces in life generates a vigorous effect, an effect that goes far beyond each one of them individually. In the same manner, I suggest that Plato and Borges realized that this hseng sheng principle applies to logos-mythos duality: the tension of the interplay between logos and mythos expresses and generates in the text a powerful effect on the reader, an effect that transcends the limitations of linguistic expression, an effect that manages to deepen the reader’s philosophical or esthetical impression. Borges manifests this effect relating to the interplay of philosophy and literature in a conversation with Denis Dutton (1976): *D.D.: Do you think that it is possible then for a story to represent a philosophical position more effectively than a philosopher can argue for it? *Borges: I have never thought of that, but I suppose you’re right, Sir. I suppose you — yes, yes, I think you’re right. Because as — I don’t know who said that, was it Bernard Shaw? — he said, arguments convince nobody. No, Emerson. He said, arguments convince nobody. And I suppose he was right, even if you think of proofs for the existence of God, for example — no? In that case, if arguments convince nobody, a man may be convinced by parables or fables or what? Or fictions. Those are far more convincing than the syllogism — and they are, I suppose.46

45

46

Quoted in: Billington, Ray. Understanding Eastern Philosophy. NY: Routledge, 1997, p. 108. On April 14, 1976, Denis Dutton and Michael Palencia-Roth, along with their colleague Lawrence I. Berkove, interviewed Jorge Luis Borges at Michigan State University. The conversation was never published, but it is available on-line as an MP3 file: http://denisdutton.com/borges.mp3.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 48 — #48

i

48

i

  : MYTHOS  LOGOS

In order to conclude these iridescent differences and similarities between Borges’ and Plato’s writings, it would be most helpful to juxtapose two specific texts: a section from Plato’s Apology and Borges’ fragment “Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote,” derived from The Maker (1960). In his last speech in the Apology, after being sentenced to death, Socrates reflects on the nature of death: If death is, as it were, a change of habitation from here to some other place, and if what we are told [i.e., traditional mythos] is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be, judges? For if a man when he reaches the other world [i.e., Hades], after leaving behind these who claim to be judges, shall find those who are really judges who are said to sit in judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and all the other demigods who were just men in their lives, would the change of habitation be undesirable? Or again, what would any of you give to meet with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? I am willing to die many times over, if these things are true; for I personally should find the life there wonderful, when I met Palamedes or Ajax, the son of Telamon, or any other men of old who lost their lives through an unjust judgment, and compared my experience with theirs. I think that would not be unpleasant. And the greatest pleasure would be to pass my time in examining and investigating the people there, as I do those here, to find out who among them is wise and who think he is when he is not. What price any of you would pay, judges, to examine him who led the great army against Troy [i.e., Agamemnon], or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or countless others, both men and women, whom I might mention? To converse and associate with them and examine them would be immeasurable happiness. At any rate, the folk there do not kill people for it; since, if what we are told is true, they are immortal for all future time, besides being happier in other respects than men are here. (40e-41c)

Alongside the Platonic text, let us consider Borges’ witty “Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote”: Weary of his land of Spain, an old soldier of the king’s army sought solace in the vast geographies of Ariosto, in that valley of the moon in which one finds the time that is squandered by dreams, and in the golden idol of Muhammad stolen by Montalbán. In gentle self-mockery, this old soldier is conceived as a credulous man – his mind unsettled by reading all those wonders – who took it into his head to ride out in search of adventures and enchantments in prosaic places with names such as El Toboso and Montiel. Defeated by reality, by Spain, Don Quixote died in 1614 in the town of his birth. He was survived only a short time by Miguel de Cervantes. For both the dreamer and the dreamed, that entire adventure had been the clash of two words; the unreal world of romances and the common, everyday world of the seventeenth century. They never suspected that the years would at last smooth away the discord, never suspected that in the eyes of the future, La Mancha and Montiel and the lean figure of the Knight

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 49 — #49

i

  :     

i

49

of Mournful Countenance would be no less poetic than the adventures of Sinbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto. For in the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it. (CF 315)

Comparatively speaking, both texts manifest a clash between reality and myth. In Socrates’ case, it is his unjust trial in contrast to the ultimate justice and wisdom of mythical sages; in Borges’ case, it is the cynical seventeenth century Spain vis-à-vis the naïve myths of the romances. In Plato, this tension glorifies the image of Socrates and glorifies the value of philosophy by means of the implicit values of the traditional myth. The implied message is that there are no limits to philosophical questioning whatsoever, not even the bitter threshold of death. More generally, here Plato penetrates into the vague images of mythos and place there the bright torch of logos: in the heart of the darkness of Hades, in the dark realm of the dead, Socrates will pursue his abstract reasoning. ‘Following the footsteps of the logos’ will go on even in the kingdom of mythos. This is a prominent example of philosophical myth: it uses myth for philosophical ends, and thus constitutes a hybrid literary genre: the mythos of logos. Borges, on the other hand, commences his text with some historical notes on Cervantes’ life and the writing of Don Quixote. Pointing out that the tension between reality and fiction underpins both the book and the biography of its writer, Borges suggests a shrewd interpretation of Cervantes’ story. He ends with a metaphysical remark about the nature of history: time will blur the differences between reality and fiction. Reality will eventually become myth as well and “chronology will melt into an orb of symbols.”47 The commentary of Don Quixote becomes a general remark regarding the power of myth over reality. Thus, says Borges, myth lurks at the beginning and at the end of literature. Whereas Plato propels logos into the realm of mythos, Borges compels logos and reality to accept the dominative power of mythos. And yet, the literary qualities and effects of their texts, generated by the vigorous interplay of reasoning and mythmaking, are basically the same.

47

It is interesting to point out the surprising relations between the fragment on Cervantes and the prologue of The Maker, in which it is published. In the prologue Borges dedicates the book to Leopoldo Lugones who committed suicide in 1938, imagining how he hands the book over to Lugones. He then remarks: “My vanity and my nostalgia have confected a scene that is impossible. Maybe so, I tell myself, but tomorrow I too will be dead and our times will run together and chronology will melt into an orb of symbols, and somehow it will be true to say that I have bought you this book and that you have accepted it.” (SF 291).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 50 — #50

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 51 — #51

i

i

C  The Intellectual Instinct: Skepticism and the Quest for Truth

The unexamined life is not worth living… (Socrates, Apology 38b)

As Diotima teaches Socrates in the Symposium, philosophia (etymologically “the love of wisdom”) is the midpoint between wisdom and ignorance; neither the gods nor ignorant people pursue true wisdom (203e). In this stance, philosophy involves a fundamental ideal and, at the same time, a severe tension: the ideal of ultimate Truth and the tension of the constant craving for tenable knowledge of that Truth or, to put it in Nietzsche’s words, the tension of the ‘pathos for Truth.’ Both this ideal and tension are undermined by dogmatic skepticism. The dogmatic skeptic denies the possibility of ultimate, objective Truth and, consequently, considers the yearning for genuine knowledge as no more than an epistemological illusion. On the other hand, the softer practice of skepticism acts differently: it intensifies the tension and maintains the postulate of Truth. Here, the skeptic uses critical analysis as a purifying device that dispels the ‘peel’ of doubtful knowledge in the quest for the ‘kernel’ of well-founded certainty. Whereas the first kind of criticism can be termed “dogmatic skepticism,” being total and intolerant in its negation of Truth, the second practice can be termed ‘methodic skepticism;’ it is based on the etymological root of the Greek word methodos, which means “progressing (meta) in the way (hodos).”1 Dogmatic skepticism exalts doubt; methodic skepticism seeks firm certainty. This tension is conspicuously dominant in the works of Plato and Borges. Regarding Plato, one of the perennial disputes among his commentators relates to the question whether he was a systematic philosopher or a skeptical one.2 What

1

2

For instance, it was this kind of methodic skepticism that served as a point of departure in Descartes’ Meditations and that eventually led him to attain the unshakable certainty of the cogito. Tigerstedt, E. N. Interpreting Plato. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1977, pp. 13-19. See Tigerstedt’s survey of the dispute between Grote and Zeller, pp. 17-19. 51

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 52 — #52

i

52

i

  :      

is unquestionable is that in Plato’s dialogues the tension between the pathos for Truth and uncompromising skepticism is embodied in the charismatic image of Socrates, especially in the ‘early’ dialogues wherein the Socratic method of elenchos (cross-examination) is dominant.3 Socrates splendidly expresses this tension in the Apology, after he was found guilty by his jury: Perhaps someone might say: “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you. (37e-38b)

The tension presented here is twofold: it is the internal tension within Socrates, encouraging him to keep on investigating despite the fact that he does not yet possess real knowledge, as well as the tension between him, the bearer of the pathos for Truth, and the unreflective Athenian citizen. Socrates deepens the inner tension in the Apology by openly acknowledging his state of ignorance: “Neither of us really knows anything fine and good” he thought to himself after investigating a public man, “but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either” (21d-e). It turns out that for Socrates of the Apology, the pathos for Truth clamorously collides with harsh reflective skepticism. This tension has led some of his frustrated interlocutors to speculate that he either does not know anything or, worse, that he declines to disclose the nature of his knowledge. In the latter case, he is accused of deliberately cheating or misleading his interlocutor.4 This view led Aristophanes, for instance, to portray Socrates in his Clouds as a total

3

4

Many rivers of ink have been spilt over the ‘Socratic Problem’, that is, the following questions: who Socrates actually was, what did he say, and what is the distinction between Plato and Socrates’ philosophy. The best account on this subject, in my opinion, is found in Guthrie’s authoritative book on Socrates, Chapter I. See: Guthrie, W. K. C. Socrates. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. See also: Grote, G. Plato and Other Companions of Socrates. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1875; Kahn, C. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Waerdt, P. A. The Socratic Movement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Guthrie, W. K. C. Socrates. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 123 (henceforth: Socrates). Guthrie’s authoritative studies on Socrates and the Sophists will serve as the cornerstone of the present chapter.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 53 — #53

i

  :     

i

53

swindler who teaches that ‘You can defend yourself in any suit you like — and win.’ (1468). Regarding Borges, a general view of his work indicates that the theme of seeking an ideal Truth is quite dominant in both his fictional and essayistic writing. This trait is prominent even in the titles of his collected volumes of essays, Inquisitions and Other Inquisitions, as well as in the central themes of most of his short stories (by way of illustration: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, “The Library of Babel”, “Averroës Search”, and “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim”). Nevertheless, he is frequently portrayed by his commentators as the total skeptical writer, as “a man who is convinced,” as Barrenechea puts it, “that nothing in man’s destiny has any meaning.”5 The aim of the present chapter is to illuminate the nature and function of the tension between skepticism and the pathos for Truth in the works of Borges and Plato. In other words, and more specifically: I intend to compare Borges’ and Socrates’ skepticism (as reflected in Plato’s work), in light of the dogmatic-methodic antithesis. As a basis for the investigation, I will first juxtapose Socratic and Sophistic skepticism, focusing on the literary portrayal of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues and on the historical images of the preeminent Sophists Gorgias and Protagoras. Etymologically, the name sophiste¯s is derived from sophos, “wise man,” indicating a unique intellectual or spiritual quality. It was generally used in Presocratic Athens to indicate special skills in a specific craft. Thereafter, in the time of Plato, it denoted a specific group of professional teachers who dealt mainly with rhetoric, the art of persuasion by means of language – a craft that was claimed to be the magic key to political and financial success.6 In addition, the Sophists regarded themselves as the successors of the authoritative Greek poets and thus, they intensively engaged in literary criticism. Throughout Western history, the dominant opinion concerning this circle was negative, – in line with the influential Platonic viewpoint. Nevertheless, the Sophists can also be regarded as the prime movers of what is generally called ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ in ancient Greece. As the preeminent scholar Eduard Zeller puts it, “just as we Germans could hardly have a Kant without the Age of Enlightenment, so too, the Greeks would hardly have

5

6

Barrenechea, A. M. Borges the Labyrinth Maker. Tr. Robert Lima. NY: NY University Press, 1965, p. 144. Guthrie, W. K. C. The Sophists. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 27-44 (henceforth: Sophists). My discussion on the Sophists will be based on this authoritative study.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 54 — #54

i

54

i

  :      

had a Socrates and a Socratic philosophy without the Sophistic [movement]” (in Sophists 48). According to Guthrie, the common philosophical basis of all the Sophists was, in addition to their intensive engagement in rhetoric, the epistemological conjecture of harsh skepticism, the conviction that human knowledge is strictly indeterminate. This all-embracing skepticism is probably established upon what has been called the Eleatic dilemma, first presented in the influential philosophy of Parmenides, which exposes the abyssal gap that exists between Being and becoming, reality and appearance, physis (essential nature) and nomos (social convention).7 In light of this severe separation, and since it seems no longer possible to consider both Being and becoming, the Sophists renounced the ideas of permanent reality and ultimate Truth altogether, upholding extreme phenomenalism, relativism, and subjectivism (Sophists 47). In other words, since it was no longer possible to settle the tension between Being (metaphysical Truth) and becoming (apparent reality), then it was no longer justified to seek a permanent essence beyond the phenomenal world. Consequently, substantiated scientific knowledge (episte¯me¯) was considered out of reach for humans. Moreover, since metaphysical Truth was no longer possible, the only open door for humans was the door of arbitrary conviction; this outlook prompted Aristotle to criticize the Sophists for ‘making every statement true and false at the same time.’ I will refer to this kind of Sophistic doubtfulness as “dogmatic skepticism,” since it is hermetic, total, and based on rigid argumentation – a sort of negative certainty that Truth is inaccessible for humans. In dogmatic skepticism, thus, there is no tension between the ideal of ultimate Truth and the skeptical approach, since the former is irrelevant and the latter is all-encompassing. Without a doubt, the most radical representatives of this dogmatic outlook among the Sophists are Protagoras and Gorgias.8 Let us concisely review their intellectual legacy. According to Aristotle, Protagoras taught his disciples to praise and negate the same argument and to ‘make the weaker argument the stronger’ (Rhetoric 1402a23 ff.). The gist of his whole worldview is manifested in the notorious opening sentence of his treatise Truth: “Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not.” (DK fr. 1;

7

8

On Parmenides’ philosophical poem and the Eleatic dilemma, see: Burnet, J. Greek Philosophy: Tales to Plato. NY: Macmillan, 1964, pp. 50-55; regarding the sophistic nomosphysis antithesis, see the discussion in Guthrie, The Sophists, Chapter IV. Antiphon was also a notorious radical skeptic among the Sophists, but there are no direct fragments remaining from his words and thus his stance cannot be analytically examined.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 55 — #55

i

  :     

i

55

Sextus Empiricus 80b1).9 It is unclear whether here Protagoras had the individual subject in mind or, alternatively, whether he sought an abstract concept of man. It is also not clear what he means by the word “measure” (metron), which was interpreted by Plato as kriterion, ‘standard of judgment’ (Theaetetus 178b). Nevertheless, it is indisputable that Protagoras expresses extreme subjectivism and, at the same time, negates the possibility of grasping the essence (if there is such an essence) of reality. He thus manifests dogmatic skepticism regarding the very existence of permanent Truth. More dogmatic and decisive skepticism pervades the thinking of the distinguished Sophist Gorgias, Protagoras’ contemporary, whose most famous treatises were the Encomium to Helen and On the Non-Being. The Encomium attends to the nature and power of speech (logos). Here Gorgias praises the spell of the spoken word: “logos is a mighty tyrant,” he solemnly says, and thus Helen, persuaded to an act of adultery, “acted under the compulsion of the word and it is vain to upbraid her” (in Sophists 50). In this view, the boundless influence of logos is capable of totally dismantling man’s moral responsibility. Plato concludes the gist of this outlook, quoting Gorgias’ repeated dictum: “The art of persuasion far surpasses all others and is far and away the best, for it makes all things its slaves by willing submission, not by violence” (Philebus 58a-b). In other words, truth is substituted for persuasion, and thus rhetoric is the only adequate human activity. However, in his treatise On the Non-Being Gorgias goes further. According to Sextus Empiricus and Aristotle, he aims here to prove three fundamental claims: (a) that nothing exists; (b) that even if something does exist, it is incomprehensible to human thought; (c) that even if it is comprehensible to someone, it is not comprehensible to anyone else. A great deal of ink has been spilled over the question whether this argument was intended as a parody or as a serious contribution to philosophy (Sophists 193). However, it is clear that Gorgias here uses Parmenides’ mode of argumentation in order to acquire a totally inverse conclusion. By doing so, he formulates the most extreme version of dogmatic skepticism: a triple negation of (a) ontologically based truth; (b) the very possibility of valid knowledge (episte¯me¯); and (c) any substantial teaching and learning. In this way, he surpasses Protagoras’ radical subjectivism. Guthrie generalizes the philosophical characteristics of Gorgias and Protagoras’ dogmatic skepticism:

9

Regarding the translation of this fragment, see Guthrie’s Appendix, ibid., pp. 188-192.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 56 — #56

i

56

i

  :       In their conclusions Gorgias and Protagoras were at one, and, if there is anything that may be spoken of as a general sophistic view, it is this, that there is no ‘criterion’. You and I cannot, by comparing and discussing our experiences, correct them and reach the knowledge of a reality more ultimate than either, for there is no such stable reality to be known. Similarly in morals, no appeal to general standards or principles is possible, and the only rule can be to act as at any moment seems most expedient. (Sophists 196)

The one man who rose against this negative dogmatism was Socrates. As Cicero remarked, Socrates opposed the Sophists and used to refute their instructions by his own subtle brand of argument. His cross examinations gave rise to a succession of accomplished thinkers, and it is claimed that then, for the first time, philosophy was discovered (Brutus 8.30-31). There are, as is well known, several accounts of Socrates’ image and intellectual temperament, the most influential of which are the memoir of Xenophon, the comedies of Aristophanes (mainly Frogs and Clouds), and Aristotle’s scattered remarks in Metaphysics. Yet it is within the Platonic dialogues that Socrates’ philosophy was formulated in its highest form, and his character was artfully molded as the great opponent of the Sophists – the exemplary image of the fervent seeker of the ultimate Truth. One aspect of this highly complex literary formation of the image of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues is of special interest: the nature of the Socratic skepticism.10 As mentioned before, Socrates’ skepticism is mainly found in the ‘early’ Platonic dialogues, wherein the old master craves for general definitions. In this quest for definitions, Socrates utilizes his famous method of elenchus (literally ‘cross-examination’ or ‘refutation’), which generally comprises the following steps: (1) As a starting point, Socrates asks his interlocutor, who is supposed to be an expert in his field, the ‘what is X’ question (i.e., ‘what is courage?’ in the Laches); (2) The interlocutor falls into the trap and gladly reacts, full of himself; (3) Socrates proves that the first given definition is insufficient and requests another one; (4) The interlocutor hesitantly provides another answer, ‘as it seems to him’; (5) Socrates refutes the answer again, indicating some logical contradiction in the interlocutor’s stance, and requests another definition; (6) The bewildered interlocutor finally gives up and the investigation reaches aporia, an epistemological dead-end; (7) Finally, Socrates declares that it is imperative to continue the

10

The most comprehensive study on Plato’s dramatic portrayal of the image of Socrates is Blondell, Ruby. The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Blondell’s working hypothesis is that the chronological division of Plato’s dialogues is untenable; therefore, she offers an alternative partition based on the literary and philosophical traits of Socrates’ image.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 57 — #57

i

  :     

i

57

investigation.11 According to Guthrie, this Socratic quest for general definitions was not a sheer intellectual act; its principal aim was to clarify moral considerations. Socrates assumed that an adequate general definition of moral terms will lead toward genuine moral understanding, which will necessarily generate moral behavior (Socrates 119). The elenchus method is thus a stage in a process of moral initiation, leading toward the possession of areté (virtue). However, the main disturbing question is whether Socrates himself possessed any substantial knowledge while carrying out the elenctic method. If not, he seems to be far too close to Sophistic skepticism, negating any firm knowledge of the Truth, and utilizing rhetorical arguments for his own benefit (he is actually portrayed as such in Aristophanes’ Clouds). In line with this view, Plato does not refrain from demonstrating the overwhelming, perhaps even destructive, effect of the elenctic method on Socrates’ interlocutors. For instance, in the dialogue Meno he describes how, after confronting Socrates’ insistent request for a general definition of virtue, Meno loses his temper and complains: Meno: O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits’ end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, which paralyzes those who come near him and touch him, as you have now paralyzed me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons - and very good ones they were, as I thought - at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician. (79e-80a)

Meno blames Socrates for ‘paralyzing’ his soul and his tongue. This effect of Socrates’ words seems to be totally negative, reflecting the dark spell of logos in Gorgias’ Encomium. This is a harsh indictment indeed. Socrates replies that it is not paralysis that he seeks: As to my being a torpedo fish, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because

11

See an analytical survey of the elenctic method in: Vlastos, Gregory. “The Socratic Elenchus.” In: Fine, Gail (Ed.). Plato: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. On Socrates’ elenchus in its relation to philosophical dialectics, see also: Robinson, R. Plato’s Early Dialectic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 58 — #58

i

58

i

  :       I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry. (80c)

Socrates requests real intellectual movement, not paralysis. He aspires to have a sincere open-ended investigation directed toward the possibility of attaining tenable Truth. But how, asks Meno, can such an investigation be possible? He supports his doubtfulness by the notorious “vicious circle” argument: a man cannot enquire neither about that which he knows, nor about that which he does not know: for if he truly knows, he has no need to enquire, and if not, he cannot enquire, for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire. Socrates finds a loophole mentioning a tradition of ‘some priests and poets’ concerning the recollection of the soul (anamnesis), according to which the soul, being immortal, has learned all things prenatally. It is not clear whether here he really adheres to this mythical tradition; what is certain is that he strongly acknowledges its impact: it is this loophole that leads one out of the vicious circle and keeps the movement of the investigation going: For all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. Therefore we ought not to listen to this Sophistic argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue. (81 c-d)

Socrates generally poses here certain epistemological assumptions. Against Meno’s claim of epistemological paralysis he poses the ideal of the continuous movement of investigation; against the Sophistic hermetic skepticism he poses the postulate of ultimate Truth; finally, against the vicious circle he erects the ideal of linear investigation that may lead to well-founded knowledge. Once again, the crucial fact here is that (Plato’s) Socrates embodies the model of an ongoing movement that aims at revealing tenable knowledge, the exact opposite of Sophistic dogmatic skepticism. But how can Socrates uphold these ideals, while he insists that he ‘knows that he does not know?’ Does not this admission of ignorance bring him closer to the Sophists?12 Plato copes with this point in the Theaetetus, using the famous metaphor of intellectual midwifery. “For I have this in common with the

12

The claims that Socrates was actually a sort of a Sophist is evident, as mentioned before, in Aristophanes’ Clouds. Some scholars have adopted this point of view; cf. Ernest Baker: “In contrasting Socrates with the Sophists, we must remember that in many respects, he was one of them” (quoted in Guthrie Socrates 129). Plato’s Socrates relates

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 59 — #59

i

  :     

i

59

midwives, “Socrates admits: “I am sterile in point of wisdom, and the reproach which has often been bought against me, that I question others but make no reply myself about anything, because I have no wisdom in me, is a true reproach.” And yet, “those who associate with me, although at first some of them seem very ignorant, yet, as our acquaintance advances, all of them to whom the god is gracious make wonderful progress… not because they have ever learned anything from me, but because they have found in themselves many fair things and have bought them forth.” (Theaetetus 150d). The metaphor of midwifery justifies the practice of Socrates “to ask questions but not to give answers.” It also alleviates the tension between the acknowledgment of self-ignorance and the uncompromised demand from the interlocutor to acquire tenable knowledge. The maieutic method encourages the interlocutor to find the truth by himself; thus it indeed maintains some fundamental, positive premises and justifies the continuity of intellectual movement. As Hackforth puts it, the Socratic interlocutor “is helped by the lesson of intellectual honesty, is shown an ideal of knowledge unattained, and a method whereby he may progressively attain, or at least approximate, thereto” (in Socrates 128). But, in order to carry out this pedagogic mission, the guide of the investigation (in that case, Socrates) must conceal himself under the mask of irony (eironeia). Here we stand face to face with one of Socrates’ most prominent features, “his old game of never giving a positive answer himself, but obtaining everyone else’s answer and refuting it,” his notorious tendency, as Alcibiades accuses, “to spend his whole life in chaffing [eironeia] and making game of his fellow-man” (Symposium 216e). The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard has devoted a whole treatise to the nature of this Socratic eironeia in its relation to the maieutic method.13 According to his view, Socrates’ goal was to encourage the disciple to look inwards and to find his own subjective truth (notice the affinity to the Platonic notion

13

to these accusations in the Apology when he speaks of his ‘shadowy prosecutors’: “but those others are more dangerous, gentlemen, who gained your belief, since they got hold of most of you in childhood,” he says, “and accused me without any truth, saying, ‘there is a certain Socrates, a wise man, a ponderer over the things in the air and one who has investigated the things beneath the earth and who makes the weaker argument the stronger’” (18 b-c. italics mine). Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Hong, H. V. and Hong, E. H., Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989; cf. Poole, Roger. Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1993, pp. 2861.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 60 — #60

i

60

i

  :      

of anamnesis). In order to realize this task, the guide must use ‘indirect communication’ and disguise himself from his disciple. Otherwise the latter is apt to fall into the trap of dogmatism, whereby the guide will be considered as an indisputable source of authority and thus the disciple will follow him instead of tracking his own independent thought. Consequently, the philosophic guide is obliged to wear the mask of eironeia; he is allowed to “deceive into the Truth.”14 Thus, in Kierkegaard’s view the Socratic irony is an integral aspect of the maieutic method: its exclusive aim is to evoke the disciple’s pathos for Truth. Following this analysis, a conclusive comparison can be made between Socrates and the Sophists. The Sophists’ point of departure is a rigid recognition that there is no ultimate truth and thus, well-founded knowledge and teaching is impossible. In light of this severe subjectivism and relativism, the only thing left in human life is to profess rhetoric. I call this view ‘dogmatic skepticism.’ On the other hand, Socrates’ springboard is the recognition of ignorance, both his own and that of others, and he uses his method of elenchus in order to encourage the interlocutor to recognize that as well. At the same time, the ideal of tenable Truth is erected. Thereafter, a mutual ongoing quest for Truth is offered, a quest in which Socrates is obliged to wear the mask of irony in order to allow his interlocutor to ‘procreate’ his own wisdom. Socrates thus uses what I call ‘methodic skepticism’ (again: from the word methodos “the way to knowledge”), aiming at generating the pathos for Truth both in oneself and in one’s fellowman. Guthrie distinctly distinguishes the differences between Socrates’ methodic skepticism and the Sophists’ dogmatism in the closing lines of his discussion of Socrates’ ignorance: They [the Sophists] held that knowledge (as opposed to shifting opinion) was impossible, for there were no stable and indisputable objects to be known. He [Socrates] demonstrated to everybody that what they called their knowledge was not knowledge at all. Superficially alike, the two statements were fundamentally different, for that of Socrates was based on an unshakable conviction that knowledge was in principle attainable, but that, if there was to be any hope of attaining it, the debris of confused and misleading ideas which filled most men’s minds must first be cleared away. Only then could the positive search for knowledge begin. Once his companion had understood the right way to the goal (the method in its Greek sense), he was ready to seek it with him, and philosophy was summed up for him in this idea of ‘common search,’ a con-

14

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 1, ed. and tr. Hong, H. V. and Hong, E. H., Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967, p. 288.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 61 — #61

i

  :     

i

61

ception of the purpose of discussion directly contrary to the sophistic idea of it as a contest aiming at the overthrow of an opponent. (Socrates 129)

I wholeheartedly concur with Guthrie that the crux of the Socratic process is the notion of ongoing ‘common search’ (suzêtêsis). This notion, which bears the tension between methodical skepticism and the pathos for truth, is fundamental throughout the Platonic work, and it can be regarded, as many scholars admit, as the cornerstone of Platonic philosophy as well. As previously mentioned, this tension is manifested by the unique form of the dialogic writing, the philosophical drama, in which Plato’s own opinion is never explicitly stated. As Tigerstedt remarks, the Platonic text actually presents two simultaneous sets of dialogues: Socrates’ explicit dialogue with his interlocutor and Plato’s implicit dialogue with the reader (Tigerstedt Interpreting Plato 98). From this viewpoint, the function of the dialogic form reflects the dialectic method of the philosopher. In general, Plato’s use of the dialogic form can be seen as a means to generate in the reader methodic skepticism and pathos for Truth. Its function can be summed up as follows:15 (1) to avoid dogmatism; (2) to encourage the reader to take an active part in the discussion; (3) to cope with the critique of the written word (mentioned mainly in Phaedrus and the Seventh Epistle); (4) to present philosophy as a dynamic human activity; (5) to reflect Socrates’ ‘living discussion’ as well as his elenchus and maieutic method.16 This function draws one’s attention to the fundamental similarity between Socrates’ effect on his interlocutor and Plato’s effect as a narrator. As Blondell puts it: “the [Platonic] dialogues induce aporia in the reader, as Socrates does to his interlocutors, with the presumed intention of eliciting an active intellectual response, as opposed to passive learning.” (p. 42).17

15

16

17

The theoretical and literary aspects of Plato’s dialogic writing are discussed at length in Blondell, pp. 1-53. Note that Plato defines ‘thought’ as an inner conversation of the soul with itself (Theaetetus 189e) so that the dialogic form can also be regarded as a mimesis of the act of thinking. Regarding the aims and nature of the Platonic dialogue form, see: Blondell, pp. 39 ff. In addition to this anti-dogmatic trait of the dialogues, Blondell also points out Socrates’ charismatic dominance in the Platonic writings (p. 43). In this approach, the dialogues constitute tension between authority and openness. Note that there are Platonic Scholars who are opposed to this pedagogical approach. For instance, Tigerstedt rejects the idea that Plato’s aim in his writing was purely pedagogical, directed toward bringing forth the reader’s thoughts. He calls this view a “pan-aphoristic approach” and skeptically

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 62 — #62

i

62

i

  :      

In a more analytical manner, Christopher Gill minutely explores the relationship between form and argument in the Platonic corpus in his article “Dialectic and the Dialogue Form.” He assumes that the dialectical method is the core of all Platonic dialogues, and that this method is based upon two constitutive principles: 1. Objective knowledge of the most important kind (about the essential principle of reality) can only be attained in and through participation in dialectic, that is, a philosophical dialogue conducted through systematic, oneto-one questions and answers. 2. Dialectic can only achieve this goal if first, the participants bring to dialectic the appropriate qualities of character and intellect, and second, engage effectively in the mode of dialectic that is appropriately related to the subject under discussion.18 The first principle conceives dialectic as a “shared search” (suzêtêsis), in the same manner that Guthrie has defined the crux of Socrates’ maieutic method. Dialektike¯, seen as the crux of the dialogues, is thus no mere form of logical exercise, but primarily “the means by which knowledge of truth is, in principle, to be obtained” (ibid. 150). This stance manifests pathos for Truth. On the other hand, the fact that the conditions for effective dialectic are set very high – combined with a strong awareness of the limited standpoint and imperfect character of any given set of participants – is one major factor ensuring that the shared search of dialectic will also be an ongoing, that is, an incomplete, one (ibid.). Some Platonic scholars, those who assume, like Zeller, that Plato must have had a consistent and systematic philosophy, will consider this ‘ongoing’ principle as too open-ended, as an unjust underscoring of the indeterminacy of the Platonic dialogues.19 Indeed, there are some dialogues, especially those pertaining to the ‘middle’ period (e.g., Republic, Phaedo, and Symposium) in which Plato does adopt what seems to be a systematic epistemological hierarchy whose apex is the observation of ultimate Truth ‘with the eye of the soul,’ and, likewise, a firm ontological ‘theory

18

19

asks: “in light of this viewpoint, what does Plato’s philosophy say at all?” (Interpreting Plato 103). Gill, Christopher. “Dialectic and the Dialogue Form”. In: Annas, J. and Rowe, C. (Eds.). New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 149. On Zeller’s Hegelian interpretation of Plato see: Tigerstedt, ibid., pp. 15-18.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 63 — #63

i

  :     

i

63

of ideas’ (the latter will be the focal point of the next chapter). But in a more comprehensive viewpoint, which takes into account Plato’s dramatic writing and the inter-dialogic inconsistencies, this ‘ongoing’ quality of the philosophical search seems tenable; in other words, the principle of an “ongoing shared search” balances the pathos for Truth and the skeptical aspects of Plato’s dialogues. I assume that this balance is manifested in the Seventh Epistle, where Plato manages to elegantly settle the seemingly contradiction between the principle of the ‘ongoing shared search’ and the ideal of acquiring ultimate knowledge: After much effort, as names, definitions, sights, and other data of sense, are brought into contact and friction one with another… [and] after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself (341 d-e).

The process is dynamic, continuous, ever-changing, but it is conducted in light of the possibility of its completion. In this stance, Plato’s work manifests, both thematically and structurally, dialektike¯ as a human, continuous shared search, which presupposes the ideal of attaining tenable knowledge about the essential principle of reality. This pathos for Truth is the driving force of the philosopher’s extreme intellectual tension (the philo of sophia). From a bird’s-eye perspective, we are left then with a fundamental series of antitheses: Sophism versus Philosophia; dogmatic skepticism versus methodic skepticism; rhetoric versus the pathos for Truth; paralyzed certainty versus the movement of suzêtêsis; Socrates versus Gorgias and Protagoras. These oppositions will be our Ariadne’s thread while exploring the labyrinth of Borges’ skepticism. All-embracing skepticism is one of the most prominent traits of Borges’ intellectual portrait: Borgesian scholars usually consider him as a skeptic, a writer, and an intellectual who doubts any formulation of valid knowledge and determinate truth values. A clean-cut expression of this approach appears in Alazraki’s well-written article on Borges’ essayistic writing: In opposition to Martínez Estrada’s enthusiasm – an enthusiasm for true order – Borges expresses flat skepticism: if there is an order in the world, that order is not accessible to man… Borges rejects the validity of philosophical idealism as an image or sketch of the world, but accepts its value as “a branch of fantastic literature.” Borges’ fiction is nurtured by the failure of philosophical theories or, as he says, “by the aesthetic worth [of those theories] and what is singular and marvelous about them.” By making them function as the coordinates of his short stories, Borges evinces their fal-

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 64 — #64

i

64

i

  :       lacy and their condition of being not “a mirror of the world, but rather [of] one more thing added to the world.”20

In this perspective, Borges distrusts any possibility of tenable human knowledge and thus conceives philosophy as a mere dialectical game – as a “branch of fantastic literature,” in line with metaphysicians of the imaginary planet Tlön.21 Therefore, concludes Alazraki, “Borges approaches cultural values to understand them not in the context of reality but in the only context open to man – his own created culture” (p. 143). In other words, Borges’ skepticism is regarded here as absolutely hermetic: its fundamental characteristics are subjectivism, relativism, and negative certainty. Clearly, he is portrayed as a modern Sophist – very close in essence to Gorgias’ total negation and Protagoras’ all-embracing subjectivism. This conception of Borges as a total skeptic can be regarded, using Thomas Kuhn’s formulation, as a paradigm among Borgesian scholars. Both Borges’ intellectual image and his work are conceived, from the viewpoint of this paradigm, as pertaining to the Sophistic pole of the philosophy-sophism dichotomy: Borges is conceived as a dogmatic skeptic.22

20

21

22

Alazraki, J. Borges and the Kabbalah and Other Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 141. Borges’ negation of philosophy is considered by Bruno Bosteels, using Lacan’s notion, as “anti-philosophy.” Bosteels places Borges in a group of thinkers who rejected the systematic aspect of philosophical contemplation, alongside Nietzsche, early Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard. This makes Borges, in essence, a postmodern intellectual. See: Bosteels, Bruno. “Borges as Anti-Philosopher.” In: Egginton, W. and Johnson, D.E. (Eds.). Thinking with Borges. Aurora: Davies Group, 2009, pp. 37-46. There are, of course, other interpretative perspectives concerning Borges’ work, underscoring his open-ended intellectual quest rather than his hermetic skepticism. For instance, Lisa Block de Behar remarks in her authoritative studies that despite Borges’ “esthetics of disappearance” - the disintegration of borders and differences in his writing - he is constantly searching for an archetypical “Edenic Language” (Block de Behar, Lisa. A Rhetoric of Silence and Other Selected Writings. Berlin: Mouton, 1995); likewise, Sylvia Molloy speaks of Borges’ oscillation between fixity and mobility and of his texts’ tendency for nonfixity, which is accompanied by “its tenuous longing for what is fixed” (Molloy, Sylvia. Signs of Borges. Trans. O. Montero. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). And still, the dominant views tend to underscore the total absence of metaphysical truth in Borges’ worldview, as can be seen, for instance, in Floyd Merrel’s remark that “he [Borges] customarily proceeds to demolish supposed truths, leaving the reader with little or no firm ground on which to stand” (Merrell, Floyd. Unthinking Thinking: Borges, Mathematics, and New Physics. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991, p. xi.). See also the clear review of this issue in David Johnson’s lucid introduction to Thinking with Borges, pp. 1-4.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 65 — #65

i

  :     

i

65

However, other surprising voices arise in the Borgesian texts. We have seen in the previous chapter that he does not negate logos totally, and that he deeply admires pure thinkers such as Spinoza and his Argentinean teacher Macedonio Fernández. Consider his detailed and fervent depiction of Macedonio, the pure thinker, in his “Autobiographical Essay”; of special interest are the nature of Macedonio’s skepticism and his notion of truth: Of all the people I have met in my life… no one has ever made so deep and so lasting an impression on me as Macedonio… Macedonio was an outstanding conversationalist and at the same time a man of long silences and few words… As in Madrid Cansinos [Rafael Cansinos Assens] had stood for all learning, Macedonio now stood for pure thinking… Macedonio doubted whether truth was communicable. He thought that certain philosophers had discovered it but that they had failed to communicate it completely. However, he also believed that the discovery of truth was quite easy. He once told me that if he could lie out on the pampa, forgetting the world, himself, and his quest, truth might suddenly reveal itself to him. He added that, of course, it might be impossible to put the sudden wisdom into words. Macedonio was fond of compiling small oral catalogues of people of genius, and in one of them I was amazed to find the name of a very lovable lady of our acquaintance, Quica… I stared at him open-mouthed. I somehow didn’t think Quica ranked with Hume and Schopenhauer. But Macedonio said: “Philosophers have had to try and explain the universe, while Quica simply feels and understand it.” He would turn to her and ask, “Quica, what is Being?” Quica would answer, “I don’t know what you mean, Macedonio.” “You see,” he would say to me, “she understands so perfectly that she cannot even grasp the fact that we are puzzled.”… when I later told him he might say the same of a child or a cat, Macedonio took it angrily… I look back on him now, however, as an Adam bewildered by the Garden of Eden. His genius survives in but a few of his pages; his influence was of a Socratic nature. (pp. 35-37)

Macedonio doubts the ability to communicate truth, not its very existence and not the potential to grasp it.23 This makes him a Socratic thinker and a me-

23

Macedonio’s tension between understanding and utterance resembles Wittgenstein’s early thought and Borges’ notion of allusion. For a detailed investigation of this tension, see my essay: “Borges and Wittgenstein on the Borders of Language: The Role of Silence in ‘The God’s Script’ and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” in: Variaciones Borges, Journal of Philosophy, Semiotics and Literature, Vol. 14/2002, September 2002, pp. 61-78.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 66 — #66

i

66

i

  :      

thodic skeptic, and his direct influence on Borges should be taken into consideration. In addition, there are direct Borgesian remarks, scattered in his work, which surpasses ‘flat’ skepticism. For instance, in a conference held in Chicago in 1980, he was asked whether he believed in anything or looked for anything that eludes causality, in anything that is transcendental. “Of course I do,” he replied, “I believe in the mystery of the world” (Eighty 102). And in his public lecture on the Kabbalah, given in 1977, he says “I am not dealing here with a museum piece from the history of philosophy. I believe the [Kabalistic] system has an application: it can serve as a means of thinking, of trying to understand the universe” (Seven Nights 101). Coincidently, in his essay “From Allegories to Novels” (1949) he remarks that “the history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses [nominalism and realism] correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality” (SNF 339). And again, in the prologue to his poetry book The Unending Rose (1975), he transcends pure linguistic skepticism and remarks that “The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force” (SP 343). Finally, consider the overwhelming metaphor of philosophy as a possible Ariadne’s thread in the fragment “The Thread of the Fable,” published in Borges’ last book Los conjurados (1985): The guiding thread is lost; the labyrinth is lost as well. Now we do not even know if what surrounds us is a labyrinth, a secret cosmos, or a haphazard chaos. Our beautiful duty is to imagine that there is a labyrinth and a guiding thread. We will never come upon the guiding thread; perhaps we find it and we lose it in an act of faith, in a rhythm, in dreams, in the words that are called philosophy or in pure and simple happiness.24

I do not claim, of course, that Borges is a naïve writer; nor do I overlook his critical approach toward systematic thought, which was analyzed in the previous chapter. Yet one can readily notice that these quotations are not in line with the above-mentioned critical paradigm of his image and work. So the following question is raised: what is the exact nature of Borges’ skepticism? Is he really a complete dogmatic skeptic, a modern Sophist? An accurate answer to this question will serve, I believe, as a basis for a well-founded interpretation of the Borge-

24

Quoted and translated in Thinking with Borges, p. 46. I will return to deal with this fragment in relation to my analysis of Borges’ image of the labyrinth.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 67 — #67

i

  :     

i

67

sian labyrinthine work.25 Fortunately, Borges directly addresses the nature of his intellectual stance in one of his last interviews, using the key notion of ‘intellectual instinct’ in light of Lessing’s intellectual legacy. The interview was published in English in the New York Times Book Review on July 13, 1986. Amelia Barili poses a forthright question: “In Los conjurados, as well as in all your work,” she asks, “there is a permanent search for meaning. What is the sense of life?” The old master candidly responds: If life’s meaning were explained to us, we probably wouldn’t understand it. To think that a man can find it is absurd. We can live without understanding what the world is or who we are. The important things are the ethical instinct and the intellectual instinct, are they not? The intellectual instinct is the one that makes us search while knowing that we are never going to find the answer. I think Lessing said that if God were to declare that in His right hand He had the truth and in His left hand He had the investigation of the truth, Lessing would ask God to open the left hand – he would want God to give him the investigation of the truth, not the truth itself. Of course he would want that, because the investigation permits infinite hypotheses, and the truth is only one, and that does not suit the intellect, because the intellect needs curiosity. (Burgin 1998: 245)26

Let us carefully review this section. First, while addressing the question of the meaning of life, Borges does not deconstruct the notion ‘meaning’ and refrains from pointing at the irrelevance of the very question, as every post-Nietzschean skeptic would have eagerly done. Alternatively, he swiftly moves from the notion of ‘the meaning of life’ to cognitive notions as ‘understanding the world’ and ‘truth.’ His shift manifests the focal point of his response: he moves from an existential viewpoint to metaphysics, from a question that concerns human existence to reflections regarding the possibility of deciphering cosmic order. So the

25

26

My methodological working hypothesis is that a veritable link exists between the writer’s intellectual image and his work, so that a clarification of one will shed light on the other. Even so, I by no means suggest that literary texts should be totally reduced to biographical analysis. I simply assume that Borges’ theoretical texts, i.e., his essays and his lectures, are mirrored in the thematic layer of his literary work and that his intellectual investigations are not detached from his literary writing. Alazraki concurs the latter claim when he remarks that “one finds that his poems, short stories, and essays share certain constants which could be considered recurrent motifs or, as they have been called, Borgesian topoi” (ibid., p. 141). The question at stake is what exactly the theoretical nature of these topoi is. Printed also in Spanish in Textos recobrados 1956-1986, pp. 373-4 (henceforth TR).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 68 — #68

i

68

i

  :      

question at stake here, as he understands it, is what is the true nature of reality and the possibility of human knowledge of the Truth. In dealing with that, he seems to present a harsh skeptical view: it is probable that valid knowledge, what Plato calls episte¯me¯ (contrary to doxa, mere conjecture), is beyond human competence. Yet, it is also likely that he addresses here the possibility of communicating the Truth, in line with Macedonio’s abovementioned outlook. Above all, he underscores the basic tension of the quest for truth, a quest that presupposes at least the possibility of tenable Truth. The key term used here is ‘intellectual instinct’, which “makes us search while knowing that we are never going to find the answer.”27 This surprising notion resembles Nietzsche’s discussion of the ‘intellectual conscience’ in The Gay Science28 the shared nucleus of both is the principle of constant questioning in the face of the mystery of the world. Apparently, the Borgesian ‘intellectual instinct’ maintains

27

28

The other term Borges uses is ‘ethical instinct’. Thereafter, he clarifies it as follows: “I feel that we know when we act well or badly. I feel ethics is beyond discussion. For example, I have acted badly many times, but when I do it, I know that it is wrong. It is not because of the consequences. In the long run, consequences even up, don’t you think? It is the fact itself of doing good or bad” (Burgin 1998: 245). As Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science (1882): “I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower. Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.” (clause 2)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 69 — #69

i

  :     

i

69

severe cognitive and emotional tension: the inner drive that keeps the quest going, on the one hand, the awareness of the probability of not achieving the goal on the other.29 Note that Borges is quite indecisive in his verdict: he manifests a probability of an open-ended quest, not a negative certainty regarding the inexistence of ultimate Truth. He clarifies the nature of this tension using Lessing’s simile, the main point of which is the claim that the quest for the Truth is far more important than Truth in itself, since it is a constant movement, a dynamic intellectual activity.30 It is useful to compare this Borgesian tension with the view of the Sophists. As previously mentioned, Gorgias declares that there is no Truth, no knowledge of the Truth, and no communication of knowledge of the Truth. Accordingly, Protagoras regards man as the exclusive criterion for the existence and non-existence of all things. Vis-à-vis this harsh relativism, Borges says: “It is probable that firm knowledge is beyond man’s reach, but we ought to sustain our constant quest for the Truth.” Strictly speaking, Borges is quite remote from Protagoras’ subjectivism and relativism since he does not unequivocally assert that Truth is a human artifact. He also lacks Gorgias’ negative certainty. In fact he never dogmatically denies, here or elsewhere, the very possibility of tenable Truth, nor the existence of metaphysical cosmic order (this view will be discussed at length in the next chapter, in relation to his pivotal metaphor of the labyrinth). And then again, what is the exact meaning of the Borgesian paradox, of this strange tension of searching without finding? I suppose that this question can be clarified by a famous section drawn from the essay “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” (1942). Here Borges reflects on human attempts to formulate a classification of the universe: Obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative. The reason is quite simple: we don’t know what the universe is… we must go even further and suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of the ambitious word. If there is, then we must speculate on its purpose; we must speculate on the words, definitions, etymologies, and synonyms of God’s secret dictionary. The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us

29

30

Plato relates this inner drive to eros, the divine guidance of man’s intellectual quest, in Symposium 210a-212a. Note that Borges, too, uses the irrational notion ‘instinct’ as the driving force of intellectual activity. In the same manner, in “A Fragment from an Apocryphal Gospel” Borges mentions an imperative law: “Seek for the pleasure of seeking, not of finding” (SP 295).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 70 — #70

i

70

i

  :       from planning human schemes, even though it is clear that they are provisional. (SNF 231)

Borges opens with a slashing skeptical view: “we do not possess any real knowledge of the nature of the universe and thus we cannot give a genuine account of its scheme.” This skepticism is exacerbated when he doubts the very legitimacy of using the word ‘universe,’ referring to its Latin origin ‘universum’ that means etymologically “combined into (versus) one (uni),” since it presupposes organic unity and some sort of an order (hence the synonym for ‘universe’ is ‘cosmos’). He manifests this suspicion also in the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1944) in which it is written, in the encyclopedia of the imaginary planet Tlön, that: The metaphysicians of Tlön know that a philosophical system is naught but the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to one of those aspects – any one of them. Even the phrase ‘all the aspects’ should be avoided, because it implies the impossible addition of the present instant and all those instants that went before. Nor is the phrase ‘all those instants that went before’ legitimate, for it implies another impossible operation. (CF 74)

Does this view display absolute negative certainty? If so, it indeed indicates a philosophical bias for dogmatic skepticism. It is clear that in these lines Borges underscores human epistemological limitations, in accordance with the view presented in the former interview. And yet, a close reading of the text indicates that he manifests here doubtfulness or hesitation, not an all-embracing negation. Just when it seems that the doubt is total, he proceeds to take a more positive stance. There might be an order, a divine scheme, he propounds, whose metaphor is “God’s secret dictionary.”31 And if, Borges proceeds, this secret dictionary does exist, we are obliged to speculate about its purpose. Here the tension reaches its climax: ‘we simply do not know’ on the one hand; ‘we must speculate’ on the other. The Borgesian hesitation between skepticism and the pathos for Truth is showily displayed.

31

The beautiful metaphor of “God’s hidden dictionary” is also mentioned in the essay “On the Cults of Books” (1952): “The Christians went even further. The thought that the divinity had written a book moved them to imagine that He has written two, and that the other one is the universe… [Carlyle] said that universal history was a Sacred Scripture that we decipher and write uncertainly, and in which we too are written” (SNF 361). Borges also remarks there that Galileo’s works abound with the concept of “Il libro della Natura”, the universe conceived as a book.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 71 — #71

i

  :     

i

71

Finally, he concludes this ambivalence with a Kantian-like imperative law that might be considered as the cornerstone of the Borgesian worldview: “the impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us from planning human schemes, even though it is clear that they are provisional.” The bottom line is that the continuous quest for the Truth, regarded as the metaphysical order of the universe, is imperative despite the harsh recognition of human limitedness. This tension oversteps Protagoras’ recognition that man is ‘the measure of all things’ since here the human quest is conducted in light of the possibility of a divine scheme, the possibility of objective Truth. At the end of the circle, Borges clutches at the Ariadne’s thread and moves on.32 Elsewhere, he assumes that the actual driving force underlying man’s intellectual instinct is the riddle itself: the investigation proceeds as long as the question remains open. This is why he would have asked God, like Lessing, to open only his left hand. “I think of the world as a riddle,” he said at MIT in 1980, “and the one beautiful thing about it is that it cannot be solved. But of course I think that the world needs a riddle. I feel amazement all the time” (Eighty 81).33 It is thus the absence of Truth (which presupposes, implicitly, the possibility of its existence) that generates men’s pathos for Truth, man’s intellectual instinct. Here Borges is in line with, and probably under the influence of, the assumption of his favorite philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer,34 who depicts man as a “metaphysical animal.” As Schopenhauer puts it, “man is a metaphysical animal, - that is

32

33

34

Accordingly, in the poem “The Other Tiger,” Borges interweaves skeptical awareness with a demand for continuous quest. Following a harsh demonstration of the gap between the literary tiger that is “made of symbols and of shadows” and the real hotblooded tiger, he concludes: “Bien lo sé, pero algo / Me impone esta aventura indefinida, / insensata y Antigua, y persevero / En buscar por el tiempo de la tarde / El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso” (SP 118). This too is a clear-cut manifestation of the Borgesian “intellectual instinct.” Borges deals with the theme of the riddle (of the universe or the pattern of human destiny) in many of his texts. For instance, in the poem “Everness” he says: “Y todo es una parte del diverso / Cristal de esa memoria, el universo; / No tienen fin sus arduos corradores / Y las puertas se cierran a tu paso; / Sólo del otro lado del ocaso / Verás los Arquetipos y Esplandores.” And again, in “Oedipus and the Enigma” he writes: “Somos Edipo y de un eterno modo / La larga y triple bestia somos, todo / Lo que seremos y lo que hemos sido. / Nos aniquilaría ver la ingente/ Forma de nuestro ser; piadosamente / Dios nos depara sucesión y olvido.” (SP 226). Indeed, in his “Autobiographical Essay”, as well as in many other places, Borges admits that “today, were I to choose a single philosopher, I would choose him [Schopenhauer]. If the riddle of the universe can be stated in words, I think these words would be in his writings.” (p. 29).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 72 — #72

i

72

i

  :      

to say, he has paramount metaphysical necessities; accordingly, he conceives life above all in its metaphysical signification, and wishes to bring everything into line with it.”35 To put it in Borges’ words: the metaphysical animal is derived by its intellectual instinct. Borges splendidly displays this tension in his story “Inferno, I, 32” (1960). Here, he describes how God appears in a dream of a captive leopard and reveals to it that it will live and die in prison so that Dante can see it and add its figure and symbol to The Divine Comedy “which has its exact place in the weft of the universe.” The animal learns the reason for its suffering, but when it awakes, there remains nothing but an obscure resignation, since “the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.” Years later, the very same dreamy revelation occurs to the dying Dante, who wakes up and senses that “he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar,” since “the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men” (SF 323). The analogy between the epistemological limitedness of man and animals in the face of God’s hidden scheme is astonishing. The riddle prevails, hinting at the possibility of the existence of a divine scheme. Note that, in fact, both Dante and the leopard can understand the complex system of the universe in their dream, but not in vigilance. Borges might hint here at the superiority of the mythos, the language of dreams, over the sobriety of logos. In that case this story is about the modes of human understanding, not the absence of Truth. As Borges’ affirms, the outcome of the ‘intellectual instinct’ tension is living in a state of constant amazement. Note that the nature of this amazement is intellectual, not existential (a la Heidegger’s Angst) or psychological (a la Freud’s ‘birth anxiety’). This intellectual amazement is, in my view, the Archimedean point of what can be called ‘the Borgesian worldview.’ It is also the gist of his most fundamental metaphor, the metaphor of the labyrinth, which he derives from Greek mythology. He repeatedly admits that he tends to conceive of the world as a labyrinth (cf. Burgin 1969: 110), and that he considers the labyrinth as “the most obvious symbol of feeling puzzled and baffled.”36 Analytically speaking, the labyrinth symbol presupposes, besides its esthetical function, two principles: (1) a complex, highly ingenious scheme intentionally designed by an in-

35

36

Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On Man’s Metaphysical Need.” In: The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009, p. 657. Dembo, L. S. and Pondrom, C. N. (Eds.). The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1972, p. 115.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 73 — #73

i

  :     

i

73

telligent planner (in Greek mythology: Daedalus); and (2) the ignorance of that scheme by someone who resides in the labyrinth (e.g., the Minotaur). Considering these principles coincidently, it can be said that it is exactly this inability to conceive of the scheme and it is this awareness of that inability that generates the chronic state of amazement (note the semblance between ‘amazement’ and ‘maze’). In other words, the Greek laburinthos is opposed to sheer chaos (khaos), since it is, strictly speaking, a carefully articulated order, a cosmos – an undisclosed kosmos. This clarification may shed light on Borges’ unexpected positive view of the labyrinth, on his talk of “hope, or salvation” entailed by the symbol of the labyrinth, and on his almost intimate feelings toward the Minotaur, which is considered as the ‘center’ of the order of the labyrinth.37 Note, for instance, his conversation with Roberto Alifano, which took place in 1983: -Alifano: Do you conceive the image of losing ourselves in a labyrinth as a pessimistic view of the future of mankind? - Borges: No, I don’t. I believe that in the idea of the labyrinth there is also hope, or salvation; if we were positively sure the universe is a labyrinth, we would feel secure. But it may not be a labyrinth. In the labyrinth there is a center: that terrible center is the Minotaur. However, we don’t know if the universe has a center; perhaps it doesn’t. Consequently, it is probable that the universe is not a labyrinth but simply a chaos, and if it is so, we are indeed lost. -Alifano: Yes, if it didn’t have a center, it wouldn’t be a cosmos but chaos. Do you believe that the universe might have a secret center? -Borges: I don’t see why not. It is easy to conceive that it has a center, one that can be terrible, or demonic, or divine. I believe that if we think in those terms unconsciously

37

Regarding the Minotaur as the justification for the labyrinth, Borges says: “Chesterton said: ‘What a man is really afraid of is a maze without a center.’ I suppose he was thinking of a godless universe, but I was thinking of the labyrinth without a Minotaur. I mean, if anything is terrible, it is terrible because it is meaningless… because the minotaur justifies the labyrinth; at least one thinks of it as being the right kind of inhabitant for that weird kind of building” (Dembo 86-7). See also the closing lines of the splendid Borgesian poem “The Labyrinth” (1969): “Zeus no podría desatar las redes/ de piedra que me cercan. He olvidado / los hombres que antes fui; sigo el odiado/ camino de monótonas paredes/ que es mi destino. Rectas galerías/ que se curvan en círculos secretos/ al cabo de los años. Parapetos/ que ha agrietado la usura de los días./ En el pálido polvo he descifrado / rostros que temo. El aire me ha traído/ en las cóncavas tardes un bramido/ o el eco de un bramido desolado./ Sé que en la sombra hay Otro, cuya suerte/ es fatigar las largas soledades/ que tejen y destejen este Hades/ y ansiar mi sangre y devorar mi muerte. / Nos buscamos los dos. Ojalá fuera/ éste el último día de la espera” (SP 274).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 74 — #74

i

74

i

  :       we are thinking of the labyrinth. That is: if we believe there is a center, somehow we are saved. If that center exists, life is coherent. There are events which surely lead us to think that the universe is a coherent structure. Think, for example, of the rotation of the plants, the seasons of the year, the different stages of our lives. All that leads us to believe that there is a labyrinth, that there is an order, that there is a secret center of the universe, as you have suggested, that there is a great architect who conceives it. But it also leads us to think that it may be irrational, that logic cannot be applied to it, that the universe is unexplainable to us, to mankind – and that in itself is a horrifying idea. (Alifano 24)

Beyond his hesitation, Borges tends, though without absolute certainty, to grasp the universe as a hidden order, as a labyrinth containing a center. The other option is, from his perspective, uncanny or inhuman.38 The same tendency was shown in the above-mentioned simile appearing in Los conjurados (1985): “The guiding thread is lost; the labyrinth is lost as well,” he wrote, “Now we do not even know if what surrounds us is a labyrinth, a secret cosmos, or a haphazard chaos. Our beautiful duty is to imagine that there is a labyrinth and a guiding thread.” More analytically, his skeptical stance applies more to the possibility of a complete human perception of the scheme of the universe than to the very existence of such a scheme. This represents an epistemological tension, not a metaphysical negation. Thus, Borges’ most common feeling is the state of constant amazement, not that of sheer horror. In another interview that took place at Indiana University in 1976, he considered this amazement as the keystone of his entire work: “And maybe everything I have written is a mere metaphor, a mere variation on that central theme of being puzzled by things,” he admits, “Since you know my works…, since you know my exercises, I suppose you have felt that I was being puzzled all the time and I was trying to find a foundation for my puzzlement” (Eighty 17). I believe that the nature of Borges’ skepticism can be accurately clarified, at this stage of our investigation, against the background of the former philosophysophism dichotomy. Borges’ outlook is closer to Plato and Socrates’ methodical skepticism than to the dogmatic skepticism of Gorgias and Protagoras. He lacks the authoritative negative certainty and the intellectual inflexibility that consti-

38

Accordingly, Borges affirms his view of the universe as a cosmos in an interview given in 1956: “Que hay un orden en el universo, un sistema de periodicidad y una evaluación general, me parece evidente. No menos innegable es para mí la existencia de una ley moral, de un sentimiento íntimo de haber obrado bien o mal en cada ocasión” (TR III: 319).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 75 — #75

i

  :     

i

75

tutes the Sophistic weltanschauung. He never dogmatically repudiates the very possibility of Truth or, in his words, of a ‘divine scheme’ of reality – the existence of the order of the labyrinth. He is thus quite remote from Protagoras’ extreme subjectivism and relativism as well as from Gorgias’ nihilism. Above all, the tension that forms the basis of his intellectual instinct and constant amazement strikingly resembles that of Socrates’ recognition that “I know that I don’t know.” Both Borges and Socrates exalt the movement of incessant investigation, the quest for tenable Truth (which presupposes the possibility of its existence), as the essential quality of a decent, contemplative way of life. This undoubtedly brings Borges closer to the Platonic conception of philosophy, the desire for wisdom. And yet (a skeptic scholar would have queried), what about Borges’ harsh criticism of philosophy? What about his declaration that “it is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much”? (Labyrinth 207); what about his rejection, mentioned in the former chapter, of the philosopher’s striving for a general definition? The question at stake is, what is philosophy in Borges’ view. It appears that he tends to conceive philosophy, in contrast to rhetoric, as a manifestation of man’s puzzlement: All poetry consists in feeling things as being strange, while all rhetoric consists in thinking of them as quite common, as obvious. In that case, I suppose, there is no essential difference between philosophy and poetry, since they both stand for the same kind of puzzlement. Except that in the case of philosophy the answer is given in a logical way, and in the case of poetry you use metaphor. (Eighty 17)39

This view is not negative altogether. Rather, it is in accordance with that of Aristotle, who considered wondering (thaunatos) as the common source of philosophizing and myth making,40 as well as with Socrates’ claim in the Theaetetus that “this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the

39

40

Cf. his statement in his Norton lecture at Harvard: “What is the history of philosophy, but a history of the perplexities of the Hindus, of the Chinese, of the Greeks, of the Schoolmen, of Berkeley, of Hume, of Schopenhauer, and so on?” (Craft 2). “That it [metaphysics] is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g., about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders)” (Metaphysics, book L: 982b10, Tr. Ross).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 76 — #76

i

76

i

  :      

only beginning of philosophy, and he who said that Iris is the child of Thaumas made a good genealogy” (155 c-d).41 Philosophy, then, is conceived by Borges, in line with Aristotle and Plato, as the tendency to grasp the world as a riddle, and hence as a manifestation of human puzzlement – in sharp contrast to the arrogant certainty of Sophistic rhetoric. In a more general manner, Borges’ view of philosophy comprises negative and positive aspects. He tends to criticize the systematic trait of all philosophical theories on the basis of their dogmatism. At the same time, he holds on to philosophy as a model of incessant intellectual examination, as an indispensable catalyst for man’s intellectual instinct. This observation is validated by Borges’ talk of the necessity of philosophy, expressed in a conversation with Burgin in 1968: I think that people who have no philosophy live a poor kind of life, no? People who are too sure about reality and about themselves. I think philosophy helps you to live… I think that philosophy may give the world a kind of haziness, but that haziness is all to the good… So that, in a sense, philosophy dissolves reality, but as reality is not always too pleasant, you will be helped by that dissolution. (Burgin 1969: 142-3)

It is exactly this ‘dissolving’ quality of philosophy that catches Borges’ interest. By dissolving reality, philosophy manifests the initial mystery of the universe: the universe is grasped as a riddle or a possible labyrinth, as a possible order, rather than a huge iron-bound machine. Thus it may serve as an ultimate catalyst to man’s intellectual instinct: for the Platonic suzêtêsis. Wittgenstein says: “A philosophical works consists essentially of elucidations; without philosophy thoughts are cloudy and indistinct, and it is its task to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” (Tractatus 4.112). Borges assumes the opposite: the act of making reality somewhat cloudy turns our attention toward philosophical quests, since it evokes in us the initial amazement; philosophy begins in wonder.42 Similarly, Schopenhauer links this initial amazement to the rise of man’s

41

42

Plato alludes here to Hesiod’s Theogony, clause 780 ff. Iris is the messenger of heaven, and thus she represents the philosopher who is able to discern the transcendental archetypes. Thaumas’ name is linked here to the word thaunatos, wonder. Thus, ‘philosophy’ is the child of ‘wonder’; Borges prefers the words ‘amazement’ or ‘puzzlement.’ Compare to Socrates’ witty remark in the Theaetetus: “I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris [the messenger of heaven and the patron-goddess of philosophy] is the child of Thaumas [etymologically: ‘wonder’].” (155d. Tr. Jowett).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 77 — #77

i

  :     

i

77

need for metaphysics. Strongly opposing Spinoza’s view of the world as an absolutely necessary mode of existence, he claims: Only to the animal lacking thoughts or ideas do the world and existence appear to be a matter of course. To men, on the contrary, they are a problem, of which even the most uncultured and narrow-minded person is at certain more lucid moments vividly aware… finally, in minds adapted to philosophizing, all this is raised to Plato’s “Astonishment as a very philosophical emotion”, that is, to that wonder or astonishment which comprehends in all its magnitude the problem that incessantly occupies the nobler portion of mankind in every age and in every country, and allows it no rest.43

Therefore, Borges’ conception of the history of philosophy as ‘the history of man’s puzzlement’ is not a deconstructive criticism but a manifestation of what he supposes to be the very core of intellectual activity; once again, the driving force of philosophy-as-amazement is the possibility of ideal Truth. Put differently: whereas Wittgenstein seeks in his late thought complete clarity, the complete disappearance of philosophical problems, and the discovery that “makes us capable of stopping doing philosophy” and that “gives philosophy peace” (Philosophical Investigations § 133), Borges upholds incessant intellectual restlessness. Following this analysis, let us reconsider Borges’ remark regarding the dispute between Aristotelian nominalism and Platonic idealism: “the history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality” (SNF 339). What does he mean by the metaphor of the ‘useless museum of distractions and wordplay’? I assume that he relates here to a remark of his fictional character, Pierre Menard (a remark which is mistakably often taken to be Borges’ own view44 ) that “there is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter – if not a paragraph or proper noun – in the history of philosophy” (SP 94). The living doctrine becomes a museum-like remnant in the history of philosophy. But in Borges’ direct view this is not always the case: a genuine dispute –like the feud between nominalism and realism - keeps on rolling in the course of time, changing shapes and names, since it presents two possible modes of understanding reality. In that case, philosophizing (but not philosophical doctrines) is a vivid activity, a demonstration of man’s constant puzzlement,

43

44

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 2. Trans. E. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969, p. 171. Cf., for instance, Alazraki 1988, p. 140.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 78 — #78

i

78

i

  :      

a marvelous manifestation of man’s intellectual instinct. Borges clearly displays this approach toward philosophy – the negation of its systematic aspect alongside the upholding of suzêtêsis – in the aforementioned discussion with Denis Dutton (1976): *D.D.: You share one thing certainly with philosophers, and that is a fascination with perplexity, with paradox. *Borges: Oh yes, of course — well I suppose philosophy springs from our perplexity. If you’ve read what I may be allowed to call “my works” — if you’ve read my sketches, whatever they are — you’d find that there is a very obvious symbol of perplexity to be found all the time, and that is the maze. I find that a very obvious symbol of perplexity. A maze and amazement go together, no? A symbol of amazement would be the maze. *D.D.: But philosophers seem not content ever to merely be confronted with perplexity, they want answers, systems. *Borges: Well, they’re right. *D.D.: They’re right? *Borges: Well, perhaps no systems are attainable, but the search for a system is very interesting. (ibid.)45

Borges also manifests his bipolar attitude toward philosophy in his story “Averroës’ Search” (1947). Averroës, the preeminent Muslim commentator of Aristotle’s work, is depicted as searching for the exact meaning of two doubtful words from the Poetics: ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’. Bounded within the circle of Islam, he fails to decipher these words. This is thus a story of intellectual failure, of philosophical defeat. What makes this failure notably pathetic is the fact that it is carried out by an extremely intelligent man who sets himself a goal that is not beyond the reach of other Western scholars (and readers), but is beyond his own grasp. This pathetic effect intensifies owing to Averroës’ unreflective self confidence: he vainly assumes that he knows, but he actually does not. At the closing of the plot, the implied narrator (or should we simply say Borges?) adds a unique reflective remark:

45

The Borgesian consideration of the history of philosophy brings to mind, indeed, Nietzsche’s shrewd remark in his Human, All Too Human: “The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure. Posterity finds it in the stone with which he built and with which, from that time forth, men will build oftener and better in other words, in the fact that the structure may be destroyed and yet have value as material.” (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Vol. II. Tr. Paul V. Cohen. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934, clause 201).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 79 — #79

i

  :     

i

79

while writing the story I felt that Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without even having suspected what a theatre is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroës yet with no more material than a few sketches from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios. (SF 241)

The story is also a symbol of the narrator’s ignorance and, as Borges points out elsewhere, it is a general symbol of every human quest since, after all, “what any single individual knows is very little, as compared with the sum of all things” (Dembo 116). Here, too, resides a tension between the ideal of truth (the real image of Averroës, the real meaning of the words ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ and in general – the real meaning of things) and the inability to conceive of it completely. And yet, note that the very justification of the search, the quest for truth, is never totally undermined in itself. Not even implicitly: what makes Averroës pathetic is his vain certainty, his lack of Aristotle’s thaunatos, his total unawareness of being enclosed within the circle of Islam, – not his pathos for Truth. On the other hand, it is exactly the narrator’s awareness of his own ignorance that saves him from such a pathetic condition. The ‘dissolving’ quality of philosophy appears to be all for the good in that case. In other words, the distinction between Averroës and the Borgesian narrator is in accordance with the gap between the Sophist and the philosopher. More precisely: the reflective awareness of the Borgesian narrator bears a clear resemblance to the Socratic self-examination. Consider, for instance, the Cratylus. After having argued that names are internally related to the nature (physis) of things, Socrates turns to self-scrutiny: My excellent Cratylus, I myself have been marveling at my own wisdom all along, and I cannot believe in it. So I think we ought to reexamine my utterances. For the worst of all deceptions is self-deception. How can it help being terrible, when the deceiver is always present and never stirs from the spot? So I think we must turn back repeatedly to what we have said and must try, as the poet says, to look “both forwards and backwards.” (428d)

In addition, Borges’ methodic skepticism is reflected in his work by some structural techniques. In his essays, it is manifested by the oxymoronic structure of the text. As Alazraki has observed, the general structure of Borges’ essayistic work consists of the following stages: (1) a presentation of the subject; (2) a general review of theories in the field; (3) Borges’ own theory; (4) a refutation of both 2 and 3; (5) an aporetic conclusion (Alazraki: Kabbalah 142-3). I accept Alazraki’s elegant generalization, but at the same time I feel uncomfortable with his conclusion, according to which this structure manifests the idea that reality is irrational, i.e., that it cannot be apprehended by means of Western logic.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 80 — #80

i

80

i

  :      

This seems to me too dogmatic an idea to be held by Borges, since it comprises some certainty concerning the nature of the universe, which he repeatedly declares he does not possess. It also annuls the very possibility of the labyrinth, the hidden hyper-rational scheme of the universe. I alternatively suggest considering the oxymoronic structure of the Borgesian essays as a manifestation of the intellectual instinct, as a way of evoking theoretical questions and posing them far beyond every possible answer. In this view, this design parallels the general structure of Plato’s ‘early’ dialogues, which lead the reader to aporia46 , as well as the aforementioned structure of Socrates’ elenchus.47 This structural device is in use in Borges’ fictional and poetic works as well. Here also, the puzzled reader is apt to run into aporetic phenomena: a surprising conclusive shift (e.g., in “The Circular Ruins”); a presentation of alternative possible outcomes of a single act (e.g., in “A Problem”); an ending where the validity of the plot is in doubt (e.g., “The Aleph”); an ending containing an open question (e.g., the poems “Chess” and “The Golem”); and a conclusive metafictional shift (“Averroës’ Search”). It should be made clear, however, that I do not wish to argue that the driving force behind Borges’ work is pedagogical in nature. He actually strongly rejects the idea of auteur engage, underscoring the fact that his own tales “are intended not to persuade readers, but to entertain and touch them” (CF 345). Rather, I assume that this ‘touch’ of the Borgesian work can be conceived as pertaining to what Stanley Fish calls “dialectical literature.” According to Fish, a mere mirrorreflection of cultural codes, values, and norms is common in “rhetorical literature” whose function is to preserve and reinforce cultural order. Dialectical literature, on the other hand, is a mode of writing that critically examines the validity and firmness of all cultural fundamentals, and requires its readers to rigorously scrutinize everything they believe in and live by.48 This dialectical trait is, as Up-

46

47

48

In that case, the dialogic writing of Plato reflects his idea of the ongoing shared search. Borges totally agrees with Plato regarding the function of the dialogue: “I should clarify,” he says in the epilogue to the book of his conversations with Burgin, “that dialogue for me is not a form of polemics, of monologue or magisterial dogmatism, but of shared investigation… two men who can speak together, can enrich and broaden themselves infinitely” (Burgin 1969: vii-viii). Borges depicts the crux of this oxymoronic structure while surveying one of the works of (the imaginary narrator) Pierre Menard: “a technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by eliminating one of the rook’s pawns (Menard proposes, recommends, debates, and finally rejects this innovation)” (SF 89). Fish, Stanley. Self-Consuming Artifacts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. cf. Korsmeyer’s conception of Borges’ literary plots as “maps to a philosophical site,”

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 81 — #81

i

  :     

i

81

dike remarks, “what endows Borges’ stories with the close texture of argument, and his critical articles with the suspense and tension of fiction.”49 And it is in line, I must add, with the function and the spirit of the Platonic dialogues. I conclude the course of our investigation by juxtaposing two specific texts: Borges’ story “The Library of Babel” (1944) and Plato’s Apology. The shared thematic basis of both is the quest for a true wise man. In the first, this quest is associated with the search for the ‘catalogue of catalogues’ of the total library (which is also the universe), the library which is “composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries”: On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined the book; this librarian is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone there are still vestiges of the sect that worshiped that distant librarian. Many have gone in search of Him. For a hundred years, men beat every possible path – and every path in vain. How was one to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered Him? Someone proposed searching by regression: to locate book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity… It is in ventures such as these that I have squandered and spent my years. I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man – even a single man, tens of centuries ago – has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battled and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous library may find its justification. (SF 116-7)

The true wise man, the godlike librarian, is one who manages to decipher the general scheme of the labyrinth, the one who possesses the key to the riddle of the universe whose existence justifies the incessant quest of all others. Accordingly, the quest for the true possessor of wisdom appears in Plato’s Apology: Once he [Chaerephon, Socrates’ intimate disciple] went to Delphi and made so bold as to ask the oracle this question… for he asked her if there were someone wiser than I. Now the Pythia replied that there was no one wiser… But see why I tell these things; for I am going to tell you whence the prejudice against me has arisen. For when I heard

49

in: Gracia, J. E. et al. (Eds.). Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco. NY: Routledge, 2002, p. 4. Updike, John. Picked-Up Pieces. NY: Knopf, 1976.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 82 — #82

i

82

i

  :       this, I thought to myself: “what in the world does the god mean, and what riddle [is] he propounding? For I am conscious that I am not wise, either much or little. What then does he mean by declaring that I am the wisest? He certainly cannot be lying, for that is not possible for him.” And for a long time I was at a loss as to what he meant; then with great reluctance I proceeded to investigate him somewhat as follows. I went to one of those who had a reputation for wisdom, thinking that there, if anywhere, I should prove the utterance wrong and should show the oracle “this man is wiser than I, but you said I was wisest.” (21 a-c)

Both texts presuppose the possible ideal of tenable Truth (otherwise there would have been no intellectual tension): the scheme of the total library, on the one hand, divine Truth, on the other. This ideal underpins the possibility of genuine knowledge, the possessor of which is the true wise man. Both Borges and Socrates underscore the attempt to find this wise man, despite the fact that the specific motivation for their search is quite different: Borges strives to justify the library (i.e., the universe) by acknowledging its pattern whereas Socrates aims at refuting the Oracle’s prophecy. Finally, following his cross-examination (elenchus) Socrates acknowledges that the merit of his own wisdom is that he is the only one who “knows that he doesn’t know” and that he thus must keep searching for the Truth. This Socratic insight is also the springboard for the Borgesian quest. Our investigation boils down to the claim that Borges’ intellectual mood and themes (there are of course other aspects in his multi-layered, infinitely rich work) are closer to Plato’s and Socrates’ methodic skepticism than to the dogmatic approach of the Sophists.50 We have seen that this mode of skepticism, whose gist is the constant movement of inquiry conducted in light of the postulate of possible ideal Truth, is reflectively expressed by the Socratic oral method of elenchus, by the Platonic notion of suzêtêsis and the Platonic dialogic writing, and by Borges’ intellectual instinct. The possibility of Truth, its human variations and its nature, is the cornerstone and the driving force of the underlying intellectual tension in each of these cases.51 In this manner, and as far as the intellectual 50

51

I also suggest that Kierkegaard’s aforementioned conception of the Socratic eironeia as a mode of indirect communication parallels, in general lines, Borges’ notion of allusion. “I think we can only allude, we can only try to make the reader imagine,” he says at Harvard, “The reader, if he is quick enough, can be satisfied with our merely hinting at something” (Craft 117). I am in good company here: Lisa Block de Behar, a preeminent Borgesian scholar, also assumes that “if we were to recognize a predominant theme in Borges’ stories, that predominance would be the relation between the truth and history or the truth and fiction

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 83 — #83

i

  :     

i

83

aspect of his work is concerned, Borges is the most Socratic writer of our times.52 This claim relates not only to Borges’ work but to his own intellectual profile as well. He manifests his own incessant quest for a ‘general scheme,’ ‘a secret plan,’ or ‘a pattern’ in a conversation with Burgin:53 But perhaps coincidences are given to us that would involve the idea of a secret plan, no? Coincidences are given to us so that we may feel there is a pattern – that there is a pattern in life, that things mean something. Of course, there is a pattern in the sense that we have night and day, the four seasons, being born, living and dying, the stars and so on, but there may be a more subtle kind of pattern, no? (Burgin 1969: 110)

(It is fitting to end this discussion with a resounding question mark…)

52

but, above all, between the truth and its variations,” in: Block de Behar, Lisa. Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation. Tr. W. Egginton. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003, p. 146. But what about Borges’ repeated claim that he is “not a thinker, but merely a man of letters”? This claim does not demolish the intellectual aspect of his work, since its negation is directed toward the systematic aspect of thinking, not toward its value. Consider his reply to Denis Dutton: “- D.D.: You say you’re not a thinker…

53

- Borges: No, what I mean to say is that I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that.” (ibid., 1976). This quest for ‘general pattern’ is in fact one of the most dominant themes in Borges’ intellectual and fictional writing. Consider, for instance, his stories “The Library of Babel” and “Death and the Compass,” his poems “The Other Tiger” and “The Moon,” his essays “Coleridge’s Dream” and “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language.”

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 84 — #84

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 85 — #85

i

i

C  The Eye of the Soul: In Search of the Idea

Siento un poco de vertigo No estoy acostumbrado a la eternidad. (Borges, OC: III, 300)

Borges was intellectually preoccupied with the nature of the Platonic archetypes throughout his life. This preoccupation was already evident in his early essay “History of Eternity” (1936), which examines the archetypes in relation to the notion of eternity. The archetypes are also a constant theme in his recent years’ work. Consider, for instance, his intellectual poem on the Rhine river, “Streaming or Being” (1981): Does the Rhine flow in heaven? Is there a universal Form of the Rhine, an archetype, Which in an invulnerable mode in the face of this other Rhine, time, Endures and lasts in an eternal Now And is the root of that Rhine, which in Germany Proceeds its course while I dictate this verse? This is what the Platonics have conjectured; This is what Guillermo of Occam didn’t approve. I say that the Rhine (whose etymology Is rinan or streaming) is no other thing than An arbitrary nickname which men Have given to the secular outflow of the water From the icebergs towards the ultimate sand. It is quite possible. Let the others judge. Will it only be, I repeat, that series of White days and black nights Which have loved, have sung, have read, And endured fear and hope, Or could it also be different, the secret “I” Who interrogates its illusory image, now wiped out, In the anxious mirror? 85

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 86 — #86

i

86

i

    :     IDEA Maybe in the other side of death I will finally know if I was a mere name or actually someone. (OC: III, 322) 1

The river’s possible relation with its archetype is the thematic core of this verse. The link that appears here, between the notions ‘river’ and ‘archetype,’ is not accidental: the river is the metaphor of the constant flux, of the Heraclitean panta rhei, whereas the archetype is the ultimate symbol of the eternal, resembling Parmenides’ absolute Being that resides beyond time and space. Borges presents here, then, the most fundamental Platonic dichotomy, that of Being versus becoming or eternity versus existing-in-time. Moreover, in this poem he elegantly relates the issue of the archetype to other major Platonic themes such as time, eternity, personal identity, the afterlife, and ontology. So what is, actually, Borges’ view of the Platonic archetype? A proper answer to this question will shed light on his famous intellectual tendency toward idealism in general, and on his actual reaction to Platonic idealism in particular. This task, having been fulfilled, will enable us to better understand the use of the theme of the archetype in his poetry and fiction as well.

1

Correr o ser ¿Fluye en el cielo el Rhin? ¿Hay una forma Universal del Rhin, un arquetipo, Que invulnerable a ese otro Rhin, el tiempo, Dura y perdura en un eterno Ahora Y es raíz de aquel Rhin, que en Alemania Sigue su curso mientras dicto el verso? Así lo conjeturan los platónicos; Así no lo aprobó Guillermo de Occam. Dijo que Rhin (cuya etimología Es rinan o corer) no es otra cosa Que un arbitrario apodo que los hombres Dan a la fuga secular del agua Desde los hielos a la arena última. Bien puede ser. Que lo decidan otros. ¿Seré apenas, repito, aquella serie De blancos dias y de negras noches Que amaron, que cantaron, que leyeron Y padecieron miedo y esperanza O también otro, el yo secreto Cuya ilusoria imagen, hoy borrada He interrogado en el ansioso espejo? Quizá del otro lado de la muerte sabré si he sido una palabra o alguien.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 87 — #87

i

  :     

i

87

On the other hand, the notion ‘idea’ (archetype) has a history of more than two thousand years, and, as Friedlander remarks, there is no other word in philosophical vocabulary that is “so heavily weighted down by the conceptual labors of centuries” (p. 18). In addition, it can be generally said that the entire ‘Platonic philosophy’ (if there is such) is based on the notion of the idea and the possibility of its knowledge: this notion, strongly related in to the act of seeing, underlies Plato’s most famous argumentations regarding the immortality of the soul, the possibility of acquiring real knowledge, his conception of ontological and epistemological hierarchies, and his view of the metaphysical order of the universe. In fact, the Platonic notion of the idea is the cornerstone of his answer to the questions that highlighted the previous chapter. Our first task is to try to properly understand, based on an etymological analysis, how Plato actually grasped the notion of the idea and its double – the notion of eidos. I would like to commence the discussion with some preliminary reservations concerning the term ‘Plato’s theory of ideas,’ with emphasis on the word “theory”, which presumes the existence of a systematic doctrine. First, Plato himself never used this phrase in his dialogues. Friedlander remarked, “We must be careful in speaking about a [Platonic] ‘theory of ideas,’ except in the case of the old Plato, who once [Epistle VI, 322d; probably unauthentic] used this somewhat rigid conceptual scheme” (Friedlander 17). Second, we cannot neglect the fact that there are some substantial and salient inconsistencies in Plato’s perception and use of the notion idea. For instance, in Republic Book X it is claimed that the idea of the bed was created by God (597b-d), whereas in the cosmological mythos of the Timaeus it was unequivocally determined that the idea is unavoidably as eternal as God himself (29a). So how can a ‘theory’ – a systematic set of arguments – contain such fundamental incongruities? And how is it possible that a prudent and meticulous writer such as Plato could have overlooked these conspicuous inconsistencies based on his theory? Moreover, some ‘late’ dialogues present a harsh criticism regarding the logical validity of the theory of ideas (cf. especially Parmenides 130d ff.). Notwithstanding, these reservations do not undermine the existence of a dominant Platonic assumption regarding the archetypes.2 I propose that we should ‘take the fair risk’ as Tigerstedt puts it, and assume that, when all is said and done: (1) Plato did have in mind some kind of a philosophical doctrine (the core of which is the set of the ideas) that cannot be reduced to

2

As Crombie observes, “There is some evidence of a [Platonic] retreat from some parts of the classical theory of Forms but that is as far as it goes.” See: Crombie, I. M. An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1963, p. 257.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 88 — #88

i

88

i

    :     IDEA

non-philosophical factors; (2) this doctrine is present, one way or another, in the written dialogues (and not only esoterically conveyed in the Academy, as some commentators claimed); (3) Plato was an intelligent and extremely self-conscious writer who was, without doubt, aware of the points of inconsistency in his work. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that he upheld a logically rigid ‘systematic theory’ of archetypes, but only that he had some philosophical purpose in mind, a purpose that needs to be clarified.3 As will be shown, the word ‘theory’ might indicate in the Platonic case not a systematic doctrine but, rather, an intuitive vision, in accordance with the etymological meaning of the Greek word ¯ theoria, which denotes ‘(visual) observation.’ Bearing in mind these remarks, let us turn to examine the nature of the Platonic idea. According to Ross’ authoritative study on Plato’s theory of ideas, it was Socrates’ search for general definitions that led Plato to recognize the existence of universals as a “distinct class of entities” (Ross 14). Therefore, a linguistic quest yielded an ontological doctrine: the search for general definitions resulted in the assumption that a set of general ontological entities must exist. Plato constantly refers to this ‘entity’ as an idea or eidos (he sometimes also used the word ousia, ‘essence’). Etymologically, the notions idea or eidos are both derived from ‘oida,’ which means ‘to have seen’ and also ‘to know’. Presocratic philosophers used these notions inconsistently: it designated ‘a mode’ (Herodotus), ‘a source’ (Ionian physicians), ‘a genre’ (Aristophanes), or ‘a sort’ (Thucydides) (Friedlander 16-17). And then came Plato and endowed these notions with an entirely novel significance, relating them to the act of seeing in accordance with their etymological sense and placing them as the Archimedean point of his thought. Basically, the notions idea and eidos indicate in the Platonic dialogues “ontologically-based entities that can be seen.” He tends to use these pairs of notions as synonyms, and yet, upon a closer look, one observes that their meanings are slightly different, depending on the context of the discussion. Usually ‘idea’ indicates in the dialogues the act of seeing, the double act of visual perception and intellectual observation; on the other hand, ‘eidos’ usually indicates ‘an object that can be seen’ or, in a more Heideggerean formulation, ‘an object that shows itself’ (Friedlander 1516).4 More abstractly, ‘idea’ is essentially an epistemological notion, relating to

3

4

See: Tigerstedt, E. Interpreting Plato. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977, Chapter VII. Ross upholds another view: he assumes that in Plato’s work ‘eidos’ indicates an abstract, mathematical term that is close to ‘class’ or ‘number,’ whereas ‘idea’ indicates a more concrete and ‘colorful’ notion (Ross 16). In this view, ‘idea’ relates Plato to Pythagorean

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 89 — #89

i

  :     

i

89

the act of human perception, whereas ‘eidos’ is an ontologically oriented concept that indicates the totally independent existence of an object that shows itself. In other words, ‘Idea’ is directed to the visual experience of the spectator; thus, it is anthropocentric in essence. On the other hand, ‘eidos’ stresses the ontological separateness of the object, constituting the absolute objectivity of the Truth in Plato’s thought. Therefore, I suggest that ‘Idea’ and ‘eidos’ should be conceived as two complementary notions that form Plato’s ontology and epistemology and serve as the basis of his idealistic notion of Truth (which is conceived as a correspondence between human thought and the perfect ontological entity). Note that Plato tends to consistently use two attributes in order to characterize his archetypes: one is paradeigma and the other - gené. The etymological meaning of these words might illuminate his conception of the archetypes. The word paradeigma (literally, ‘a pattern’) relates to the domain of sculpture and is used in ancient Greece to indicate the model of a statue. Thus, for instance, in the ‘plausible mythos’ of the Timaeus, Plato describes the archetypes as an initial paradeigma of the universe: a pattern that the benevolent God (the de¯miourgos, the divine craftsman) observes and impresses in matter (27a- 31e). The word gené means ‘species’ and its original use usually relates to the classification of biological creatures in nature (Clay 224). In the first case, the archetype serves as an initial source of concrete objects; in the second - it points at a general type. Nevertheless, there is a continuous dispute among Plato’s commentators regarding the nature of the archetypes. Aristotle, for instance, remarks that his master observed the archetypes in accordance with the Pythagorean notion of numbers, in a mathematical algebraic context (Metaphysics 1078b9-12); similarly, Taylor assumes that the usage that we find in Plato’s dialogues has its origin in the Pythagorean sense of geometrical pattern (Ross 13). Moreover, the modern tendency to consider the ‘idea’ as a mental notion led to a Kantian interpretation of Plato. For instance, in Hermann Cohen’s view the idea is grasped as a function of pure reason, which constitutes the cohesion of human perception, in accordance with Kant’s “Transcendental self.”5 It is probable that this viewpoint of the archetypes led Heidegger to harshly attack the entire Platonic system from

5

philosophy, whereas ‘eidos’ brings him closer to Parmenides’ ontology. It seems that Ross overlooks the etymological root of these notions, which conspicuously constitutes a fundamental analogy between knowledge and sight. Hermann Cohen’s Neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato is manifested in detail in his book Mathematics and Theory of Platonic Ideals (Platons Ideenlehre und die Mathematik), Marburg, 1878. Kant presents his notion of the ‘transcendental self’ in the section “Transcendental Deduction of the Categories” in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 90 — #90

i

90

i

    :     IDEA

an ontological perspective. Heidegger’s analysis of Plato’s ‘parable of the cave’ (1947) is a good example of this approach. In Plato’s Republic, he claims that a devastating transformation in the concept of Truth takes place, a transformation that had a severe effect on the development of Western philosophy: it is the move from the perception of Truth as aletheia (literally, ‘unhiddenness ‘) to idea (‘that which is seen’). Heidegger assumes that this transformation lies at the basis of the anthropocentric turn in Western thought, and that it is the prime cause of the catastrophe of the ‘forgetfulness of Being,’ the philosophical neglect of the ontological source of reality. In his words: “as ‘unhiddenness’ (aletheia) it [the Truth] is still a basic aspect of reality itself. As ‘correctness of apprehension’ (idea), it signifies the human attitude toward reality” (quoted in Friedlander, 227). Thus, whereas the concept aletheia originally signified for the Greeks the ontological and objective quality of Truth, the Platonic focus on idea constituted an anthropocentric approach that harmfully led from Being to beings, from existence-initself to existence-in-time, from ontology to epistemology.6 This short survey illustrates the elusiveness of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Nevertheless, in light of the former etymological analysis of Platonic notions and especially considering the tension between ‘that which is seen’ (eidos) and ‘the seeing of something’ (idea) - I suggest that the interpretations that tend to overlook the ontological dimension of Plato’s thought are too far from his own intention. Here I follow the path and the conclusions of the above-mentioned authoritative study of David Ross, Plato’s Theory of Ideas (1951), which presents a solid and plausible outlook of the Platonic doctrine.7 Following a comprehensive analytical scrutiny of Plato’s arguments and a close reading of the dialogues, Ross concludes that the Platonic theory of Forms is based on three fundamental presumptions: First, that Plato consistently thought of Ideas as different from sensible things. Secondly, and with equal certainty, that he thought of them as completely objective, neither as thoughts nor as the ‘content of thoughts’ (whatever that phrase may mean), but as entities whose existence is presupposed by all our knowledge. Thirdly, that he

6

7

Friedlander remarks that Heidegger’s notion of ‘aletheia’ is in fact no less anthropocentric than Plato’s idea: ‘unhiddenness’, which presupposes that humans experience the presence of Being; thus, it is a relational concept, similar to the conception of the visual experience of the idea (Friedlander 228-229). Ross, D. Plato’s Theory of Ideas. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1951. Ross’s authoritative study will serve as a basis for analyzing the archetypes in this chapter.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 91 — #91

i

  :     

i

91

thought of them as existing separately from sensible things; but to the question whether Plato consistently so thought of them no simple answer can be given. (Ross 227-8)

Based on this approach, I suggest considering four observations regarding the nature of the Platonic archetypes. First, that Plato is quite coherent throughout the dialogues in his assumption that the ideas are realistic entities, the existence of which is entirely independent of man’s perception. This view directly opposes the relativistic view of the Sophists, which was discussed at length in the former chapter. It is also in line with the ontological terminology of Parmenides’ Presocratic philosophy, which most likely influenced Plato’s thought deeply: Similar to Parmenides, Plato assumes that the archetypes are essentially complete ontological existing Beings (to ontos on), which comprise no diversity, no movement, no becoming, and no change.8 Consider, for instance, the similarity between Parmenides’ On Nature and Plato’s Symposium. Parmenides depicts the nature of ultimate Being as follows: “In it [the perfect Being] are very many tokens that what is (on), is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be…” (VIII: 1-5. Tr. Burnet). Compare this terminology with Diotima’s description of the archetype of beauty: What he [the observer] shall see is, in the first place, eternal; it doesn’t come to be or cease to be, and it doesn’t increase or diminish. In the second place, it isn’t attractive in one respect and repulsive in another, or attractive at one time but not at another, or attractive in one setting but repulsive in another, or attractive here and repulsive elsewhere… No, he shall perceive it in itself and by itself, constant and eternal, and he will see that every other beautiful object somehow partakes of it, but in such a way that

8

Plato’s veneration of Parmenides is manifested by the depiction of the latter in the dialogue Parmenides: “Antiphon, then, said that Pythodorus told him that Zeno and Parmenides once came to the Great Panathenaea; that Parmenides was already quite elderly, about sixty-five years old, very white-haired, and of handsome and noble countenance” (127b). Consider also Friedlander’s remark on Plato’s debt to Parmenides: “With the Socratic question and with every attempt to name the newly perceived Forms and to demarcate them from that with which they must not be confused, Plato took over current linguistic and conceptual terms, which originated from Parmenides… the Parmenidean philosophy of Being provided him with the means to anchor his intuition in permanent thoughts and words… eventually, far transcending Parmenides, he constructed a harmonious system of being and knowledge” (pp. 23-25). For a comprehensive comparison between Plato’s and Parmenides’ thought, see: Cornford, F. M. Plato and Parmenides. London: Routledge, 1958.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 92 — #92

i

92

i

    :     IDEA their coming to be and ceasing to be don’t increase or diminish it at all, and it remains entirely unaffected. (Symposium 211a-b)9

In my opinion, such a Platonic use of ontological (or Parmenidean) terminology undermines the basis of the aforementioned non-ontological interpretations of the archetypes. The second observation is that the archetypes, considered as perfect ontological entities, must reside beyond everyday reality. This means that the archetype is both beyond space and beyond time. The archetype is, strictly speaking, transcendent (beyond reality) and eternal (beyond time). This separateness leads to the third observation: Plato’s system comprises an integral tension between particular spatiotemporal objects and the transcendent set of the archetypes. This tension is generated by the fact that particular objects in daily reality are grasped as mere reflections of the archetypes, so that the idea is indirectly present, via a mimetic relation, in each of them. For instance, every beautiful body is a reflection of the archetype of the beautiful, as assumed in the Symposium (210a-211c). In this manner, the archetype serves as the paradeigma, the separate initial pattern of every object. In other words, we are facing an unresolved tension between the separateness and the presence of the ideas. This entails another tension that originates from the gap between the essential oneness of the archetype and the plurality of the particular things that reflect it (for instance, there is only one idea of whiteness, whereas there are many white objects). Based on this tension, Plato constantly stresses the necessary failure of every particular thing to be a perfect exemplification of any idea (Ross 231): the particular thing is an ontologically inferior reflection of the archetype. If this inferiority had not existed, argues Socrates in the Cratylus, then we could not have distinguished between the source and its picture, and every reflection would have duplicated the entity of the reflected source (432c-d). The last fundamental observation is that the archetypes can be, in principle, the subject of human knowledge. This potentiality is indicated by the notions

9

Whereas Parmenides’ initial presumption is that there exists only one undivided Being, Plato assumes a plural set of archetypes (Plato confronts these views, focusing on the question of the plurality in his dialogue Parmenides, 137b-166c). And yet, as can be seen from the aforementioned texts, their general ontological approach and terminology is mutual. For an analysis of the link between this Platonic depiction of the archetype of beauty and Parmenides’ ontological philosophy, see: Solmsen, F. “Parmenides and the Description of Perfect Beauty in Plato’s Symposium.” American Journal of Philology, 92 (1971), pp. 62-70.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 93 — #93

i

  :     

i

93

‘idea’ and ‘eidos’ that presuppose the act of seeing (‘oida’). The archetypes can be intuitively – that is, directly and comprehensively – perceived by the human mind, by the “eye of the mind” (I will deal with this metaphor next). This direct encounter of human thought and the archetype is sometimes depicted as an experience, even a somewhat mystical one (e.g., Symposium) and sometimes as a pure intellectual activity (e.g., Phaedo). As Plato points out in the ‘parable of the divided line,’ it is only the direct perception of the idea that can supply the perceiver with tenable knowledge (episte¯me¯), far beyond human conjectures (doxa) and even beyond mathematical certainty: only an ontologically perfect object can yield solid knowledge. In other words, ontological hierarchy constitutes a parallel epistemological hierarchy.10 Seen from this perspective, Plato’s archetype is an absolute ontological entity that exists in itself and by itself, eternal and transcendental, totally separate from sensible things although serving as their prime cause.11 This is the archetype as eidos: the ontological object of vision. As seen before, the archetype maintains another aspect manifested in Plato’s writing by the notion ‘idea’ – ‘the act of seeing an object.’ This aspect focuses on the human side of the encounter with the archetype and, as mentioned before, it should be conceived as complementary to the ontological perspective. So how can the existing-within-time lover of wisdom get to know such a transcendental and eternal entity? We now move from an ontological discussion to a more epistemological, perhaps existential, approach.

10

11

More concretely, in the ‘parable of the divided line’ (Republic: VI, 510a-511e), Plato draws two parallel hierarchies: one comprises four ascending grades of ontological existence (shadows, physical objects, mathematical entities, and the idea – the unhypothetical first principle); the other is composed of four grades of knowledge (unreflective opinions, conjectures (doxa), scientific knowledge, and, finally, supreme knowledge (episte¯me¯)). For a detailed analysis of this parable see, for instance, Ross 45-53. Besides these observations, and based on the (now doubtful) assumption that a chronological division of the dialogues is justifiable and that a developmental approach to the dialogues is valid, Ross portrays three developments in Plato’s philosophy that are worth mentioning. First, while in the early dialogues there was no trace of transcendentalism, “as Plato’s mind matured he moved gradually towards a transcendental view of the ideas as entities existing on their own account” (233). Second, Ross traces a process of ‘scalarism’ in Plato’s thought (80 ff.): a recognition of the complexity of the universe, which led him (1) to formulate a hierarchy of ontological levels parallel to a hierarchy of knowledge; (2) to recognize the existence of a hierarchy within the sphere of ideas: first he assumed that Good is the supreme idea (‘the parable of the sun’), and thereafter he acknowledged the superiority of the One (Sophist); and (3) recognized the necessity of two intermediaries that exist between the highest and the lowest: mathematical entities and the human soul (Ross 221-224).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 94 — #94

i

94

i

    :     IDEA

Basically, Plato identifies the highest level of human knowledge with the act of seeing and the symbol of sight throughout his writing. The basic dichotomy here is the status of doxa (empirically based opinion) in comparison with ultimate knowledge (episte¯me¯), which is reflected by the blindness/sight antithesis. In this manner, in Republic VI Socrates refers to doxa as a sort of blindness: “Have you not observed that opinions [doxa] divorced from knowledge are ugly things? The best of them are blind. Or do you think that those who hold some true opinion without intelligence differ appreciably from blind men who go the right way?” (506d).12 This helps him formulate the unique character of the philosopher: whereas the unreflective citizen is constantly compared to a blind man, the philosopher is depicted as the one who sees. Ignorance relates to knowledge in the same manner that blindness relates to sight. Thus, for instance, in Republic VI the philosophers are depicted as the supreme painters of the ideal state who “would glance frequently in either direction, at justice, beauty, sobriety and the like as they are in the nature of things [the archetypes], and alternately at that which they were trying to reproduce in mankind [the state]…” (501b). Similarly, in the Symposium, the philosopher who reaches at the highest degree of understanding is called ‘the observer’ (epoptes). And again, in Epistle VII Plato repeats the analogy, focusing on the metaphor of the ‘light in the soul’: There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject [philosophy]. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself. (344b, tr. Harward)

No doubt, the analogy between sight and knowledge is handled in the most theoretical manner in ‘the parable of the sun’ (Republic VI). Here Plato considers ‘the Good’ (to kalón) as an ultra-archetype, drawing a colorful similarity between the Good and the sun. The sun provides the light that enables the eyes to see, and it is at the same time the prima causa of the existence and growth of things that can be seen. Similarly, the (archetype of) Good is the prime source of all rational knowledge as well as of the existence of the objects of thought that constitute the eternal archetypes. Hence, the function of the sun in the sensual world parallels the function of the Good in the intelligible world of eternal Being. Visual sight becomes the perfect metaphor or quality of philosophical knowledge:

12

See also Phaedrus 270e, Republic 484c.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 95 — #95

i

  :     

i

95

When it [the soul] is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality [to on, ontological existence] shine resplendent [from the Good], it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason; but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts into opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason. (508d)

This analogy is developed and beautifully portrayed in the following parable, perhaps the most well-known philosophical parable ever, the ‘parable of the cave’ (Republic VII, 514a ff.). The image of the cave illustrates the fundamental contrast between the world of becoming, the realm of sense-perception (aistheton), and the intelligible realm (noeton) of perfect Beings. This turns our real world into a kind of a prison, and our daily life is drawn with gloomy colors.13 Naturally, light and shadow and sight play pivotal role in the scene: Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets… see also men carrying past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others silent… do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them? (514a515a)

As Socrates clearly explains, the process of the philosophical apprenticeship of the soul is vividly symbolized here by the act of ascending from the prisoncave upwards, ‘into the light of the sun’ (517b ff.). In a complementary manner, the fire within the cave represents contingent assumptions (doxa), whereas the outdoor sun denotes the archetype of the Good (this is in line with the former ‘parable of the sun’), the visual observation of which yields complete knowledge

13

For a review of the speculations regarding the possible sources of this parable, see: Wright, John Henry. “The Origin of Plato’s Cave.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philosophy XVII (1906), pp. 130-142.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 96 — #96

i

96

i

    :     IDEA

in the soul of its beholder (episte¯me¯).14 The symbolic axis of the whole parable is, then, the quality of sight and its disturbances, inside and outside the cave: But a sensible man would remember that there are two distinct disturbances of the eyes arising from two causes, according as the shift is from light to darkness or from darkness to light, and, believing that the same thing happens to the soul too, whenever he saw a soul perturbed and unable to discern something, he would not laugh unthinkingly, but would observe whether coming from a brighter life its vision was obscured by the unfamiliar darkness, or whether the passage from the deeper dark of ignorance into a more luminous world and the greater brightness had dazzled its vision. (518 a)

Paying such attention to sight, light, and ‘that which is seen,’ it is not surprising that we find in Plato the dominant novel metaphor of “the eye of the soul.” There were, in fact, some similar metaphors that preceded Plato’s writings. Aeschylus speaks of an “understanding endowed with eyes,” Pindar scorns the “blind heart,” Epicharmos demands to “see with our minds,” and Gorgias mentions the ones who make the incredible “clear to the eyes of the imagination.” Likewise, following Plato, Aristotle considers thought as “the soul’s eye” (Ethics VI 1144a28). And yet, as Friedlander remarks, these records are still quite far from “the plasticity and systematic meaning” of the Platonic widespread use of this image (p. 13). In fact, Plato mentions the “mind’s eye” in different variations throughout his writing, but mostly in his ‘middle’ dialogues – Symposium, Phaedo, and the Republic. In the Symposium Socrates refers to the noesis-aesthesis (pure-thought / sensual perception) dichotomy and says to Alcibiades that “the mind’s eye begins to perceive critically and distinctly only as the bodily eye fails in strength” (219a). In the Republic this metaphor dominates the text, and its dominance is manifested especially in the aforementioned parables of the sun and the cave. Sometimes Plato slightly alters the metaphor, speaking of “the soul’s eye” (Republic 533d) or “the organ in the soul with which we learn the truth” (Republic 518c). His fundamental assumption is that “there is in every soul an organ or instrument of knowledge… whose preservation outweighs ten thousand eyes” (ibid. 527de), so that philosophical methodology (dialektike¯) is, strictly speaking, the only process of inquiry that advances towards the prime unhypothetical first principle

14

Based on this view, Plato’s assumes that the exclusive goal of genuine education is the turning of the entire soul from the world of becoming toward ‘the brightest region of Being’ (518c-d).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 97 — #97

i

  :     

i

97

(idea) drawing forth the mind’s eye out of “the barbaric slough of the Orphic myth” (533d).15 We have seen in the first chapter of this study that Plato tends to utilize metaphors and myths for philosophical ends. What is, then, the exact function of the ‘the mind’s eye’ metaphor in his theory? I assume that, above all, it fulfills three philosophical goals. First, it portrays supreme knowledge (episte¯me¯) as an intuitive phenomenon. Solid knowledge is grasped as a comprehensive, direct, and simultaneous act of perception, which is also an experience. Second, it indicates the indispensable quality of real knowledge, at supreme clarity resembling the lucidity of light. Last, this metaphor is the ultimate Platonic answer to the dogmatic skepticism of the Sophists: real knowledge is self-evident just like sight. Once we directly see the idea with our minds, we irrefutably come to possess the knowledge of its essence.16 In addition, and in a more Heideggerean viewpoint, it is not impossible that with this metaphor Plato refers to an intimate experience that cannot be put into words. Here, the observation of eidos entails the experience of Truth as ‘aletheia’ (unhiddenness); thought can yield direct experience of ontological Being.17 According to this viewpoint, the observation of the idea as aletheia unifies ontological, epistemological, and also existential aspects (Friedlander 229). The last point leads us to reflect on the question of Plato’s mysticism. As Friedlander wisely remarks, “Plato’s dialectical journey, his rise from the darkness of the cave to the light of the sun, the ascent of the soul’s chariot to the realm beyond the heavens - all these elements have their equivalent in any form

15

16

17

The mystery cult of Orphism pictured the impious souls as buried in mud in the underworld. This image might serve, as Burnet suggests, as the origin of Plato’s parable of the cave. For the nature of the Orphic cult, see: Burkert, W. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Total clarity was the fundamental ideal of the rationalistic philosophers. For instance, Descartes poses the “clear and distinct” ideas of thought as the basis of perfect certainty (Meditations); and Spinoza, who calls the supreme level of knowledge Sientia intuitive, says: “No one, who has a true idea [of thought], is ignorant that a true idea involves the highest certainty. For to have a true idea is only another expression for knowing a thing perfectly, or as well as possible… what can there be more clear, and more certain, than a true idea as a standard of truth? Even as light displays both itself and darkness, so is truth a standard both of itself and of falsity” (Ethics: II, XLIII note). In addition, in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, it was Wittgenstein who assumed that the main point of philosophy is nothing except to gain perfect clarity, a clarity that, as he hoped, would dissolve all philosophical puzzlements (Philosophical investigations: § 133). See especially Heidegger’s essay “What is Metaphysics?” (1929).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 98 — #98

i

98

i

    :     IDEA

of mysticism” (p. 72), and indeed the relevant Platonic texts (especially sections drawn from Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, and the Phaedo) served as the cornerstones of Western mysticism in general, and Christian neo-Platonic mysticism in particular.18 Was Plato himself a mystic? Based on his mode of writing, it is tempting to say yes. Consider, for instance, Russell’s remark in his classic essay “Mysticism and Logic” (1914): “in Plato, the same twofold impulse [i.e., of science and mysticism] exists, though the mystic impulse is distinctly the stronger of the two, and secures ultimate victory whenever the conflict is sharp.”19 Yet, I believe that this question can only generate speculative answers when it is considered from a biographical viewpoint. I assume, for instance, that Friedlander’s observation that “Plato possessed what Socrates did not seem to need: the plastic eye of the Greeks” (p. 13) is doubtfully hypothetical. We simply do not know what Plato ‘the silent philosopher’ thought since he never expressed his thoughts straightforwardly (aside from the Seventh Epistle, which is considered to be an authentic text). But to ask the question from a textual stance, to ask whether Plato’s work comprises traces of mystical traits, seems to me a stimulating question. Seen from this textual viewpoint, it is suggested that if direct observation of the idea is indeed similar, in essence, to mystical states, then Plato was compelled to use metaphorical symbolism such as “the mind’s eye” since he was unable to express himself analytically. More abstractly, we cannot fail to see the affinity between the characteristics of the Platonic metaphor of “the mind’s eye” – the direct observation of perfect Being – and William James’ classic analysis of mystical experiences. James enumerates four universal characteristics of mystical experience: ineffability (it cannot be put in words), transiency (it is a short-term experience), passivity (it is given to the mystic), and noetic quality (it yields substantial knowledge in the mind of the mystic).20 One can readily notice the affinity of this analysis with Plato’s description of the mind’s eye encounter with the eidos. Consider once again the Seventh Epistle: following a long endeavor of the apprentice for the prime causes “suddenly a fire is kindled in the soul as by a spark” (341c).This

18

19 20

Friedlander analytically compares Plato and the mystics, referring to aspects of gradual journey, anguish, suddenness, the love of God, the structure of mystical consciousness, the transcendence of the sensual world, and mystical union. He concludes that despite some substantial similarities, the philosophical journey of Plato cannot be perceived as identical with mystical initiations (pp. 71-84). Bertrand Russell. Mysticism and Logic. London: Penguin, 1954, p.11. James, William. The Variety of Religious Experience. New York: Mentor Books, 1958, chapter XVI.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 99 — #99

i

  :     

i

99

depiction parallels many records of mystical revelations, and it perfectly matches James’ analysis. In addition, note that Plato’s work is embedded with notions drawn from the vocabulary of several mystery cults that performed in Athens in his time. Among them, the mystery cult of Eleusis deserves special attention, since it, too, brings into focus the act of sight.21 This cult was based upon the myth of the disappearance and return of the goddess-daughter Persephone and her reunion with her mother Demeter. It was carried out during the great autumn festival, the mysteria. We do not know exactly what were the details of the Eleusinian ritual, since the rites were arrhetos telete, “unspeakable sacred ceremonies.” However, based on several records we do know that it consisted of a mass procession that proceeded from Athens to Eleusis and culminated in a nocturnal celebration in the Telesterion, ‘the Hall of Initiation.’ According to the records, at the climax of the Telesterion ritual, the hierophant suddenly distributes sacred objects to the initiates, and this was the paramount revelation of “the holy things.” Although we do not know what kind of objects they were, it is certain that the texts insist that the true state of blessedness is “not in this emotional resonance but in the act of ‘seeing’ what is divine” (Burkert 93). That is to say that the initiate observed a sacred object and this vision converted him into a supreme human being or even, somehow, an immortal: an epoptes (‘a watcher’). The whole ceremony was thus called epopteia, “an experience of watching.” Direct visual observation yielded some kind of personal spiritual salvation. Let us take a closer look at Plato’s texts, considered from the viewpoint of the Eleusian cult. It turns out that Plato ingeniously intertwines Eleusinian traits and vocabulary in his depiction of the observation of absolute beauty, both in the Symposium and in the Phaedrus. In the former, Diotima treats Socrates as an Eleusian initiate: “now, it is not impossible, Socrates, that you too could be initiated into the ways of love I have been spoken of so far. But I don’t know whether you are ready for the final grade of Watcher [epoptes], which is where even the mysteries [myste¯s] I have spoken of lead if you go about them properly” (210a).

Similarly, the portrayal of the soul’s prenatal observation of absolute beauty in the Phaedrus is saturated by Eleusinian vocabulary:

21

The term ‘mystery’ derives from the Greek word ‘mystikos’, whose etymological source is the word ‘myein’ which means ‘to close,’ i.e., not to speak. As Burkert asserts, mysteries were initiation rituals of a voluntary, personal, and secret character whose aim was a change of mind through experiencing the sacred (p. 10).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 100 — #100

i

100

i

    :     IDEA But at that former time they saw beauty shining in brightness, when, with a blessed company – we following in the train of Zeus, and others in that of some other god – they saw the blessed sight and vision and were initiated into that which is rightly called the most blessed of mysteries, which we celebrated in a state of perfection, when we were without experience of the evils which awaited us in the time to come, being permitted as initiates to the sight of perfect and simple and calm and happy apparitions, which we saw in the pure light, being ourselves pure and not entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body, in which we are imprisoned like an oyster in its shell. (250b-c)22

These examples sufficiently support the claim that Plato’s image of “the mind’s eye” is related to mystical states and mystery vocabulary. In this way, this metaphor serves to unite (as Russell indicates) supreme rationality and mythological mysticism, pure intellectual observation and deep experience.23 This oxymoronic quality brings us to the threshold of Borges’ work. The first question is Borges’ view of, or reaction toward, the Platonic archetype. In the poem “To My Father” (1976) Borges recalls his impression of the death of his father. Surprisingly, he links this intimate experience with Plato’s archetypes: We saw you die smiling and also blind, Expecting nothing on the other side. But your shade saw or maybe barely spied Those final archetypes you shared with me That Plato the Greek dreamt. (SP 381)24

22

23

24

Compare this section with the metaphorical text of Plutarch, which attempts to portray the process of dying in terms of a mystery initiation: “…Wanderings astray in the beginning, tiresome walkings in circles, some frightening paths in darkness that lead nowhere; then immediately before the end all the terrible things, panic and shivering and sweat, and amazement. And then some wonderful light comes to meet you, pure regions and meadows are there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn, sacred words and holy views; and there the initiate, perfect by now, set free and loose from all bondage, walks about, crowned with a wreath, celebrating the festival together with the other sacred and pure people, and he looks down on the uninitiated, unpurified crowd in this world in mud and fog beneath his feet” (quoted in Burkert 91-92). Plato was not the first philosopher who combined mysticism and rationality. In fact, the philosophical-poem of Parmenides, which aims at manifesting the basic rules of logic, opens with a depiction of the supernatural ascent of the philosopher to the realm of heaven (On Nature: I, 1-35). Te hemos visto morir sonriente y ciego. Nada esperabas ver del otro lado,

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 101 — #101

i

  :     

i

101

The bewildering merging of death, blindness, and the direct vision of the archetype evokes Socrates’ claim in the Phaedo that the true philosopher “practices dying, and death is less terrible to him than to any other man”(67e), and he “removes himself, so far as possible, from eyes and ears, and, in a word, from his whole body, because he feels that its companionship disturbs the soul and hinders it from attaining truth and wisdom” (66a). The sincere intimacy of the scene diminishes the possibility that Borges treats the Platonic archetype as a mere intellectual game, or a purely imaginative manifestation of fantastic writing. What is, then, his theoretical view of Plato’s idea? And what is the function of the idea in his essayistic and fictional writing? The first step toward an adequate answer to these questions should attend to the realism-nominalism dichotomy. Historically, this dichotomy is anchored in a medieval dispute regarding the nature of universals (for instance, “a dog” or “a tree”). The realists, whose most salient representative was William Champeaux, conceived universals as separate and unitary units or entities that serve as preliminary sources of particular objects. On the other hand, the nominalists, represented by Thomas Aquinas, assume that universals are nothing more than a grammatical generalization (hence their name is derived from the word ‘onoma,’ ‘name’).25 According to the nominalists, universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality; the realist considers them as preliminary entities that exist outside human consciousness and language. In fact, this dichotomy is based upon the ancient quarrel between Plato and Aristotle regarding the nature of the archetypes. Plato considered them, as seen above, as the ontological prima causa of all things, entirely separate from human nomos (custom). This stance leads him to consider proper names as a manifestation of the true and general nature of the thing they name. Thus, Socrates asserts in the Cratylus: Then, as to names: ought not our legislator also to know how to put the true natural names of each thing into sounds and syllables and to make and give all names with a view to the ideal name, if he is to be a namer in any true sense? And we must remember

25

Pero tu sombra acaso ha divisado Los arquetipos que Platón el Griego Soñó y que me explicabas. For the history of the realism-nominalism dispute, see: Copleston, F. A History of Medieval Philosophy. 2 vols. Westminster: Image Press, 1962. For the relation of this dispute to art and literature, see: Eco, U. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 102 — #102

i

102

i

    :     IDEA that different legislators will not use the same syllables. For neither does every smith, although he may be making the same instrument for the same purpose, make them all of the same iron. The form must be the same, but the material may vary, and still the instrument may be equally good of whatever iron made, whether in Hellas or in a foreign country;- there is no difference. (389d-390a)26

In this manner, Plato is the intellectual forefather of the medieval realist movement. Aristotle, on the other hand, gave priority to concrete things. “It is hard to see,” he says in the Nicomachean Ethics, how a weaver or a carpenter will be benefited in regard to his own craft by knowing this ‘good itself’ or how the man who has viewed the idea itself will be a better doctor or general thereby. For a doctor seems not even to study health in this way, but the health of man, or perhaps rather the health of a particular man; it is individuals that he is healing” (I: 6).27

This view leads to the Aristotelian treatment of proper names as nomos – a conventional linguistic construct – which serves as the cornerstone of medieval nominalism.28 Borges, too, associates the rationalist-nominalist dichotomy with the Platonic-Aristotelian dispute, based on Coleridge’s view.29 He mentions this assumption almost identically in two essays published in Other Inquiries (1952): “Keats’ Nightingale” and “From Allegories to Novels.” In the former, he distinguishes between the British state of mind, which he considers as essentially nominalist, and the German highly realistic Spirit. In the latter, he relates allegories to medieval rationalism in contrast to the nominalist-oriented modern novels. In the course of the discussion he adds an illuminating remark:

26

27

28

29

In fact, the argumentation regarding the nature of proper names in the Cratylus is much more complex and dialectical, and in the second part of the dialogue Socrates crossexamines and perhaps deconstructs his own view – leading the reader toward a notorious aporia. For a detailed analysis of this issue, see my essay: “Language as Picture in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Plato’s Cratylus,” Tópicos 35, 2009, Panamericana University, Mexico. For a historical survey of the Aristotelian-Platonist interrelations, see: Gerson, L. P. Aristotle and Other Platonists. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005; Karamanolis, George E. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. See: Modrak, Deborah K.W. Aristotle’s Theory of Language and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. See: Coburn, K. (Ed.) The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London: Pilot Press, 1949.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 103 — #103

i

  :     

i

103

Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The Platonists sense intuitively that ideas are realities; the Aristotelians, that they are generalizations; for the former, language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols; for the latter, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian, may be an error or fiction resulting from our partial understanding. Along latitudes and epochs, the two immortal antagonists change languages and names: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Frances Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. In the arduous school of the Middle Ages, everyone invokes Aristotle, master of human reason (Convivio IV, 2), but the nominalists are Aristotle; the Realists, Plato. (SNF 339)

As noted in the previous chapter, Borges does not ridicule this dispute. “The history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay”; he continues, “The two hypotheses correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality” (ibid.). More analytically, in this section he develops Coleridge’s opinion and assumes that the dispute comprises three points of contention: (1) the archetypes (ontologically real or conceptual generalizations), (2) language (arbitrary sign-system or a ‘map of the universe’), and (3) the universe (cosmos or chaos)30 . All three are strongly interrelated: if the archetypes are indeed real, they can serve as a rational paradigm of both the universe (as seen in the opening of the Timaeus) and language (as assumed in the first half of the Cratylus). It is conspicuous in this section that Borges addresses the dispute from a realist or archetypical viewpoint, preferring the general over the individual. As he points out, individual philosophers are considered mere historical manifestations of two general attitudes toward reality. But then again what is actually his theoretical view of the archetypes31 ? Is Borges a realist or a nominalist writer? These questions have troubled generations of Borgesian scholars. A brief survey of some antipodal views will show how grave the disagreement is. Jaime Rest assumes that Borges is the ultimate nominalist who upholds the ‘nominalist silence’ based on the harsh acknowledgement of the limitedness of language. In contrast, John Sturrock assumes that Borges, in his writing, is an ultimate realist whose viewpoint is strongly related to Platonic idealism. There are also more intricate views in dispute. Carter Wheelock uses as a point of departure Isaiah Berlin’s symbolic dichotomy of the hedgehog (a thinker who knows one big thing) and

30

31

For a detailed discussion on cosmos and the metaphor of labyrinth as a hyper-structure, see the previous chapter. Once again: by the word ‘view’ I do not mean a systematic theory, but rather a thought or a set of thoughts that stem from a continuous reflection on the issue.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 104 — #104

i

104

i

    :     IDEA

the fox (a thinker who knows many small things). And he assumes that Borges is ‘a fox who aspires to be a hedgehog’: a nominalist who yearns for realism. In contrast, Floyd Merrell assumes that, after all, the Argentinean maestro is a complete realist, disguised as a nominalist.32 This dispute is still ongoing and the issue at stake, which is essential for understanding Borges’ view of Plato’s archetypes, needs further clarification. Let us first examine Borges’ essayistic writing. At first sight, he seems to be closer to Aristotelian nominalism. In the aforementioned essay on Keats’ nightingale, for instance, he remarks: “nominalism, once the novelty of a few, today encompasses everyone; its victory is so vast and fundamental that its name is useless. No one declares himself a nominalist because no one is anything else” (SNF 339). Similarly, in his early essay “History of Eternity” (1936), he mentions the same view that nominalism is today “a general promise of our thought” and that realism is “a doctrine so distant from our essential nature that I disbelieve all interpretation of it, including my own” (SNF 135). When examined more closely, these remarks apply to the historical status of realism and nominalism, especially to their function in modern thought; there is no analytical evaluation regarding their status and nature. In fact, the latter remark on realism seems more ambivalent and baffling than negative: realism is perceived as ‘otherness’ (to use Levinasian vocabulary), as totally alien to modern thought.33 So once again: what is Borges’ view on this issue? Most fortunately, in the “History of Eternity” (which actually contains two distinct editions) he directly deals with the nature of the Platonic archetypes and straightforwardly expresses his own thoughts regarding this theory. The two versions of this essay warrant careful reading. The edition of the essay “History of Eternity” was published in 1936 in a book of collected essays that bears the same name. As Monegal remarks, “all

32

33

See: Rest, Jaime. El laberinto del universo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Librerías Fausto, 1976, p. 195; Sturrock, John. Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 22; Wheelock, Carter. The Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969, p. 24; Merrell, Floyd. Unthinking Thinking: Borges, Mathematics, and New Physics. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991, pp. 9 ff. Regarding Borges’ view of modernism, one should bear in mind that he tends to attack the idea of strictly modern or contemporary writing: “I do not see why a man, by the mere fact of sharing my experience of living in the same century, should be more important than somebody who died many years ago… I think the word ‘modern’ means nothing whatever; and the word ‘contemporary’, of course, is a mere synonym of ‘modern.’ I think they’re both meaningless” (Burgin 1998: 80-81). Thus, the modern negation of realism is irrelevant to Borges’ own view, which needs further clarification.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 105 — #105

i

  :     

i

105

things considered, History of Eternity is a seminal book, the first to offer in one volume all aspects of the mature writer Borges would soon become” (p. 269). The essay is a review of the historical development of the notion of ‘eternity’ in Western thought. It comprises four sections: the first three are theoretical in nature and the last comprises the short literary text “Feeling in Death” that depicts an intimate experience of timelessness for the young Borges.34 Within the theoretical sections of the essay, there are passages that deal directly with Platonic doctrines and are of special interest for our investigation. Borges’ consideration of Plato’s idea follows his analysis of Plotinus’ Enneads: The ideal universe to which Plotinus summons us is… the motionless and terrible museum of the Platonic archetypes. I do not know if mortal eyes ever saw it (outside of oracular vision or nightmare), or if the remote Greek who devised it ever made its acquaintance, but I sense something of the museum in it: still, monstrous, and classified… but that is a bit of personal whimsy which the reader may disregard, though some general notion of these Platonic archetypes or primordial causes or ideas that populate and constitute eternity should be retained. (SNF 126)

Borges expresses here his own emotional or psychological reaction towards the archetypes. In essence, he conceives of them as inhuman entities: the still, monstrous, and classified entity of the archetype is the exact opposite to the fluctuating human existence. He repeats this impression and these attributes in the story “The Library of Babel” (1941), wherein he describes the nature of the total universe-library as follows: “I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I suspect that the human species – the only species – teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the library – enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and sacred – will endure” (CF 118). The core of this emotion is a Pascalian-like horror infiniti, a manifestation of human anxiety in the face of the inconceivable motionless of eternity. Borges mentions this horrifying impression in a conversation with Burgin: “when I first read the Republic, when I first read about the types, I felt a kind of fear… I felt that the whole world of Plato, the world of eternal beings, was somehow uncanny and frightening.” (Burgin 1969: 12). Besides this sensation, which is after all a psychological reaction, Borges also manifests a theoretical evaluation of the Platonic doctrine. In his view, the core 34

The short piece “Feeling in Death” is also published in The Language of the Argentines (1928) and thereafter in the essay “A new refutation of Time” (1947). This plurality manifests Borges’ affinity with this text.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 106 — #106

i

106

i

    :     IDEA

of Plato’s theory is the following: “individuals and things exist insofar as they participate in the species that includes them, which is their permanent reality” (p. 127). According to this formula Borges seems totally indifferent to the ontological dimension of the archetypes. He focuses, alternatively, on their function as general patterns of concrete objects, on their role as paradeigma. I quote his analysis of this function, highlighting his personal remarks: Plato has far more universal forms to propose. For example, Tableness, or the intelligible table that exists in the heavens; the four legged archetype pursuit by every cabinetmaker, all of them condemned to daydreams and frustration. (Yet, I cannot entirely negate the concept: without an ideal table, we would never have achieved solid tables.) For example, Triangularity, an eminent three-sided polygon that is not found in space and [is not designed] to adopt an equilateral, scalene, or isosceles form. (I do not repudiate this one either: it is the triangle of the geometry primers.) For example, Necessity, Reason, Postponement, Connection, Consideration, Size, Order, Slowness, Position, Declaration, Disorder. With regard to these conveniences of thought, elevated to the state of forms, I do not know what to think, except that no man will ever be able to take cognizance of them without the assistance of death, fever, or madness. And I have almost forgotten one more archetype that includes and exalts them all: Eternity, whose shredded copy is time. (p. 128)

A few remarks regarding this section follow. First, the most conspicuous fact here is that Borges does not repudiate or ridicule the Platonic doctrine of archetypes. Instead, he points at the logical necessity of Tableness to mundane tables and of Triangularity to practical geometry. As for the archetype’s relation to human thought, he expresses his perplexity alongside his awareness that their observation entails ‘death, fever, or madness.’ Furthermore, he assumes that eternity, considered as the archetype of time, ‘includes and exalts them all.’ In other words, in contrast to Plato, who regards the Good (Republic) or the One (Sophist) as the supreme Archetype, Borges tends to exalt Eternity. Note that Plato never explicitly regarded eternity as an archetype, but rather, he speaks of it as an integral trait of the existence of the archetypes in the realm of Being.35 The Borgesian view of eternity as the supreme archetype is, then, a modification of Plato’s thought: a modification that underscores the strange, inhuman nature of eternity. All things considered, this section manifests, in my view, a Borgesian intellectual

35

Plato only mentions in the Timaeus that time is “a movable image of eternity” (37d), and he explicitly regards eternity as the utmost trait of the archetypical pattern (“Now if so be that this cosmos is beautiful and its constructor good, it is plain that he fixed his gaze on the Eternal [pattern]” 29a).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 107 — #107

i

  :     

i

107

attraction, accompanied by emotional horror, to the Platonic archetypes.36 This intellectual affinity is clearly shown in a hesitant footnote added to the first section: I do not wish to bid farewell to Platonism (which seems icily remote) without making the following observation, in the hope that others may pursue and justify it: the generic can be more intense than the concrete… the generic (the repeated name, the type, the fatherland, the tantalizing destiny invested in it) takes priority over individual features, which are tolerated only because of their prior genre. (p. 129 n. 3)

This affinity with Plato, this acknowledgement of the priority of the generic over the concrete, is in line with (and probably affected by) the philosophical idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer. Borges quotes Schopenhauer twice in the essay and in both cases the German philosopher supports the Platonic stance that the generic supersedes the individual. I record the second quotation: “It is the life and fate of lions,” says Schopenhauer, “to seek lion-ness which, considered in time, is an immortal lion that maintains itself by the infinite replacement of individuals, whose engendering and death form the pulse of this undying figure” (p. 127). In short, in the first edition of the essay Borges manifests an ambivalent approach toward the Platonic archetypes: the idea is intellectually attractive and emotionally horrifying. Both attitudes indicate a serious consideration of the issue, not rhetorical playfulness. From an emotional perspective, Borges senses that the monstrous motionless existence of the archetype is essentially inhuman, and that its observation will have a destructive effect on the observer. On the other hand, he is intellectually fascinated with the Platonic view that gives priority to the generic over the concrete. Notwithstanding, in this edition he seems to be totally indifferent to the Platonic preoccupation with ontology, while highlighting eternity as the supreme archetype of time. Thus, it is time and not ontology that generates the archetype’s enchantment on Borges’ thought; as seen in Schopenhauer’s discussion of lions and lion-ness, the primacy of the generic over the concrete provides the latter with some sort of everlasting existence, some sort

36

Note that alongside the affinity with the archetypes, Borges enumerates three arguments discrediting the Platonic doctrine: (1) the incompatible cluster of generic and abstract terms; (2) Plato’s silence concerning the process by which things participate in the universal forms; (3) the mixture and variety of the archetypes. It seems that here he simply records classical criticism against Plato, based on Alfred Foullée’s book, which is mentioned in the bibliographical list of the essay, but he does not express his personal outlook.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 108 — #108

i

108

i

    :     IDEA

of eternity. The idea of the archetype, thus, copes with the problem of existencein-time, which is ‘the major metaphysical problem’ in Borges’ view.37 Thereafter, in a prologue to the second edition of the essay (1952) Borges critically examines his former view of the archetypes. His self-awareness is illuminating. I translated the relevant section from Spanish: [In the essay “History of Eternity”] I relate to Plato’s philosophy… Nevertheless, in a work that aspires to chronological rigor, it would have been more reasonable to depart from the hexameters of Parmenides (“it didn’t exist in the past, nor will it exist in the future, since it is”). I don’t know how I could have referred to the Platonic Forms as “immobile museum pieces,” and how I failed to understand, reading Schopenhauer and Erigena, that they are vivid, powerful, and organic [vivas, poderosas, y orgánicas]. The act of movement, the occupation of distinct sites in different moments, is inconceivable without time; the same happens with immobility, the occupation of the same place in distinct points of time. How could I fail to understand that eternity, longed for by so many poets, is a splendid artifice that frees us, even in an ephemeral manner, of the intolerable operation of the successive? (OC: I, 351)

In line with this section, he remarks in a conversation with Burgin: “I think that I was unfair to Plato. Because I thought of the archetypes as being, well, museum pieces, no? But really, they should be thought of as living, as living, of course, in an everlasting life of their own, in a timeless life” (Burgin 1969: 11). In order to clarify what seems to be Borges’ shift of thoughts, let us carefully analyze the former section. First, he points out the regrettable absence of Parmenides from the former edition. This means that he becomes aware of his indifference to the ontological dimension of the archetypes. Second, and most importantly, he dramatically alters the attributes of the archetypes, moving from depicting them as “motionless and terrible museum pieces” to their portrayal as “vivid, powerful, and organic.” He explicitly relates this shift to the reading of Erigena and Schopenhauer. The Scottish mystic John Scotus Erigena upheld a pantheistic stance. He assumed that particular things are mere theophanies (revelations or representations of the divine) and that behind them resides God as the one and only reality. And Schopenhauer asserted that the idea is the direct objectification of the cosmic Will, the only metaphysical prima causa of the universe. Both cases point to powerful and vivid forces (God, the Will) as fundamental aspects of phenomenal reality.

37

Cf. his lecture on time, OC: IV, 198.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 109 — #109

i

  :     

i

109

Another significant point is Borges’ novel acknowledgement of the link between the archetypes and time. As he conceives it now, the archetypes accumulate time despite being motionless. Philosophically speaking, this means that their eternal status is altered from Nunc-stance (the freezing of time) to the quality of an endless accumulation of time. It turns out that the essential shift in Borges’ view of the archetypes is related to the aspect of time. More concretely, Borges arrives at a novel perspective of Platonic eternity: he moves from the view of eternity as “a game or a spent hope” in the first edition, to a more positive stance, according to which eternity may serve as a temporal salvation to mankind, a salvation from unbearable succession. This view is almost identical to the stance of Schopenhauer who assumed that the observation of the archetype by the artistic genius has the power to release him, ephemerally, from the suffering of successive spatio-temporal existence. It is plausible that Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Plato underpins Borges’ new evaluation of the Platonic archetype.38 More generally, I believe that Borges arrives here from the perspective of Parmenides to that of Heraclitus: from the conception of the idea as a totally separate, timeless, and motionless entity to its interpretation as a powerful, time-accumulating, and vivid entity – resembling the constantly fluxing Heraclitean river (compare to the poem “Streaming or Being” quoted in the opening of this chapter). This shift brings Borges closer to Plato’s stance. From a more psychological point of view, it can be concluded that Borges managed to overcome his earlier emotional disapproval of the archetype. In his late thought the archetype’s eternal existence seems more of a comfort to human existence than a threat, and the idea thus becomes closer to time and life. (It is possible that this change of mind is related to Borges’ progressive blindness, as will be discussed at length next.) Generally, the textual records show that the old Borges tended to express increasingly more positive views regarding the archetype. He published three po-

38

Consider Schopenhauer’s following note: “[We] devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as [a] pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception… the person who is involved in this perception is no longer an individual, for in such [a] perception the individual has lost himself; he is pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.” (ibid., p. 216-217).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 110 — #110

i

110

i

    :     IDEA

ems in La Cifra (1981) - the aforementioned “Correr o ser,” “Beppo,” and “Las dos catedrales”- that repeat the central theme of the essay “Coleridge’s Dream” (1951) and manifest a positive inclination toward Platonic philosophy. In addition, consider his remark in the fragment “La Brioche,” published in Atlas in 1984 (the personal tone cannot be ignored): Spinoza has observed that each thing aspires to maintain its existence; the tiger wants to keep being a tiger, and the stone, a stone. I personally have observed that there is no thing that is not inclined [propenda] to be its archetype, and sometimes it manages to do so. It is enough to be in love in order to think that the beloved one is already his or her archetype. (OC: III, 420. my translation)

It does not mean, of course, that he has become a complete devotee of Platonism. Rather, it indicates that especially in his recent years he is far closer to realism than to nominalism, to Platonic thought than to Aristotelian empiricism. It would be possible to argue against accepting this conclusion that Borges is interested only in the aesthetical value of the archetype, that he considers this Platonic concept as a mere intellectual game that expands the possibilities of literary writing. Indeed, in the prologue to La Cifra (1981) he unequivocally declares that he ‘suspects’ that the Platonic archetypes pertain to fantastic literature. “What are the nights of Scheherazade or the invisible man,” he asks, “visà-vis the infinite substance, comprising infinite attributes, of Baruch Spinoza, or the Platonic archetypes?” (OC: III, 338). It seems like a clear reduction of Platonic philosophy onto fantastic literature, that is, of metaphysics onto esthetics or rhetoric. And yet, in accordance with the method of ‘internal intertextuality’ that juxtaposes texts of the same writer in order to distill his own definition of the concept in use, we should carefully consider how Borges grasps the nature of fantastic literature. This will shed light on the parallelism drawn between the Platonic archetypes and fantastic imagination. Fortunately, in an interview given in 1968 he clearly shows his view of the issue: I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols… in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because, after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain. Symbols are there all the time.39

39

Interview originally given to Marx and Simon, published in: Commonweal, vol. 89, no. 4, October 1968, pp. 107-110; republished in Burgin 1998, pp. 76 ff. Monegal mentions a similar saying, which unfortunately has never been published, included in a Borgesian lecture on fantastic literature in November 1949 (Monegal 409).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 111 — #111

i

  :     

i

111

This distinction between the symbolic and the circumstantial evokes the Platonic dichotomy of becoming vs. Being, or ephemeral appearance vs. everlasting archetypes. Thereafter, in the same interview, Borges manifests an even closer affinity with Platonic thought when he speaks of the distinction, in writing, between time and eternity: I suppose a writer of the fantastic is writing far more real than, well, what newspapermen write about. Because they are always writing about mere accidents, circumstances. But, of course, we all live in time. I think that when we write about the fantastic, we are trying to get away from time and to write about everlasting things. I mean, we do our best to be in eternity, though we may not quite succeed in our attempt. (ibid.)

Considered from a philosophical viewpoint, Borges’ view is quite similar to Romantic esthetics that tend to assume that art and only art can manage to represent eternal symbols (compare, especially, to Novalis’ theory of symbolism).40 It is also very close to, and most probably influenced by, Schopenhauer’s view of art, according to which art manages to manifest the ‘what,’ the eternal idea, in contrast to science, which attends only to the circumstantial. Consider the similarities between Borges’ view of the fantastic and the following section in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation: But now what kind of knowledge is it that considers what continues to exist outside and independently of all relations, but which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and is therefore known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas that are the immediate and adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, of the Will? It is art, the work of genius. (I: § 34)

Above all, Borges exhibits in his view of the fantastic a severe Platonic tension: the fantastic narrator lives in time while expressing in his writing his yearning for eternal symbols (compare it especially to Socrates’ speech in the first part of the Phaedo). In the same manner, in one of his Harvard lectures (1968) he regards timeless or un-historical beauty as the ideal of his own writing: Though I suppose I am being quite unhistorical when I say this… still I think there are lines [in poetry]…where somehow we are beyond time. I think that there is an eternity in beauty; and this, of course, is what Keats had in mind when he wrote “A thing of

40

For the aesthetics of romanticism and Novalis’ view of symbolism, see: Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Ed. Hardy, H. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, Chapter V.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 112 — #112

i

112

i

    :     IDEA beauty is a joy forever.” We accept this verse, but we accept it as a kind of right, as a kind of formula. Sometimes I am courageous enough to think that it may be true – that though all men write in time, are involved in circumstances and accidents, and failures of time, somehow things of eternal beauty may be achieved. (Craft 115)

In other words, when Borges relates Platonic philosophy to fantastic imagination, it does not mean that he considers the archetype as a mere enclosed set of ideas or an aesthetic game (he is not a Kantian henchman, after all). Rather, he considers fantastic writing as an act that expresses the same Platonic yearning for everlasting symbols. This Platonic yearning is expressed throughout his work by the repeating theme of what can be called “the search for the archetype,” and, especially, by the dominant metaphor of the tiger. Seen from an intellectual perspective, the theme of the search for the archetype exhibits in the Borgesian work a constant yearning for the general pattern, for the source, or for the essence of changing phenomena. As he puts it in the poem “In Praise of Darkness” (1960): it is the quest for “the algebra and the key” of the mysterious universe; in the context of the previous chapter, it can be said that this theme represents the tension of Borges’ ‘intellectual instinct.’ It is a dominant theme in countless Borgesian poems and short stories. Here are a few examples culled from his writing: in the fictional essay “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” (1941), we learn about a student who seeks Al-Mu’tasim, who appears to be an archetypical soul dimly reflected in other souls; the story “The Library of Babel” (1941) depicts the quest of the librarians for the “catalogue of catalogues,” the general paradigm of the total library; the story “Parable of the Palace” (1960) tells about a poet who managed to capture in his verse the essence of the king’s palace; the story “The God’s Script” (1949) is about an imprisoned priest hunting for the archetypical writing of God; and the story “UNDR” (1975) portrays a quest for the primordial word. The archetype is also the Archimedean point of many Borgesian essays, for instance, the aforementioned “History of eternity” (1939). It is also a pivotal issue in “The Postulation of Reality” (1931), “The Metaphor”(1952 ), “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” (1942), “Keats’ Nightingale” (1951), “Coleridge’s Flower” (1945), and “Pascal’s Sphere” (1951). The closing lines of the essay “Coleridge’s Dream” (1951), which examines the possible relations between Coleridge’s poem and Kublai Khan’s palace (both given in a dream in different centuries and different cultures) clearly manifest this tendency: Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object (to use Whitehead’s term), is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation was the palace; its

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 113 — #113

i

  :     

i

113

second, the poem. Whoever compares them will see that they are essentially the same. (SNF 372)

Similarly, the Platonic tension stands at the basis of Borges’ metaphor of the tiger, which is one of the most conspicuous metaphors in his writing alongside the labyrinth, the double, and the mirror. Borges has repeatedly admitted that the tiger has been his obsession from early childhood. “In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger,” he writes in “Dreamtigers” (1960); “I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and vast history books by the splendor of their tigers.” Thereafter, he describes his failure to incorporate the tiger into his adult dreams: Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it’s altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than a tiger. (CF 294)

The dream-tiger lacks the essential qualities of the archetypical tiger: its vividness, its absolute beauty, its perfect form. Thus, the tension in this text springs from the gap between the tiger’s appearance and its archetypical form (grasped, in accordance with Borges’ descriptive view, as vivid, organic, and powerful); it is obviously a Platonic tension. Borges repeats this tension in the poem “The Other Tiger” (1960). Here, too, he counterbalances two types of tigers, “the hotblooded one that savages a herd of buffalo,” and the one that is “made of symbols and shadows, a set of literary images.” Against this pair (which represents, as he explained later, the gap between art and the world (Eighty 59)), he poses a third one, the other tiger, thus producing an unending chain of tigers that aspire to the absent, archetypical tiger: I know all this; yet something Drives me to this ancient, perverse adventure, Foolish and vague, yet still I keep on looking Through the evening for the other tiger, The other tiger, the one not in this poem. (SP 119)41

41

“Bien lo sé, pero algo Me impone esa aventura indefinida, Insensata y antigua, y persevero En buscar por el tiempo de la tarde El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso.”

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 114 — #114

i

114

i

    :     IDEA

He returns to this ideal tiger in one of his last texts, the fragment “My Last Tiger” (1984). Here he explicitly mentions the Platonic archetype: I would like to recall, though I am unable to do so, a sinuous tiger painted by a brush of a Chinese artist who had never seen a tiger, although he has certainly seen the tiger’s archetype. This Platonic tiger can be found in Anita Berry’s Art for Children. (SP 463)

All in all, the metaphor of the tiger manifests in the Borgesian oeuvre a Platonic tension between the world of becoming and the realm of perfect forms, between phenomena and archetypes, or between the concrete and the general. More exactly, it manifests the postulation that the generic might take priority over individual features, an assumption that fascinates Borges’ thought and imagination. Note that Borges’ theory of metaphor is also anchored in this Platonic tension. In an essay called “La metáfora” written in 1952 and published in the second edition of History of Eternity, he assumes that on the basis of poetry stand five archetypical metaphors (time-river, woman-flower, eyes-stars, death-sleep, lifedream) and that, besides some rare cases, every possible invention of a concrete metaphor is nothing but a variant of these essential archetypes. On the other hand, a concrete way of indicating these archetypical analogies, the number of their variations, is infinite. So in Borges’ view, the Platonic tension between unity and plurality is the core of the notion of the metaphor. He returns to handle this subject in his second Harvard lecture (1968), and there, too, his conclusion incorporates the same fundamental tension: Now we are led to the two obvious and major conclusions of this lecture. The first is, of course, that though there are hundreds and indeed thousands of metaphors to be found, they may all be traced back to a few simple patterns. But this need not trouble us, since each metaphor is different: every time the pattern is used, the variations are different. And the second conclusion is that there are metaphors – for example “web of men,” or “whale road” – that may not be traced back to definite patterns. (Craft 40-41)

Up to this point we have dealt with the archetype handled by Borges as an eidos, as a general pattern or a metaphysical entity in contrast with concrete objects. But what about Borges’ attitude toward the archetype grasped as an idea: as an object of sight? What about the aspect of direct human contact with the archetype? We have seen that Plato portrays a pointblank observation of the archetype with ‘the mind’s eye,’ and that this act, which does not lack mystical characteristics, is conceived by him as most fruitful for human life: it provides the Watcher (epoptes) with solid philosophical knowledge and even with some

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 115 — #115

i

  :     

i

115

sort of spiritual superiority. As for Borges, it was mentioned before that he tends to emphasize the destructive effects of the idea’s observation, particularly in his early writing. “I do not know if mortal eyes ever saw it [the Platonic idea] (outside of oracular vision or nightmare),” he reluctantly remarks in the “History of Eternity,” “or if the remote Greek who devised it [Plato] ever made its acquaintance” (SNF 126). And again: “no man will ever be able to take cognizance of them without the assistance of death, fear, or madness” (p. 128). In line with that, in his work the sight of the idea is frequently linked to death, nightmares, or madness. Thus, for instance, in the above-mentioned poem on his father, the deceased man manages to observe, perhaps, the Platonic archetypes ‘on the other side’ of life; similarly, the protagonist of “A yellow Rose” (1960) manages to observe the rose’s archetype only on the verge of his death. Of special interest is the fact that Borges tends to relate the archetype’s observation to the theme of blindness, as seen in the poem about his father, who dies “blind and smiling” and only in this context manages, perhaps, to behold the archetypes. This tendency brings him closer to the Platonic dichotomy of aesthesis vs. noesis, or visual sight vs. intellectual observation. Generally, the tension between blindness and sight pervade the works of Plato and Borges. Whereas the Greek philosopher relates them to the possession or the absence of real knowledge, considering them from a sheer intellectual perspective, the Borgesian attitude is more intricate. In his poems and lectures he tends to address the subjects of blindness and sight from a rather personal perspective, speaking mainly of his own existence as a blind man (often, as a blind bibliophile). On the other hand, in his fantastic short stories he depicts unique states of total, mystical-like, allencompassing visions. The “Poem of the Gifts” (1960), one of his most touching poems, is a good example of his highly personal contemplation on his blindness: No one should read self-pity or reproach Into this statement of the majesty Of God, who with splendid irony Granted me books and darkness at one touch. Care of this city of books he handed over To sightless eyes, which now can do no more Than read in libraries of dream the poor And senseless paragraphs that dawn deliver To wishful scrutiny. In vain the day Squanders on these same eyes its infinite tomes, As distant as the inaccessible volumes That perished once in Alexandria. From hunger and from thirst (in the Greek story),

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 116 — #116

i

116

i

    :     IDEA A king lies dying among gardens and fountains. Aimlessly, endlessly, I trace the confines, High and profound, of this blind library. Cultures of East and West, the entire atlas, Encyclopedias, centuries, dynasties, Symbols, the cosmos, and cosmogonies Are offered from the walls, all to no purpose. In shadow, with a tentative stick, I try The hollow twilight, slow and imprecise – I, who had always thought of paradise In form and image as a library (…) (SP 95)42

The blind man’s existence is associated, here and elsewhere, with reading, learning, and books. In addition to the outspoken tone, the atmosphere and the environment are always deeply intellectual, akin to Plato’s dialogues. Similarly, in his famous lecture on Blindness, published in Seven Nights in 1980, Borges counts the intellectual gifts of blindness, underscoring the replacement of the visual world with the aural world of the Anglo-Saxon language (SNF 478). He

42

Poema de los dones Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche esta declaración de la maestría de Dios, que con magnífica ironía me dio a la vez los libros y la noche. De esta ciudad de libros hizo dueños a unos ojos sin luz, que sólo pueden leer en las bibliotecas de los sueños los insensatos párrafos que ceden las albas a su afán. En vano el día les prodiga sus libros infinitos, arduos como los arduos manuscritos que perecieron en Alejandría. De hambre y de sed (narra una historia griega) muere un rey entre fuentes y jardines; yo fatigo sin rumbo los confines de esta alta y honda biblioteca ciega. Enciclopedias, atlas, el Oriente y el Occidente, siglos, dinastías, símbolos, cosmos y cosmogonías brindan los muros, pero inútilmente. Lento en mi sombra, la penumbra hueca exploro con el báculo indeciso, yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca (…)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 117 — #117

i

  :     

i

117

also mentions Socrates’ demand for self-knowledge, saying: “According to the Socratic phrase, who can know himself more than the blind man?” (482). This remark surprisingly associates blindness with the Platonic aesthesis-noesis dichotomy, and blindness becomes here an intellectual catalyst, not a misfortunate disease. He makes this connection most conspicuous in the delicately written poem “In Praise of Darkness”(1969). Here, a sincere tone and intellectual consideration are ingeniously intertwined. The analogy with Democritus’ fate is illuminating; the Platonic intellectual bias cannot be disregarded: Old Age (the name that others give it) Can be the time of our greatest bliss. The animal has died or almost died. The man and his spirit remain. I live among vague, luminous shapes That are not darkness yet (…) In my life there were always too many things. Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think: Time has been my Democritus. This penumbra is slow and does not pain me; It flows down a gentle slope, resembling eternity. (SP 299)

The dichotomy is crystal-clear. The removal of visual sight entails the blessing of dispensing with the phenomenal world. From this moment onward, the door is opened for a more lucid memory and contemplative thought, a more philosophical way of life.43 “It is only when your eyesight goes into decline that your mind’s eye begins to see clearly,” Socrates says to Alcibiades (Symposium 218e); accordingly, the blind Borges approaches, finally, his secret center, conjoining the darkness of the eyes with the ideal of solid self-knowledge: From East, West, and North The paths converge that have led me To my secret center (…) Now I can forget them. I reached my center, My algebra and my key,

43

Similar to the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis (recollection), which is linked to the souls’ vision of the archetypes, Borges stresses the bonds between blindness and memory, especially literary memory. For instance, in the story “The Creator” (1960), which is written about Homer but does not lack autobiographical traits, the blind protagonist realizes that it was his destiny “to sing and make resound the Odyssey and the Iliad in the memory of mankind…” (SP 73). See also Borges’ aforementioned lecture on Blindness.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 118 — #118

i

118

i

    :     IDEA My mirror. Soon I will know who I am. (SP 300-301)44

This complex linkage of Blindness, memory, blissfulness and knowledge clearly relates Borges to Plato’s thought. The Platonic dichotomies of aesthesis vs. noesis, ephemeral vs. the everlasting, and Being vs. becoming – all pervade the aforementioned Borgesian texts. In addition to the handling of the theme of blindness, Borges occasionally presents in his fictional writing varied forms of mystical-like visions that resemble (despite the fact that he always depicts a visual sight) Plato’s depiction of the observation of the archetype. These visions are the Archimedean point of three fantastic (let us bear in mind Borges’ own definition of that notion) stories: “The Aleph,” “The Zahir,” and “The God’s Script.” All three appear in The Aleph (1949); all three display, as will be shown, different conceptions of eternities and archetypes. First, let us review Borges’ distinction between what he calls ‘nominalist eternity’ and ‘realist eternity.’ As he claims in the “History of Eternity,” the first type “gathers up all the details of the universe in a single second,” and the second “yearns with a strange love for the still and silent archetypes of all creatures” (CNF 135). In other words, nominalist eternity consists of gathering the entire space into one point in time, whereas realist eternity presumes a transcendental source residing beyond time and space. So time is again the pivotal aspect

44

Elogio de la sombra La vejez (tal es el nombre que los otros le dan) puede ser el tiempo de nuestra dicha. El animal ha muerto o casi ha muerto. Quedan el hombre y su alma. Vivo entre formas luminosas y vagas que no son aún la tiniebla (…) Siempre en mi vida fueron demasiadas las cosas; Demócrito de Abdera se arrancó los ojos para pensar; el tiempo ha sido mi Demócrito. Esta penumbra es lenta y no duele; fluye por un manso declive y se parece a la eternidad (…) Del Sur, del Este, del Oeste, del Norte, convergen los caminos que me han traído a mi secreto centro (…) Ahora puedo olvidarlas. Llego a mi centro, a mi álgebra y mi clave, a mi espejo. Pronto sabré quién soy.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 119 — #119

i

  :     

i

119

that distinguishes the two perspectives. I assume that the story “The Aleph” is a manifestation of the first nominalist type, whereas “The Zahir” and “The God’s Script” represent the realist type. In a more detailed manner, “The Aleph” tells of a protagonist, “Borges,” who descends into a basement wherein he manages to envisage the Aleph – the complete microcosm: Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. (CF 283)

The Aleph represents the total sum of the endless spatio-temporal objects in the universe, gathered simultaneously into one single point.45 It is thus the manifestation of nominalist eternity, as it was defined by Borges’ essay above. Vis-à-vis the Aleph, the notions of the Zahir and God’s script are depicted as concrete objects, elevated to the degree of timeless general forms. The Zahir is first portrayed as an ordinary Argentinean coin that becomes monstrously unforgettable. Similar to the case of the Aleph, the Zahir is observed by the protagonist (“Borges” again) after the death of his sweetheart. Once it is seen, it becomes an intolerable idée fixe: the protagonist, rolling down to the abyss of madness, cannot think of, nor remember, anything besides the coin. The protagonist’s consciousness abounds with the image of the coin; finally, the coin substitutes for the universe: Time, which softens recollections, only makes the memory of the Zahir all the sharper. First I could see that face if it, then the reverse; now I can see both sides at once. It is not as though the Zahir were made of glass, since one side is not superimposed upon the other – rather, it is as though the vision were itself spherical, with the Zahir rampant in the center. Anything that is not the Zahir comes to me as though through a filter, and from a distance… (CF 248)

As previously mentioned, this illustration of the Zahir is in line with Schopenhauer’s description of the genius’ esthetical experience. In the German philosopher’s view, during an aesthetic experience, which is an act of concentrated visual

45

I disagree at this point with the elegant analysis of Floyd Merrell, according to which the Aleph is a symbol of realist eternity (Merrell 8). Note that the Aleph contains, actually, nothing more than countless representations of concrete objects – quite far from the realist’s vision of the transcendent and unified unmovable archetype.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 120 — #120

i

120

i

    :     IDEA

observation of the genius, one concrete object is plucked out of its circumstantial relations and its image overflows into the entire consciousness of the beholder. Finally, the object is grasped sub specie aeternitatis, as a Platonic idea: it becomes timeless and transcendental, “beyond time and space.” But in Borges’ case, this vision of the idea of the Zahir is monstrous, since it comprises neither change nor movement – like a static museum piece. Its constant observation thus inflicts total madness on the protagonist, gradually consuming his personality. The Zahir is, in short, a symbol of the encounter of human consciousness with the museum-like inhuman Platonic archetype (presented already in Borges’ early essay), a monstrous version of the realist eternity. In front of the dazzling quality of the Aleph and the monstrosity of the Zahir (the former serves as a symbol of nominalist eternity and the latter of realist eternity), Borges poses another fantastic symbol of eternity in the story “The God’s Script,” a symbol far more intricate than the others. The story describes a priest, Tzinacán, imprisoned in a deep hemispheric cell. This scene brings to mind, of course, Plato’s parable of the cave. In the darkness of his cell the priest turns to scrutinize his memories, and one day he suddenly recalls an ancient tradition, according to which, on the first day of creation God wrote a magical phrase, capable of warding off all evils. “He wrote it in such a way”, tells Borges, “that it would pass down to the farthest generations, and remain untouched by fate” (CF 251). The priest decides to dedicate his days and nights in search for the divine Script: In the wide realm of the world there are ancient forms, incorruptible and eternal forms – any one of them might be the symbol that I sought. A mountain might be the word of the god, or a river or the empire or the arrangement of the stars. And yet, in the course of the centuries mountains are leveled and the path of a river is many times diverted, and empires know mutability and ruin, and the design of the stars is altered. In the firmament there is change. The mountain and the star are individuals, and the life of an individual runs out. I sought something more tenacious, more invulnerable. (ibid.)

The divine script is a kind of an archetype: it is, above all, a form, an eternal form, a symbol of unity surpassing plurality. It is unchangeable and untouched by time, in opposition to individual things. Borges’ priest, thus, is intellectually characterized as a philosophical realist, as one who aspires for a timeless general form. Besides, the omnipotent power of the divine script parallels Cabalistic doctrines, especially the view regarding the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew language grasped as the metaphysical building blocks of the universe. Borges’ conception of God’s script as a primordial archetype is, then, a Platonic variant

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 121 — #121

i

  :     

i

121

of the Cabalistic doctrine.46 But where could have God concealed his script? The priest, following an arduous effort, realizes that the script is written on the skin of the jaguars (he sometimes uses the word ‘tigers’). With deep fervor he imagines his God, in the first morning of time: Entrusting the message to the living flesh of the jaguars, who would love one another and engender one another endlessly, in caverns, in cane fields, on islands, so that the last men might receive it. I imagine to myself that web of tigers, that hot labyrinth of tigers, bringing terror to the plains and pastures in order to preserve the design. (CF 251)47

This vertiginous merging of the eternal script and the hot-blooded generations of tigers or jaguars is not accidental. It perfectly symbolizes, in my view, the mature Borgesian perception of the archetype grasped as a vivid, powerful, organic, and time-accumulating entity. The archetype is presented here then as a dialectical combination of plurality and generality, eternity and time, vividness and stability. In contrast to the Zahir, which represents, as was shown, the museum-like monstrous archetype, the divine script is an organic archetype written on the skin of hot-blooded species of tigers or jaguars (the mentioning of the tiger is essential in this context. We have seen that it serves in Borges’ work as the symbol of the tension between plurality and the archetypical). In other words, the complex symbol of the divine script written on the tiger’s skin can be conceived as representing the new Borgesian version of the realist eternity: timeless yet vivid, transcendent yet powerful, unified yet organic. In line with this state of affairs, the deciphering of the God’s script is accompanied by a mystical vision of the entire universe, perceived by the priest as a huge wheel of causes and effects. In accordance with Plato’s stance, it can be under46

47

The Cabbalistic doctrine of alphabetic letters appears mainly in the Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzira). According to this book, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet were the primordial instrument with which God created the universe; thus, the knowledge of their hidden combinations endows its possessor with omnipotent power. Borges discusses the Book of Creation in many of his essays, especially in “On the Cult of Books” (1952). It is also frequently mentioned in his poems (e.g., “The Golem”), his lectures (e.g., “The Kabbalah”, 1980), and his stories (e.g., “The Rose of Paracelsus”). Regarding Borges’ view of the Cabbalistic doctrine of language, see my essay: “Borges and Cabbalistic Language: Ontology and Symbolism in The Rose of Paracelsus,” in: Variaciones Borges, Journal of Philosophy, Semiotics and Literature, Vol. 23/2007, Iowa University, USA, April 2007, pp. 149-173. I will return to deal with this quotation in Chapter 7, in the context of Borges’ conception of the book as a ‘living labyrinth.’

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 122 — #122

i

122

i

    :     IDEA

stood as the envisaging of the paradeigma of the universe. Finally, it is interesting to note that despite the fact that Tzinacán manages to envisage the paradeigma of the world, decipher the divine script, and acquire omnipotence – he refuses to say the words and remains lying down in darkness on the floor of his cell, waiting to die. He explains his refusal by the fact that “he who has glimpsed the burning designs of the universe, can have no thought for a man, for a man’s trivial joys and calamities, though he himself was that man” (p. 254). Tzinacán’s encounter with the Platonic archetype has transformed him into what Schopenhauer calls “a pure subject of knowledge,” an abstract man who observes an abstract idea.48 He becomes similar to the ideal, presented in the Phaedo, of the true philosophers who “are ever studying death” (64a).

48

It should be taken into account that Borges tends to portray in his work abstract figures, lacking any psychological idiosyncrasies. “The fact is that I cannot create characters,” he once confessed in an interview, “I am always writing about myself in impossible situations. I have never created a single character, as far as I know” (Eighty 161). This tendency is another point of osculation between Borges and Plato.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 123 — #123

i

i

Part II

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 124 — #124

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 125 — #125

i

i

C  The Broken Mirror: The Crisis of Artistic Mimesis

Siempre se pierde lo esencial. Es una Ley de toda palabra sobre el numen. (Borges, “La luna”)

A man sets himself to the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with the images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face. (SP 143)

In this epilogue to The Maker (1960) (“my most personal book”), Borges manifests his strong interest in the relationship between literature and reality. One can readily note that in his view this issue is anything but simple; the ambitious attempt to ‘portray the world’ by means of artistic creation results in delineating the image of the narrator’s own face. Mimetic relation, artistic representation, and narrative identity are interrelated here in a manner that needs to be clarified. In fact, this quotation reflects a severe mimetic crisis in Borges’ literary and intellectual career, a crisis that the following discussion will strive to spotlight. More generally, the issue of artistic mimesis dominates Borges’ entire theoretical writing, and, as usual in his works, it also permeates – in a strikingly straightforward manner – his short stories, fictional essays, and intellectual poems. On the other hand, it would not be an overstatement, I believe, to consider the notion of mimesis as one of the keystones of Plato’s entire philosophy. As previously shown, the relation of the Platonic archetype to the phenomenal world is characterized by a fundamental presence-absence tension: the sensible particulars (aistheton) are perceived as representations of the ontologically perfect archetypes; yet these representations are, in essence, imperfect or ontologically inferior in the face of their sources. In other words, it is the mimetic relation that allows Plato to consider the archetypes as the prima causa of sensible objects, so that the intelligible set of ideas (the kosmos noetos) becomes the original pattern (paradeigma) of sensible reality. It is this mimetic relation that serves as 125

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 126 — #126

i

126

i

  :     

Plato’s essential response to both Sophistic relativism (“man is the measure of all things”) and the Parmenidean rift between Being and the world of appearance from a mimetic viewpoint, Being indeed exists per se, apart from human evaluation, and at the same time it is related – through imitation – to our daily life. Thus, through the mimetic connection the archetypes can be perceived, simultaneously, as purely transcendent and as a source of all mundane reality. Mimesis, serving as a golden path (methexis) between absolutism and relativism, thus becomes a pivotal player in Plato’s entire system, and it underpins the internal connections between several key aspects in his thought: language and reality (the proper name as a portrait of the object in the Cratylus), time and eternity (time as the ‘moving image’ of eternity in the Timaeus), the universe and the archetypes (the set of archetypes as a paradigm of the world in the Timaeus), the philosopher’s way of life and the eidos (the philosopher’s personality as a reflection of the ideas in the Republic), physical beauty and absolute beauty (corporal beauty as reflecting the idea of the beautiful in the Symposium), the ideal state and the absolute Good (the state as a portrait of the idea of the Good, drawn by the philosopher in the Republic), and so on. With regard to the latter relationship between the ideal state and the Good, which constitutes Plato’s metaphysical politics, Socrates straightforwardly expresses the tension underlying the mimetic relation in the closing lines of Book IX of the Republic. Referring to Glaucon’s remark on the hiatus between ‘the city whose establishment we have just described in words’ and the ideal city ‘that can be found nowhere on earth’, Socrates responds: Well, perhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it [the philosopher] and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen. But it makes no difference whether it exists now or ever will come into being. The politics of this city only will be his and of none other. (592b)

That is true despite the possibility that the ideal state does not exist de facto; however, it still serves as the only genuine source for constituting any just state; the origin, which is the prime cause of the mimetic relation, is present and absent at the same time. In addition, Plato is also (notoriously) the forefather of the mimetic conception of art in Western thought. His image of poetry as mimesis, developed in Book X of the Republic, as the first discussion of art seen from this viewpoint, became the cornerstone of every theoretical consideration in Western thought. As Murray summarizes the issue, following Plato “mimesis or imitation (defined, of course, in many different ways) played an important part in theories of literature

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 127 — #127

i

  :     

i

127

and art from antiquity right through to the end of eighteenth century. A standard image used to describe the relationship between a work of art and the world or ‘nature’ was that of a mirror, an image which Plato uses in Republic 596 d-e” (p. 29). This conception of art as a ‘mirror’ is widely mirrored, so to speak, in Borges’ work and thought as well. So, what is the theoretical nature of the Platonic concept of mimesis? And how is it reflected in Borges’ work and thought? The following discussion will address these queries. Etymologically, in ancient Greece the term ‘mimesis’ referred to a relationship between something that exists and something intentionally made to resemble it. Generally, it applied to relationships between sources and their resemblances. Before Plato, the mimesthai word-group covered a wide range that included vocal mimicry, dramatic enactment or impersonation, imitation of behavior, and visual representation (Murray 3).1 According to Aristotle, Plato’s own perception of mimesis was taken from the Pythagoreans who assumed that things in the sensible world imitate the numbers, which means that the structure of daily reality is anchored in a rational or mathematical structure (Metaphysics 987b). Yet, a closer look at the dialogues shows that Plato’s use of the term is, as expected, highly flexible. It is interesting to note, for example, that in Sophist 265b he considered mimesis as a sort of productive art (poietikai technai), which is shared by both God and man, overcoming the gap between divine craftsmanship (phytourgia) and human craftsmanship (demiourgia). In fact, Plato’s use of the term involves fundamental tension. On the one hand, as manifested in the “parable of the sun” (Republic 506b-509d), the archetype of the Good is regarded as the ontological source (aitia) of the existence of all the other ideas, which, as written in the Timaeus, serve as the prime pattern of the sensible world. From this viewpoint, a cause-and-effect relationship exists between the archetypes and the very existence of mundane things. This sound relationship is indicated by Plato, but inconsistently, by means of various notions or metaphors such as ‘partaking,’ ‘participating,’ or ‘imitating.’ For instance, in the Phaedo, Socrates claims that “if anything is beautiful besides absolute beauty, it is beautiful for no other reason than because it partakes of absolute beauty; and this

1

On the Presocratic use of the notion ‘mimesis’, see: Murray 3, n. 8; on mimesis and the impersonation of character in the Platonic dialogues, see: Blondell, R. The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, Chapter 2.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 128 — #128

i

128

i

  :     

applies to everything” (100c).2 As discussed previously, Plato extends this representational relationship in the Timaeus, using it as the foundation of Timaeus’ entire cosmology: in the aikos muthos (plausible story) of the dialogue, the divine craftsman gazes at a set of eternal archetypes and imprints them into matter (29a ff.). Thus, in this outlook, the entire universe exists as a mimetic relation to the archetypes. On the other hand, this unshakable internal relation involves, in Plato’s view, indispensable ontological inferiority. The representational object is, by logical necessity, an imperfect embodiment of its origin. Otherwise, stresses Socrates in the Cratylus, a total mimesis would have duplicated its source. In that case – had it been possible, say, to completely imitate reality by language – “the effect produced by the names upon the things of which they are the names would be ridiculous, if they were to be entirely like them in every respect. For everything would be duplicated, and no one could tell in any case which was the real thing and which the name” (433a). The basis of this inferiority is thus the logical distinction between the source and its representation. The source (in this case, the eidos, which is also the ontological origin of the world), is logically self-sufficient, whereas the mimetic object requires its source as a preliminary condition of existence.3 Consider, for instance, Socrates’ discussion of ‘the equal’ in the Phaedo. Speaking of the nature of recollection, Socrates ponders the question of whether the likeness of that which is recollected is in any way defective or not. This leads him to consider the distinction between ‘the absolute equal’ and equal things: - [Socrates] And shall we proceed a step further, and affirm that there is such a thing as equality, not of wood with wood, or of stone with stone, but that, over and above this, there is equality in the abstract? Shall we affirm this? - Affirm, yes, and swear to it, replied Simmias, with all the confidence in life. - And do we know the nature of this abstract essence? - To be sure, he said. - And whence did we obtain this knowledge? Did we not see equalities of material things, such as pieces of wood and stones, and gather from them the idea of an equality which is different from them?- you will admit that? Or look at the matter again in this

2

3

Plato also discusses this representational relation in Parmenides 132c-133a, Cratylus 389a, and Phaedo 74a-75a. For a detailed discussion of the ontological inferiority of representation, see: Crombie, I. M. An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines. Vol. 1. London: Routledge, 1963, pp. 144 ff.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 129 — #129

i

  :     

i

129

way: Do not the same pieces of wood or stone appear at one time equal, and at another time unequal? - That is certain. - But are real equals ever unequal? Or is the idea of equality ever inequality? - That surely was never yet known, Socrates. - Then these (so-called) equals are not the same with the idea of equality? - I should say, clearly not, Socrates. - And yet from these equals, although differing from the idea of equality, you conceived and attained that idea? - Very true, he said. - Which might be like, or might be unlike them? - Yes. - But that makes no difference; whenever from seeing one thing you conceived another, whether like or unlike, there must surely have been an act of recollection? - Very true. - But what would you say of equal portions of wood and stone, or other material equals? And what is the impression produced by them? Are they equals in the same sense as absolute equality? Or do they fall short of this in a measure? - Yes, he said, in a very great measure, too. - And must we not allow that when I or anyone look at any object, and perceive that the object aims at being some other thing, but falls short of, and cannot attain to it he who makes this observation must have had previous knowledge of that to which, as he says, the other, although similar, was inferior? - Certainly. - And has not this been our case in the matter of equals and of absolute equality? - Precisely. - Then we must have known absolute equality previously to the time when we first saw the material equals, and reflected that all these apparent equals aim at this absolute equality, but fall short of it? - That is true. (74a-75c. Tr. Jowett)

Here, the distinction between absolute equality (the source) and equal things (imitations) leads to the recognition of the existence of prenatal knowledge and to the concept of recollection (anamnesis). In the Timaeus Plato provides another

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 130 — #130

i

130

i

  :     

justification for this mimetic inferiority. Here, he writes, the mimetic imperfectness stems from the irrational quality or the “rebelliousness” of the material in which the things are impressed (52d). Whereas the form or the essence of things reflects the eternal paradeigma of the archetypes, the content - the material that accepts this form - is imperfect by nature; thus, the mundane mimesis is inferior, of necessity, in the face of its source. Generally, it can be said that the mimetic relationship in Plato’s system is characterized by severe tension, a tension based on the gap between the separateness and the presence of the archetypes. Consequently, every mimetic activity – human or divine – yields a product that is ontologically inferior vis-à-vis its original model. According to Ross’ attentive reading of Plato’s mode of writing, this tension is expressed in the dialogues by the inconsistent use of the metaphors ‘sharing’ and ‘imitating’: The only conclusion possible seems to be that, while he [Plato] was not quite satisfied with either expression, he saw no way of getting nearer to the truth than by using both; the one [’sharing’] stressing the intimacy of the link between a universal and its particular, the other [’imitating’] stressing the failure of every particular to be a perfect exemplification of any universal. He may even have had an inkling of the fact that the relation is completely unique and indefinable. Both ‘sharing’ and ‘imitating’ are metaphors for it, and the use of two complementary metaphors is better than the sole use of either. (p. 231)

In a wider perspective, mimesis serves both as an intermediary (metaxu) element and a separating element in Plato’s system. The term ‘mimetic relation’ thus indicates, above all, representational tension. This tension is one of the cornerstones of Plato’s thought, and it underpins his ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, politics, and metaphysics. For instance, it establishes the dreamlike trait of reality (notoriously a dominant theme in Borges’ work, too) as perceived by the common, unreflective, man: in the fifth Book of the Republic, pointing out the separation between the perception of beauty of ‘the lovers of spectacles and the arts’ and that of the (few) true ‘lovers of wisdom,’ Socrates claims: He, then, who believes in beautiful things but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it – do you think that his life is a dream or a waking? Is not the dream state, whether the man is asleep or awake, just this: the mistaking of resemblance for identity? (476c).4

4

The mimetic tension of beauty is also prominent, and splendidly portrayed, in the description of the effect of the beauty of the beloved’s face on the lover’s “souls’ feather”

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 131 — #131

i

  :     

i

131

Such a consideration of beauty and art in the context of the mimetic relationship leads us to the threshold of a more specific discussion of the nature of artistic mimesis. As mentioned before, Plato was the first philosopher who regarded art as imitation of reality. This outlook has had a tremendous impact on Western thought from Plato onwards, and the view that works of art imitate the external world, with varying degrees of complexity, was quite axiomatic in theories of literature and art. Interestingly, a standard image used to describe the internal connection between a work of art and reality was that of a mirror, an image first presented in Book X of Plato’s Republic (596d-e). Thus, Cicero calls comedy “speculum consuetudinis” (a mirror of costume), and thus Shakespeare’s Hamlet – restless deep Hamlet – orders that the theatre players “be well used; for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time” (II: 2).5 This Platonic impact was also the subject of harsh criticism, especially following Nietzsche’s attack (“Plato versus Homer: this is the complete, the genuine antagonism” (Genealogy of Morals, 3:25)). Consider, for instance, Susan Sontag’s sharp criticism presented in her essay “Against Interpretation” (1964). Plato’s theory, she claims, has irreversibly destroyed the ‘innocence’ of the experience of art as incantatory or magical, an experience in which “one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.” This has generated the movement from ‘erotics’ to ‘hermeneutics’, from experience to meaning. Following Plato, the Western evaluation of art mistakenly centered on the work’s ‘meaning’ at the expense of recognizing its direct impact and unique style: Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic.

5

in Phaedrus 254a- 257e. Note that in the Timaeus the dreamy quality of reality is more general and fundamental, arising from the very nature of space (cora): “for when we regard this [spatial dimension of things] we dimly dream and affirm that it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some place, and that that which is neither on earth nor anywhere in the Heavens is nothing” (52b). For a detailed discussion on the image of art as mirror, see: Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953; see also: Havelock, E. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 20-35.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 132 — #132

i

132

i

  :     

But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition ‘says something.’ But what does Plato, in fact, say? His first discussion of artistic mimesis appears in Book III of the Republic in relation to the question of literary style (lexis). This discussion follows the presumption that the fable (mythos), which is used to shape the souls of children, “is, taken as a whole, false, but there is truth in it also” (377a). Strictly speaking, in this view the fable is conceived as a sophisticated mode of mimesis of reality that mingles truth and falsehood, and which is, at the same time, quite indispensable in children’s education. As Plato puts it, “owing to our ignorance of the truth about antiquity, we liken the false to the true as far as we may and so make it [the fable] edifying” (382d). In light of this indispensability of the myth or the artistic utterance, Plato moves to examine “both the matter and the manner of [mythical] speech” (392d). He first divides literary styles into three parts: diegesis, mimesis, and a mixture of both. Diegesis or ‘the pure narrative’ is employed when a poet speaks in his own person, as can be seen in the style of the dithyramb poems. Mimesis (as a mode of style) is used when the poet speaks in first person “as if he were one of his characters,” as performed in tragedies and comedies.6 The third way, exemplified by Homer’s epic, interweaves both styles so that the poet sometimes speaks in his own voice and sometimes in the voice of his characters. Socrates rapidly reveals his reservations about the use of pure mimesis, on the basis of his claim that when someone - a poet or reciter - speaks in the voice of another, he makes himself like that person, not just in voice but also in character (I will discuss this point in Chapter 6, in the context of the discussion of the poet’s identity). Imitation thus entails, for Plato, total identification. This is why the children of an ideal state should imitate as less as possible and if they eventually do so they should imitate only what is appropriate for them, that is, men who are brave, sober, pious, free, and so on, whereas Things unbecoming the free man they should neither do nor be clever at imitation, nor yet any other shameful thing, lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality. Or have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech, and the thought? (395c)

6

Mikhail Bakhtin relates to this phenomenon as a “double-voice speech” or “heteroglossia” in his Discourse of the Novel. For a detailed discussion of the author/character relation in classical Greece, see Blondell, Chapter 2.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 133 — #133

i

  :     

i

133

This argument leads to the claim that since artistic mimesis has a profound effect on young children’s character, it should be handled with the utmost prudence. But at this point Plato seems to be quite ambivalent. As Murray points out, here he seems to be “caught between the view that mimesis is beneficial provided that its object is morally suitable, and the feeling that there is something essentially harmful about mimesis in itself” (p. 5). This ambivalent approach will lead the philosopher-king, eventually, to closely monitor the speech of the poets and to harshly censor all kinds of poetry, to use ‘noble lies’ to benefit the state, and, finally, to banish the great poets from the philosopher’s state. In light of all that has been said, three conclusions can be drawn regarding the discussion of Book III of the Republic. First, that Plato tends to underscore the considerable impact of poetic mimesis over children’s souls and characters. This is what makes it so perilous and, at the same time, so indispensable in the scheme of the ideal state’s education. Second, in Plato’s view it is morality (more exactly, moral utility) that provides the criteria for distinguishing ‘good’ from ‘bad’ artistic representation. The censorship and the expulsion of the great poets are in fact a logical application of this morally oriented standard. Lastly, it seems that in Book III the monitoring of the philosopher-king is sufficient to transform artistic mimesis into a beneficial ‘noble lie.’ Plato displays a more fundamental attack on the very nature of artistic representation in Book X of the Republic. This peculiar reexamination of artistic mimesis has puzzled generations of Platonic scholars. Why should he devote one third of his entire scheme of the ideal state for such a thorough discussion of art? And why should he return to handle this issue in the last part of his project? Some have suggested that Book X was a late appendix to the system of the Republic; others – that it is a logical development of the ideal state’s design. One more puzzlement stems from the fact that although Plato takes such pains, in most of Book X, to critically attack the nature of artistic representation, he concludes it with his own mimesis: the great myth of Er that depicts the fate of the souls in the afterlife.7 In fact, Book X opens with a demand to fully illuminate the nature of artistic representation “for neither do I myself,” says Socrates, “quite apprehend what it would be at” (595c). The springboard of the inquiry is “our customary pro-

7

For an analysis of the relation between Book III and Book X of the Republic, see: Moravcsik, J. and Temko, P. (Eds.). Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982, pp. 4 ff; A clear survey of the attempts to resolve the inner discrepancy of Book X can be found in Havelock, pp. 33 ff.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 134 — #134

i

134

i

  :     

cedure,” that is, the habit of positing a single Form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name (596a). Thereafter, Socrates ironically portrays the artist as an omnipotent superhuman. He intentionally alludes here to the traditional Greek conception of the artist as poietes (literally: a maker): a divine man who is both a wise (sophoi) and a skilled craftsman (cheirotechnai).8 Such a wondrous man mocks Socrates, is not only able to implement all things, but he can also manage to easily produce “all plants and animals, including himself, and thereto earth and heaven and the gods and all things in heaven and in Hades under the earth” (596c). Notwithstanding, this activity produces nothing more than the appearances of things, not reality and truth. This statement should be considered, of course, against the background of Plato’s ontological hierarchy that appears in his ‘parable of the divided line.’ Seen from this perspective, the mimetic artist produces only shadows and reflections (eikon) that belong to the lowest ontological grade, which is “God’s joke” (Sophist 266 b-c).9 In order to further develop this claim of inferiority, Socrates takes the painter as a model. The painter, he claims, paints not things as they are but as they appear; moreover, even this appearance is made only fragmentarily, seen from a limited visual perspective (598b). Besides, a good painter who exhibits a picture of a carpenter from a distance could “deceive children and foolish men and make them believe it to be a real carpenter” (598c). It seems that Plato alludes here to a popular Athenian tale of the contest between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis strove to demonstrate his artistic skills by painting grapes on a wall so vividly that some birds came to eat them. Parrhasius, on his part, portrayed a cloth over his colleagues’ grapes so realistically, that Zeuxis himself furiously tried to rip it up. This tale implies that a good artist possesses the power to substitute reality for appearance. Socrates criticizes this ability by reducing it to a mere act of deception. In his perspective, the mimetic artist appears to be a swindler, a man who produces nothing more than delusive appearances. This is a dramatic reduction ad absurdum of the extolled image of the mimetic arts in ancient Greece. Plato demonstrates his view by examining the creation of beds and tables. This choice shifts the attention from the representation of human action, as discussed in Book III, to the examination of human production in Book X; it moves from praxis to poiesis and from the objects of mind to the objects of sight (Clay

8 9

For a detailed discussion of this tradition, see Chapter 6. As remembered, the hierarchy of the ‘parable of the divided line’ (Republic 509e-511e) comprises four ascending ontological grades: eikon (shadows), skeuaston (spatiotemporal objects), matemata (mathematical entities), and the pure eidos (archetypes).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 135 — #135

i

  :     

i

135

122). This half-jocular examination manifests the apex of Plato’s criticism of artistic representation. It goes as follows: there are three kinds of beds. The first is made by God, the second by the carpenter, and the last by the painter. God (“the king”) produces the unitary archetype of the bed (“truth”), the one “which really and in itself exists (on).” The carpenter gazes at this archetypical bed and creates a wooden bed, a concrete physical object. Lastly, the painter portrays the appeared image of the carpenter’s bed. Hence, the imitator is de facto the producer of the product three times removed from the truth (597e). This representational deficiency applies to poets as well. Since poets are also imitators they are condemned, like painters, to operate at the third level of reality, and consequently their products are nothing but a dim imitation of the mundane imitation of real entities (597e). The next Platonic attack is directed toward Homer ad hominem. Plato’s Socrates fastens, so to speak, the halter around Homer’s neck and straightforwardly demands to extinguish “the leader of tragedy” from the ideal state. Some unreflective people, he notes, assume that Homer and other poets know all the arts and all things human pertaining to virtue and vice, and all things divine.10 And yet, We must consider whether these critics have not fallen in with such imitators and been deceived by them, so that looking upon their works they cannot perceive that these are three removers from reality, and easy to produce without knowledge of the truth. For it is phantoms, not realities, that they produce… Do you suppose, then, that if a man were able to produce both the exemplar and the semblance, he would be eager to abandon himself to the fashioning of phantoms and set this in the forefront of his life as the best thing he had? … But, I take it, if he had genuine knowledge of the things he imitates he would far rather devote himself to real things than to the imitation of them, and would endeavor to leave after him many noble deeds and works as memorials of himself, and would be more eager to be the theme of praise than the praiser? … Let us not, then, demand a reckoning from Homer or any other of the poets on other matters…” (598e-599c)

As a result, it turns out that the philosophers really had good grounds for dismissing poetry from their ideal city, “for such was her character” (607b). Let us consider the issue from a more general perspective. Plato’s arguments against artistic representation comprises four claims: (a) that it produces thirdgrade representations that belong to the lowest ontological rank of shadows; (b) that it tends to imitate negative deeds of heroes and gods, thus to challenge the

10

A detailed analysis of Homer’s cultural status in Athens appears in Chapter 6.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 136 — #136

i

136

i

  :     

moral order of society; (c) that it fosters the lowest sections of the human soul at the expense of rationality, thus spoiling the harmony of the soul11 ; (d) that the imitative artist possesses no genuine knowledge since he did not see either the archetypes or the ‘ultra-archetype’ of the absolute Good. As Murray concludes, “As far as Plato is concerned, existing poetry fails on both counts: poets imitate the wrong kind of behavior and therefore corrupt the souls of their listeners, but they are also incapable of producing a true likeness of goodness and the other moral qualities because they do not know what goodness is.” (p. 6). Thus, poets fail miserably in attempting to capture the hearts of their readers. Still, one point needs further clarification. What exactly led Plato to harshly criticize artistic representation in his Republic? This question ought to yield only speculative answers, since Plato himself never provides his own direct justification. But I believe that it might be fruitful to closely trace the modus operandi of his usage of metaphors and analogies in his critical discussions. As was shown, the dominant metaphors that support his argumentations against artistic representation are ‘mirror’ and ‘painting.’ These metaphors have something in common: they both presuppose an external pattern that serves as the origin – an object that is mirrored by the mirror or the model (imaginary or realistic) of painting. Thus, at the basis of the mimetic relation stands the presumption of the paradigm, the initial pattern. This view is in line with the aforementioned cosmological outline of the Timaeus, according to which, the set of the archetypes serves as the paradeigma of the universe, as well as with the fundamental Platonic assumption that one Form stands at the basis of diverse phenomena. It is possible, then, that Plato demonstrates here his narratorial consistency, that is, his usage of the same metaphors both in his metaphysical myths (in this case, the ‘eikos mythos’ of the Timaeus) and his critical evaluation of traditional myths and mythmakers (the artist as a mirror-carrier). But this usage aims at different, even opposite, goals: in the former case it is used to allude to a certain metaphysical entity that resides beyond philosophical language and analysis; in the latter – to undermine the cultural status of the Athenian artists. Interestingly, Plato uses the image of the painter as a contradictory example in two distinct parts of the Republic. In Book VI he compares the philosophers to painters in order to emphasize their merit as the ideal rulers who possess the unique ability to impress justice (the absolute Good) on the customs of society (500a ff.). But when it comes to the poets, their comparison with the painter in

11

This psychological point will be handled in Chapter 6 in relation to the question of man’s identity.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 137 — #137

i

  :     

i

137

Book X underscores their fallacious power and lack of real knowledge. This tendency indicates, in my view, either the rhetorical quality of Plato’s arguments, stressing their contextual nature, or his implicit ambivalence toward the poets or the mimetic artists as such.12 It may also suggest that he had in mind, as some scholars assume, a mimetic dichotomy: the “good mimesis” that directly imitates the archetypes and is utilized by philosophers, versus the “bad mimesis” of the poets, which operates at a third level of reality.13 In any case, what seems to be unquestionable is the fact that in Plato’s view every sort of representation is essentially inferior in the face of its model. There will always remain an abyssal gap between the direct observation of the archetype, the source, and the indirect attempt to create its semblance or to construct its exact mimesis. Let us now examine Borges’ view of artistic representation. According to the ‘plausible myth’ of the Timaeus, God uses a set of archetypes as the paradeigma to the world. Borges’ aforecited leading metaphor of the labyrinth assumes, in general lines, a similar thought: if the world is indeed a labyrinth and not mere chaos, then there is a preliminary rational pattern to it, which is out of the reach of mankind. The labyrinth is, strictly speaking, a mimetic structure since it assumes a representational relation between an existing structure and its ulterior preliminary pattern. From this viewpoint arises Borges’ notion of the intellectual instinct and the severe epistemological tension that underpins his writing, which was discussed in Chapter 2. We have also seen that Plato tends to underscore the artist’s lack of knowledge. This ignorance leads artists and their followers to exist in a dreamlike state of mind, substituting representation for identity. This claim, however, cannot be accepted according to the Borgesian worldview since, as was demonstrated, Borges conceives philosophy as the history of mankind’s puzzlement, rejecting the very possibility of analytical definitions that serve as the basis of rational knowledge. Regarding Plato’s concern about the considerable impact of representational arts on children’s souls, I do not think that Borges was that naïve, and, anyway, his view of the connections between literature and identity is quite complex and it surely deserves a separate discussion. Thus, two severe Platonic

12

13

For a detailed outline of Plato’s general view of painting, see: Keuls, E. C. Plato and Greek Painting. Leiden: Brill, 1978. For the speculative distinction between “good” and “bad” mimesis, see: Havelock, pp. 20-35. It is interesting that Plotinus’ view in the Enneads (5.8.1), according to which art represents the uncovered essence of nature, is in line with this reading of the Platonic dialogues.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 138 — #138

i

138

i

  :     

arguments concerning the nature of artistic mimesis remain relevant to Borgesian discussion. The first is the moral argument that appears in Book III of the Republic (henceforth Rep. III); the other is the ontological or metaphysical argument of Book X (Rep. X), which is anchored in the ontological hierarchy presented in ‘the parable of the divided line.’ As shown, Plato tends to conceive moral utility, that is, acting in accordance with the absolute Good, as the exclusive criteria of evaluation for artistic mimesis. In Borges’ case, things are quite different: he consistently denies any link between art (more specifically: literature) and morality or, to put it more generally, between aesthetics and ethical evaluation. This tendency is manifested, for instance, in the prologue of his book Brodies’ Report (1970), wherein he admits: I do wish to make clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a fabulist or spinner of parables, what these days is called an auteur engagé. I do not aspire to be Aesop. My tales, like those of The Thousand and One Nights, are intended not to persuade readers, but to entertain and to touch them. This intention does not mean that I shut myself, as Solomon’s image would have it, into an ivory tower. (CF 345)

Here he rejects any commitment by the writer to ‘social order’ or, as he puts it in his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (1951), any debt of the writer to his contemporary tradition.14 In other words, Borges assumes that the only ethical demand upon writers is to “lose ourselves in the voluntary dream called artistic creation,” and it is exactly the following of this demand that makes them, paradoxically, good members of society (SNF 427). This separation between aesthetics and ethics is more thoroughly justified in his lecture on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949) that appears in Other Inquisitions (1952). Borges depicts here the self-reproach of Hawthorne, a son of American Puritans, in the face of his literary way of life. He quotes a passage from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), in which the writer imagines how his forefathers scorn him for devoting his life to literary practice, and he relates this psychological conflict to the more abstract issue of “the feud between theology

14

This rejection leads him to state in the essay “Two Books” (1941) that “the ‘burning reality,’ which exasperates or exalts us and frequently annihilates us, is nothing but an imperfect reverberation of former discussions…That is why the true intellectual refuses to take part in contemporary debates: reality is always anachronous” (SNF 209). It would also be useful to consider the relationship of this Borgesian stance to the Florida-Boedo literary feud that took place in the early twenties in Argentina (see: Alazraki 1987, pp. 1-3).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 139 — #139

i

  :     

i

139

or ethics and aesthetics.” He also provides some historical examples of that feud, mentioning (unsurprisingly) Plato’s Rep. X, Islam’s strict prohibition of all kinds of mimetic creations, and an anecdote regarding Plotinus who did not allow anyone to sculpt his portrait, claiming that it was enough for him to carry the image in which nature had entrapped him. Hawthorne, says Borges, has resolved this conflict by making art a herald of consciousness. At this point, he expresses his grave reservations about this solution: The fact that Hawthorne sought, or was ready to accept, morality as the aim of his stories cannot annul the value of his writing. In the course of existence dedicated more to reading than to life, I have noticed that intentions and literary theories are nothing but catalysts, and that the accomplished work knows how to avoid them and even oppose them. If a writer has any value as a writer, no intention of him, be it fallacious or banal as can be, can damage his work incorrigibly… in Hawthorne, the initial vision was always genuine; the fallacious, or the eventual fallacious, was the moral that he would tend to add in the last paragraph… (OC, II: 59)

This insistence on the separation between art and morality clearly indicates that Borges opposes Plato’s idea of morality as the exclusive criteria of artistic representation. The basis of this Borgesian rejection is anchored, surprisingly, on another Platonic doctrine: the doctrine of inspiration, which will be handled in the next chapter (the discord between mimesis and inspiration was in fact never resolved by Plato). So there remains only one question at stake, namely, Borges’ reaction to Plato’s ontological attack against artistic mimesis, according to which, all mimetic arts yield third-grade imitations of the truth. Indeed, the question of the relationship between literature and reality preoccupied Borges’ thought throughout his life, and it should be handled diachronically. Borges’ deep interest in the link between literature and reality is already evident in his very early writing. It is presented for the first time in the Baleares Manifesto (1921) of the Spanish literary circle , which Borges coauthored along with other members of the group.15 It is, in fact, the first attempt of young Borges to abstractly formulate his esthetical outlook. I translate the Spanish text: There are two distinct modes of aesthetics: the passive aesthetics of the mirror and the active aesthetics of the prism [la prisma]. Guided by the first, art is transformed into a copy of the objectivity of our environment [medio ambiente] or of the physical history

15

Manifest was published in February 15, 1921, and signed by J. L. Borges, J. Sureda, F. Bonanova, and J. Alomar.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 140 — #140

i

140

i

  :      of the subject. Guided by the second, art redeems, using the universe as its instrument, and manages to forge – far beyond the boundaries of space and time – its personal vision. This is the aesthetics of the [Spanish] . Its volition is to create: to impose unsuspected aspects on the universe. It requires from every poet a pure vision that is totally separate from things, clean from ancestral stigmas; a fragmented vision, as if in front of the eyes of the poet the world appeared afresh. (TR: I, 95)

The manifesto exhibits two distinct types of aesthetics that stand for two modes of relations between art and reality. In the first – the “aesthetics of the mirror” – art passively depicts reality, stays close to objective facts, and sets aside the artists’ subjectivity. The second, the “aesthetics of the prism”, uses reality as raw material in order to express the unique subjective vision of the poet; it is, thus, an active performance that depicts reality from a certain subjective perspective, from a certain ‘prism.’ In the former reality comes first, in the latter – the personality of the artist dominates. In the essay “Postulation of Reality” (1931) Borges presents a distinction that parallels the mirror-prism dichotomy: the distinction between “romantic” and “classical” writers. Divorcing the words classical and romantic from all historical connotations, Borges uses them “to mean two archetypes of the writer (two procedures)” (SNF 59), that is, in a Platonic mode of thought that prefers the general to the particular. The classical writer completely trusts language, and believes that once an image comes into existence, it becomes public property. He also tends to generalize and make the characters abstract to the point of invisibility. He is not really expressive; he does no more than record a reality, not represent one. Hence, to the classical mind “the plurality of men and of eras is identical; literature is always one and the same” (SNF 61). On the other hand, the reality that the romantic writer seeks to overcome “is of a more overbearing nature; his continual method is emphasis, the partial lie” (SNF 61). Above all, accentuates Borges, the romantic writer “generally with ill fortune, wishes incessantly to express” (SNF 59). One can easily see that the ideal of the classical writer is the ‘aesthetics of the mirror’, whereas the romantic upholds the ‘aesthetics of the prism’. Thus, we have two archetypical modes of writers that represent two aesthetical attitudes. Regarding young Borges’ own viewpoint, it can be inferred from the manifesto and other early texts that in his  period he upheld the romantic attitude and sought total expression. The theoretical core of this view was the theory of the Italian philosopher, historian, and critic Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), who, according to Borges, “may not be the most profound thinker but is the least prejudiced” (Seven Nights 77). In the Harvard lecture entitled “A Poet’s Creed” (1968), Borges reveals his early relations with Croce’s thought:

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 141 — #141

i

  :     

i

141

When I was young, I believed in expression. I have read Croce, and the reading of Croce did me no good. I wanted to express everything. I thought, for example, that if I needed a sunset I should find the exact word for sunset - or rather, the most surprising metaphor. (Craft 117)

Croce’s most prominent work, the Philosophy of the Spirit, is divided into four books. The first, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistics (1902), perceives art as an expression. This book, which Borges describes later as “sterile but brilliant” (OC: IV, 226), has helped mold the early Borgesian expressionist stance: it fashioned his view that good poetic expression is based on finding the exact word or metaphor for a particular event. Clearly, this stance directly opposes the “aesthetics of the mirror” upheld by the classical writer. Put differently, Borges’ early romantic-oriented ‘aesthetics of the prism’ follows Croce’s notion of art as expression, in sharp contrast to Plato’s ‘aesthetics of the mirror.’ Consequently, at this time he followed Lugones’ assumptions that the metaphor is the essential element of literature and that the poet’s task is to weave new striking metaphors.16 He beautifully and most candidly exhibits this tendency, this naiveté, in the poem “The Moon” (1960): When in Geneva or Zurich the fates decreed That I should be a poet, one of the few, I set myself a secret obligation To define the moon, as would-be poets do. Working away with studious resolve, I ran through my modest variations, Terrified that my moonstruck friend Lugones Would leave no sand or amber for my creation. The moons that shed their silver on my lines Were moons of ivory, smokiness, or snow. Needless to say, no typesetter ever saw The faintest trace of their transcendent glow. I was convinced that like the red-hot Adam Of Paradise, the poet alone may claim To bestow on everything within his reach

16

Borges promptly renounced this view, becoming highly critical of the naiveté of the  as early as the late twenties (Monegal 223). Alternatively, as seen in the essay “The Metaphor” (1952), he exhibits a purely Platonic outlook that boils down to the statement that the basic analogies that poets can unveil is limited, and that there are, consequently, only five archetypical metaphors. See the former discussion in Chapter 3.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 142 — #142

i

142

i

  :      Its uniquely fitting, never-yet-heard-of name. (SP 111)17

From a more philosophical perspective, it can be said that the art-asexpression viewpoint, despite being highly biased toward romantic subjectivism, does not relinquish altogether the realistic aspect of art. It does not demolish the link between poetry and reality, but rather it seeks “the uniquely fitting” name of all things. This view (converting the poet, as Borges remarks, into a kind of a redAdam in paradise who “bestows on everything its unique name”) is in line with the “good mimesis” and the “bad mimesis” dichotomy mentioned earlier in discussing Plato’s dialogues; if this highly speculative, but possible, stance actually exists in Plato’s thought, it is assumed that words can represent, to some extent, the nature (physis) of things. However, in Plato’s case it is only the philosopher who can undertake this mission, whereas the young Borges exalts (so romantically) the poet. Nevertheless, over the course of time Borges has radically changed his opinion. He was painfully disillusioned by the naïve belief in the ideal of total poetic expression. This relentless awareness has intensified over the years, especially throughout the forties and the fifties, during which he abandoned his poetic writing and began to write mainly short stories. This severe crisis, a crisis of artistic representation, is manifested lucidly in the book “The Maker” (1960), which Borges considers as the most personal of all the books he has written “for the simple reason that it is rich with reflections and interpolations” (SP 143). Here, the collapse of what can be called “the mimesis of expression” is wittily and melancholically manifested by new metaphors, similes, and anecdotes.

17

Cuando, en Ginebra o Zürich, la fortuna Quiso que yo también fuera poeta, Me impuse, como todos, la secreta Obligación de definir la luna. Con una suerte de estudiosa pena Agotaba modestas variaciones. Bajo el vivo temor de que Lugones Ya hubiera usado el ámbar o la arena. De lejano marfil, de humo, de fría Nieve fueron las lunas que alumbraron Versos que ciertamente no lograron El arduo honor de la tipografía. Pensaba que el poeta es aquel hombre Que, como el rojo Adán del Paraíso, Impone a cada cosa su preciso Y verdadero y no sabido nombre.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 143 — #143

i

  :     

i

143

Consider, for instance, the metaphor of the map in the shrewd fragment “On Scientific Rigor” (1960): …in the Empire in question, the Cartographer’s Art reached such a degree of perfection that the map of a single Province took up an entire City, and the map of the Empire covered an entire Province. After a while these Outsized Maps were no longer sufficient, and the School of Cartography created a Map of the Empire that was the size of the Empire, matching it point by point. Later generations, which were less devoted to the Study of Cartography, found this Map irrelevant, and with more than a little irrelevance left it exposed to the inclemencies of the sun and winter. In the Western desert there are scattered ruins of the Map, inhabited by animals and beggars. No other relics of the geographic discipline can be found anywhere else in the land. (SP 139)

As is pointed out by the title, this passage mocks the megalomaniacal aspirations of scientific positivism. Yet in a more general perspective, the criticism of the art of cartography indicates an undermining of the mimetic relation per se: the very possibility of any sign-system to adequately represent things in reality. As we have seen, Plato points out the essential inferiority of any mimetic relation. Borges, on the other hand, employs a different mode of critique: he draws a reduction-ad-absurdum of the possibility of a perfect mimetic representation. Thus, even if it was possible to minutely represent reality, this solution would be impractical and preposterous. The fragmental relics of the map in the simile might indicate the necessary imperfectness of any mimetic relation, of any attempt to entirely express the universe. “The essential thing is what we always miss. From this law no one will be immune, “he acknowledges in the outset of the aforementioned poem “The Moon”.18 It is probable that here Borges actually directs this melancholic arrow toward his former  fellows, as well as toward his own naïve expressionist approach. In fact, The Maker (1960) comprises three specific (and rather well-known) texts that attack, more directly, the ideal of total artistic representation: “Parable of the Palace,” “The Yellow Rose,” and the poem “The Other Tiger.” Let us take a closer look at these texts. “The Other Tiger” was discussed earlier in relation to the absence-presence tension of the archetypes, a tension that foreshadows the mimetic tension as well. Its motto, “And the craft createth a semblance,” taken from Morris, directs the mind to the question of artistic representation. In the second stanza of the poem Borges flaunts this mesh of tensions; the melancholic tone cannot be overlooked:

18

Siempre se pierde lo esencial. Es una Ley de toda palabra sobre el numen. (SP 108)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 144 — #144

i

144

i

  :      Evening spreads in my spirit and I keep thinking That the tiger I am calling up in my poem Is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows, A set of literary images, Scraps remembered from encyclopedias, And not the deadly tiger, the fearful jewel That in the sun or the deceptive moonlight Follows its paths, in Bengal or Sumatra, Of love, of indolence, of dying. Against the tiger of symbols I have set The real one, the hot-blooded one That savages a herd of Buffalo, And today, the third of August, ‘59, Its patient shadow moves across the plain, But yet, the act of naming it, of guessing What is its nature and its circumstance Creates a fiction, not a living creature, Not one of those that prowl on the earth. (SP 117-119)19

The last lines are the most severe. It is the conduct of artistic representation, the very attempt to create semblance, which distances us from reality and from the vividness of the hot-blooded tiger. Plato insisted on this point in Rep. X. The attempt to express reality yields its exact opposite, a mere fiction, a tiger of shadows. The representational failure is innate to the craft of the writer, and

19

Cunde la tarde en mi alma y reflexiono Que el tigre vocativo de mi verso Es un tigre de símbolos y sombras, Una serie de tropos literarios Y de memorias de la enciclopedia Y no el tigre fatal, la aciaga joya Que, bajo el sol o la diversa luna, Va cumpliendo en Sumatra o en Bengala Su rutina de amor, de ocio y de muerte. Al tigre de los simbolos he opuesto El verdadero, el de caliente sangre, El que diezma la tribu de los búfalos Y hoy, 3 de agosto del 59, Alarga en la pradera una pausada Sombra, pero ya el hecho de nombrarlo Y de conjeturar su circunstancia Lo hace ficción del arte y no criatura Viviente de las que andan por la tierra.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 145 — #145

i

  :     

i

145

it cannot be avoided: art has become a cage. This critical perception is in line with the Islamic reproval mentioned by Borges in the outset of his text “Covered Mirrors”(1960): “Islam tells us,” he writes, “that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment” (CF 297).20 In the tale of the “Parable of the Palace” Borges tackles the issue from another angle. One day, he writes, the legendary Yellow Emperor shows his palace to the poet. Following a long winding journey in the almost boundless landscapes of the Empire, the poet, who seemed quite removed from the extraordinary sites that so astounded the others, “recites the short poem that we now link indissolubly to his name – the composition that, according to the most discriminating historians, bought him immortality and death” (SP 83). The poem was extremely short, but it comprised the entire palace in every detail (like the case of the radiant Aleph that was seen in Danery’s basement in the story “The Aleph”). The poet’s work of art is then depicted as the perfect microcosm, the absolute and concise expression of the universe, which is the paramount aspiration of the Ultraists, of the Cabbalists, and, in fact, of young Borges himself. The Emperor cries out “you have taken away my palace!” and orders the poet to be executed on the spot. The motive for the Emperor’s wrath is in accordance with Plato’s thought: as Plato observed in the Cratylus, a perfect mimesis will duplicate the thing and thus representation will be substituted for identity. Another Platonic explanation can be drawn from Rep. X: the artist is capable of creating only remote semblances, but he can delude others into regarding them as real. Borges himself concludes the plot with an observation that becomes deeply pessimistic: Others tell the story differently. There cannot be two identical things in the world: as soon as the poet recites the poem (they tell us), the palace disappeared as if blasted and swept away by the final syllable. Of course legends like this are mere fiction. The poet was the Emperor’s slave and died accordingly. His poem fell into oblivion because that

20

Another critique seen from an Islamic viewpoint can be found in Borges’ witty fragment “Mahomad’s Double”, published in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935). The first lines go as follows: “Since the idea of Mahomed is always connected with religion in the minds of Mahomedans, therefore in the spiritual world some Mahomed or other is always placed in their view. It is not Mahomed himself, who wrote the Koran, but some other who fills his place; nor is it always the same person, but he is changed according to circumstances…” (CF 62). The core of the plot is, again, the gap between the source and its representation.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 146 — #146

i

146

i

  :      was what it deserved. His descendents are still searching for the word that is the world, but they will not find it. (SP 85)

The parallelism of the word and the world, up to the point that language comprises the ontological core of reality, is actually more Cabbalistic an idea than it is Platonic.21 So the explanation given by Borges – that there can be no two perfectly identical things in the universe – seems to be a glorification of Platonic doctrines or a Cabbalistic variation on the subject. But he immediately annuls this possibility, humbly accepting (to use Freud’s vocabulary) the ‘principle of reality.’ He points out the short-handedness of the poet and his poem in the face of the political power of the Emperor and the ontological firmness of his palace. The ideal of a total, ontologically based, mimesis becomes a lost paradise, a remote nostalgia.22 In the third text, “A Yellow Rose,” this iron-bound disillusionment reaches its pinnacle. The story is about the dying extolled poet Giambattista Marino, “the new Homer and the new Dante,” and it focuses on “a silent and unalterable event” that was the last of his life. Marino beholds in his dying bed a yellow rose. He recites his own inevitable verses that comprise some striking metaphors of the rose: “Blood of the Garden, pomp of the walk, gem of spring, April’s eye…” And it was at that moment that the revelation took place: Marino saw the rose, the way Adam must have seen in Paradise. He sensed that it existed not in his words but in its own timelessness. He understood that we can utter and allude to things but not give them expression [que podemos mencionar o aludir pero no expresar], that the proud tall volumes that made a golden shadow in the corner of his room were not the world’s mirror, as his vanity figured, but simply other objects that have been added to the world. (SP 77)

This harsh insight, concludes Borges, also came to Homer and Dante. The core of the crisis is, strictly speaking, Platonic. It is the gap between directly observing the eternal archetype of the rose (represented by the image of Adam in Paradise) and attempting to express it by means of poetic representation, by the “pride and tall volumes” of poetry. This is a twofold criticism, directed both at the limitedness of language and at the ontological inferiority of any artistic mimesis.

21

22

See my essay: “Borges and Cabbalistic Language: Ontology and Symbolism in The Rose of Paracelsus,” in: Variaciones Borges, Journal of Philosophy, Semiotics and Literature, Vol. 23/2007, Iowa University, USA, April 2007, pp. 149-173. “Every poem, in time, becomes an elegy…there are no paradises besides lost paradises,” he writes in the uncollected poem “Possession of Yesterday” (Alifano 157).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 147 — #147

i

  :     

i

147

Later on Borges affirms that these three texts – “The Other Tiger,” “Parable of the Palace,” and “The Yellow Rose” – stand for the same fundamental idea, for the inability of art to cope with reality. In this context, in a lecture given at Indiana University (1980), he adds a very interesting remark: This poem [The Other Tiger] stands for the fact that things are unobtainable by art. At the same time, though things may be unobtainable, though we shall never find the yellow rose or the other tiger, we are making structures of words, of symbols, of metaphors, of adjectives, of images, and those things exist, and that world is not the world of the rose and the tiger but the world of art, which may be as praiseworthy and as real. (B80 59)

This is quite an interesting perspective on the subject. The separateness of the world of art naturally leads to the assumption that man’s actions and symbols are nothing but an enclosed set of signs that refers to itself, not to reality. And yet, in this quote we can glimpse at another tone: a more positive view is added to the rambunctious collapse of artistic representation. Indeed, Borges proceeds and mentions a loophole of hope: For all I know, these poems that came out of despair, out of feeling that art is hopeless, that you cannot express things and that you can only allude to them – these poems may also be hope and a token of felicity, since if we cannot ape nature we can still make art. And that might be sufficient for a man, for any man, for a lifetime. (ibid.)

What is the basis for this possibility of a “token of felicity”? At first sight, this separation between art and reality seems to be in line with Ernest Cassirer’s theory, mentioned by Alazraki in order to define the core of Borges’ worldview, according to which, human knowledge (as well as myth, language, and art) is reduced to a kind of fiction that should not be measured by any strict standard of truth (Alazraki 1988: 145). To put the question more abstractly, does this acknowledgement of the separation between representation and reality mean that Borges has become, following the mimetic crisis, a Kantian aesthetician who upholds the principles of “art-for-art’s sake” and of literature as a “free game with ideas”? Having paid attention to other Borgesian texts, I assume that this is not the case. From a philosophical point of view, Borges’ stance seems remote from Kant’s transcendental idealism and closer to George Berkeley’s radical idealism. In fact, he regards Berkeley’s’ system as “the fountainhead of my thoughts” already in his early essay “Berkeley’s Crossroad” (1923), expressing his agreement with Berkeley’s statement “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived by thought) that re-

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 148 — #148

i

148

i

  :     

futes the existence of ontologically objective matter.23 This idealistic perspective enables Borges to find remedies and consolations for his mimetic wounds. It allows him to glorify the status of art despite the harsh awareness of its representational limitedness. Put differently, Berkeley’s refutability of objective reality undermines Plato’s ontological hierarchy (‘the parable of the divided line’), which serves as a basis of his attack on artistic representation. Since this hierarchy is no longer valid, then art and reality are separate and parallel, not hierarchical, realms. In a conversation with Burgin, Borges clarifies this stance: The ‘Parable of the Palace’ is really the same kind of parable as ‘The Yellow Rose,’ or ‘The Other Tiger.’ It’s a parable about art existing in its own plane but not being given to deal with reality… So I think of art and nature, well, nature as the world, as being two different worlds…they [the parables] stand for the same thing – for a kind of discord, for the inability of art to cope with the world and, at the same time, the fact that though art cannot repeat nature and may not be a representation of nature, yet it is justified in its own right. (Burgin 1969: 80)

Despite the fact that Borges does not develop this stance into a systematic theory of representation, the fundamental idea seems to be clear. Art and reality are perceived as two distinct worlds. The work of art is seen as a heterocosmos (distinct world), sufficient in itself. And yet, this principle does not necessarily lead to a Kantian separation between the two. As seen in the closing of “A Yellow Rose,” Borges actually indicates a subtle spiderweb link between art and reality, which he calls ‘allusion’ (aludir). This is the crux of Marino’s insight that “we can utter and allude to things but not give them expression [que podemos mencionar o aludir pero no expresar]” (ibid.). Expression is replaced not with total despair but with the new humble ideal of allusion. This new link endows art and literature with the quality of the “modest and secret complexity” (“modesta y secreta

23

See Berkeley, George. The Principles of Human Knowledge, paragraph 3: “for as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse [essence] is percipi [perceived by the mind], nor it is possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.” Regarding Berkeley’s Idealism, see: Berman, D. George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Regarding Borges’ relation to Berkeley’s Idealism, see: Jaén, D. T. Borges’ Esoteric Library. Maryland: University Press of America, 1992, p. 45-59. Note that this Borgesian affinity does not suggest that Borges has become a complete idealist.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 149 — #149

i

  :     

i

149

complejidad”, OC: II, 236). It allows art to slightly point at reality, as if from a distance.24 In a Harvard lecture he sheds light on this point: Now I have come to the conclusion (and this conclusion may sound sad) that I no longer believe in expression: I believe only in allusion. After all, what are words? Words are symbols for shared memories. If I use a word, then you should have some experience of what the word stands for. If not, the word means nothing to you. I think we can only allude, we can only try to make the reader imagine. The reader, if he is quick enough, can be satisfied with our merely hinting at something. (Craft 117)

This view needs further clarification. The concept of allusion is quite different, essentially, from that of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Here there is a dialectical tension: separateness, on the one hand, and a subtle link between art, independent and self-justified art, and reality on the other. But what exactly is the philosophical nature of this link, besides its dialectical or paradoxical quality? To put it more concretely: what is the representational function of the act of ‘allusion’? I believe that Borges provides the key to this question in an interview given to Moreno and Obhgado in 1966.25 Here, Moreno directly confronts Borges with three alternative conceptions of artistic representation: “Do you think that poets are engaged in the glorification of reality? Or perhaps they simply copy it? Or, alternatively, do they attend to a deeper aspect of reality…?” The Argentinean maestro replies: I suppose that the best thing for a writer to do is to accept the third solution that you have just mentioned. This view is in line with Aristotle, who assumed that poetry is more real than history, since the truth is essential for poetry. But the poet can, of course, do what he can, not what he should do. (p. 741)

This is the heart of the matter. Still rejecting Plato’s “aesthetics of the mirror,” painfully abandoning Croce’s “aesthetics of expression”, Borges arrives at the threshold of Aristotle’s concept of mimesis. According to Aristotle, the spatiotemporal object comprises both the material cause and the formal (essential) cause (Physics: II 194a21). This means that the Form or the essence of the thing is not, as Plato assumed, transcendent but rather, strictly speaking, inherent. In this view

24

25

On the theoretical aspects of Borges’ concept of ‘allusion’, compared to Wittgenstein’s doctrine of showing, see my essay: “What Can Be Shown Cannot Be Said: Wittgenstein’s Doctrine of Showing and Borges’ ‘The Aleph’.” In: Variaciones Borges, Vol. 13/2002. April 2002, pp. 41-56. Moreno, C. F. and Obhgado, A. “Entrevista con Borges.” In: Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, No. 201, Madrid, September 1966. (Interview given in Spanish; translation mine.)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 150 — #150

i

150

i

  :     

the archetype, the Form, is contained within the object. Similarly, the task of philosophy is less mystical and much more concrete, that is, to unfold the hidden essence, the archetypical structure, of the thing. As a result, a new theory of artistic representation arises, too. As Aristotle writes in Chapter IX of Poetics, “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen - what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity” (1451b). And the artistic representation of these possible and plausible events reveals the essence of things, the inherent archetypes. Artistic mimesis is, then, a means of exposing the true nature of things. For instance, when it comes to tragedy, it is the task of the playwright to unveil the gist of a certain character by manifesting his or her actions on a stage.26 Thus, in sharp opposition to Plato, Aristotle assumes that poetry and art are not so far from philosophy; that they actually attend to archetypical truth. “Poetry, therefore,” he concludes, “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speaks or acts, according to the law of probability or necessity…” (Poetics 1451b5-7). Aristotelian artistic representation is, hence, not a mere low-rated aping of phenomenal reality, but an act that resembles Plato’s ideal of “creating according to a true archetype” (Republic 472d), i.e., creating a semblance that is derived from the eidos, the general concept (Butcher 153). In other words, Artistic mimesis is a philosophical phenomenon in Aristotle’s view, despite the fact that it is totally liberated from the servitude to phenomenal reality: on the one hand, it deals with fictions and possibilities rather than facts, on the other – it manages to reveal the gist of things in reality. As such, its aim (telos) is the unveiling of essential, implicit truths. Returning to Borges, it is clear now that his concept of representational allusion is aligned with Aristotle’s theory, since he made clear in the previous interview that the ideal of the writer should be to deal with the deeper aspects of reality, not with its phenomena. And yet, how can truth be “essential” for poetry and literature, if reality and art are separate worlds? Borges surely does not accept any attempt to reduce poetry to philosophy. But he seems to point at the conception of ‘allusion’ as an action that inspires the reader to direct his attention, slightly, toward the inner aspects of reality. This tendency is in line with his aforementioned view that fantastic literature applies to timeless symbols that go far beyond circumstantial reality (see the discussion in Chapter 3), and to his

26

For a discussion see: Butcher, S. H. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry & Fine Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1951, pp. 114 ff.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 151 — #151

i

  :     

i

151

assumption that “a false fact can be real seen as a symbol” (“el hecho, quizá falso, puede ser verdadero como símbolo”) (OC: I, 252). Once again, we should refrain from over-systematizing Borges’ thought and bear in mind that he does not attempt to formulate a systematic ‘theory’ of artistic representation. Nevertheless, a more abstract consideration of his fundamental idea is warranted. Thus, I suggest that this Borgesian ‘esthetics of allusion’ transforms literature, and art in general, into a complex and dialectical sort of mirror. Not the simple mechanical Platonic mirror that repeats and copies our movements and the appearance of reality, but a mirror that vaguely reflects something deeper, something that what might be termed a ‘deep symbol’ in line with Aristotle’s view of representation. Consider in this context the following stanzas drawn from the poem “Ars Poetica” (1960):27 At times in the evening a face Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror; Art should be that mirror Which reveals to us our own face. They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels, Wept tears of love at the sight of Ithaca, Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca Of green eternity, not of marvels. It is also like the river with no end That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same And the other, like the river with no end. (SP 137)28

27

28

This complex metaphor of the mirror-of-depth is also evident in other Borgesian texts such as the mirror that shows true acts of justice in “The Mirror of Ink” (1935), and “the marvelous mirror, great and round, of mixed metals… wherein who so looked might see the counterfeit presentment of his parents and his children, from the first Adam to those who shall hear the Trumpet” in “The Chamber of Statues” (1935). A veces en las tardes una cara Nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo; El arte debe ser como ese espejo Que nos revela nuestra propia cara. Cuentan que Ulises, harto de prodigios, Lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca Verde y humilde. El arte es esa Itaca De verde eternidad, no de prodigios. También es como el río interminable Que pasa y queda y es cristal de un mismo

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 152 — #152

i

152

i

  :     

The metaphor of the mirror is dominant, but this is a complex symbol – perhaps even an antithetical one. Once again, the question at stake is: if art and reality are in fact two parallel (i.e., distinct and separate) worlds, how can we talk about a ‘complex symbol of mirror’ that presupposes some sort of inner connection between the two? It seems to me that the movement of Borges’ thought is more spiral than cyclical. The harsh awareness of the separateness of art and reality produces a distance between the two, and it is exactly this distance that liberates art from reality, highlighting the realm of possible or fictional events. From this artistic freedom, a deeper sort of representation can be generated. This is the link, I believe, between the Borgesian ‘allusion,’ the slight hinting at the deeper aspects of reality, and the Aristotelian conception of mimesis. Thus, Borges says in his last Harvard lecture: When I write something, I think of it not as being factually true (mere fact is a web of circumstances and accidents), but as being true to something deeper. When I write a story, I write it because somehow I believe in it – not as one believes in mere history, but rather as one believes in a dream or an idea. (Craft 114)

I believe that it is appropriate to close our somewhat spiral discussion with the very same quotation that initiated it: a section drawn from the epilogue of “The Maker” (1960). The analysis just suggested here might shed light on this text: now it can be read in terms of the Borgesian transition from ‘aesthetics of expression’ to the more subtle, and humble, ‘aesthetics of allusion’: A man sets himself to the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with the images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face. (SP 143)

Heráclito inconstante, que es el mismo Y es otro, como el río interminable.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 153 — #153

i

i

C  The Guided Dream: The Riddle of Poetic Inspiration

A writer should write with a certain innocence. (Borges at Eighty 92) 1 For the poet is a light and winged and sacred thing… (Ion 534b) In these red London Labyrinths I find that I have chosen The most curious of human professions, Though given that all are curious, in their way. (SP 351)2

In these lines, drawn from the poem “Browning Resolves to Be a Poet” (1975), Borges touches on the mystery of literary faith. One of the main sources of this curious quality, of this ‘spell of poetry’ (to use Plato’s words), is the phenomenon of poetic inspiration. Since inspiration serves as the wellspring of poetry and of all literature, investigation of its nature and scope is philosophical in essence: in Aristotelian notions, it is the quest for the prima causa of poetry and, in general, of literature. In ancient Greece, the word that denoted ‘inspiration,’ enthousiasmos, was drawn from ancient mystery cults. This association with mystical and religious traditions indicates that poetic inspiration was conceived, above all, as a transcendent or supernatural phenomenon. The topic of poetic inspiration is also one of the points of interface between the works of Borges and Plato. In Plato, it brings together several theoretical issues and philosophical myths: the nature of human memory, the scope of human knowledge, the function of traditional myth, the cultural image of the poet, and

1

2

The first version of this chapter was published in Spanish in: Solotorevsky, Myrna and Fine, Ruth (Eds.) Borges en Jerusalén. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2003, pp. 81-91. Por esos rojos laberintos de Londres Descubro que he elejido La más curiosa de las profesiones humanas, Salvo que todas, a su modo, lo son. 153

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 154 — #154

i

154

i

  :     

the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry. Note that in some cases, Plato’s view of inspiration sharply contradicts other doctrines in his work. For instance, the view of inspiration as a transcendental phenomenon is not aligned with the consideration of poetic mimesis, discussed at length in the last chapter, as a mere mechanical third-rate duplication of phenomenal reality. In fact, Plato has never resolved this tension in his dialogues. Regarding Borges, it seems at first quite unlikely that the writer of “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” (a story wherein a 20th century French author manages to rewrite some chapters of the classical work of Cervantes) will have anything to say regarding the nature of inspiration. Nevertheless, he not only solemnly discusses this theme, but he also repeatedly admits that he concurs with what he calls “the Platonic theory of the muse.” His whole approach – clearly manifested in his dialogues, essays, and works of fiction – can (to use his own words) be boiled down to a simple statement: poetry is given to the poet from outside. Since he assumes that poetry and prose are essentially the same thing, and that there is only a formal difference between them (Eighty 76), the Borgesian statement can be formulated more generally: Borges assumes that, overall, literature is given to the writer. As will be shown, this seemingly simple point of departure actually serves as a springboard to a highly complex, perhaps even ambivalent, theoretical and personal approach. After all, what else can be expected from a writer who assumes that “there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth – for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity” (CF 345)? Our discussion will commence with a review of the pre-Platonic notion of inspiration. The etymological meaning of the Greek word ‘enthousiasmos’ (‘inspiration’) is “that which contains a god” (GPT 57).3 This fact indicates that inspiration is basically considered as a transcendental and irrational experience. As conceived in traditional myths, it is an event in which an external power inexplicably invades the soul of a chosen human, and speaks through his mouth. Inspiration is grasped, then, as a mystical event: a phenomenon of a fusion between a man and some divine or supernatural force that is sometimes called ‘god’ (relating mostly to Apollo) and sometimes ‘the muse.’ This is why it is frequently associated with the word ‘mantiké’, which denotes direct communion with a god through a human medium (GPT 113). In fact, the concept of inspiration also presupposes a psychological state of compulsion, a state in which an external power takes control over the poet’s en-

3

Cf. the discussion of inspiration in Longinus’ On the Sublime, Chapter 8.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 155 — #155

i

  :     

i

155

tire personality, exceeding and subduing his consciousness and will. Thus, it is also frequently associated with the phenomenon of madness (mania). In addition, the Greek conception of inspiration indicates that the content of the poet’s words is essentially divine, and that there is no gap between man’s utterance and divine expression. Hence, in this view the words of the poet do not represent divine speech but, in fact, directly express it. Two important conclusions regarding the pre-Platonic conception of inspiration can be drawn: first, that the Platonic question of mimetic imperfection does not arise in the case of inspiration, since the latter is conceived as a direct divine revelation. Second, that inspiration is not a dialogic event. Despite the fact that Greek inspiration is essentially a verbal phenomenon (and not, say, a textual or symbolic one), the poet usually does not converse with divinity; rather, a divine utterance is carried out through the poet’s soul, as if it was a mode of external dictation. These characteristics have helped mold the poet’s cultural image as a sort of a spiritual shaman, a chosen man whose role is that of an axis mundi (‘world pillar’): to mediate between human society and the divine realm.4 I will return to consider the topic of the poet’s cultural image in Chapter 6. Classical Greek literature is replete with descriptions of poetic inspiration. From Homer onwards, the poets have openly called upon divine forces, especially the mythological Muses at the outset of their songs. The role of the Muse was quite varied: it was supposed to provide the poet with genuine knowledge, or to instill ‘sweetness’ in his song, or to assist him in composing and performing his poems (Murray 7).5 According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the nine Muses were daughters of Mnemosyne, the powerful goddess of memory and the spouse of Zeus. This fact somehow associates inspiration with the faculty of human memory. Each of the Muses possessed the power to provide a specific kind of inspiration.6 Consequently, the style of the poet’s creation is considered to be predetermined by his subordination to a specific Muse. Interestingly, Greek myths tend

4

5

6

For a general analysis of shamanism, see: Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy: London: Arkana, 1989. For a more specific diachronically oriented discussion of shamanism and Greek poetry, see: McGahey, Robert. The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994, pp. 351. For a general survey of the pre-Platonic concept of inspiration, see: Murray, p. 7, note 15. Calliope – epic poetry; Euterpe – lyric poetry; Erato – love poetry; Polyhymnia – sacred poetry and dance; Melpomene – tragedy; Thalia – comedy; Clio – history; Terpsichore – dance and choral songs; and Urania – astronomy.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 156 — #156

i

156

i

  :     

to depict the inspirational relation as containing a masculine human receiver and a feminine divine source. It is possible that this tendency alludes to the intimate connection between the Muse and the poet, pointing at the erotic trait of the inspirational relation:7 there is always a specific divine force (unlike the Hebrew’s abstract Holy Spirit) directly contacts a chosen human being. The ancient Greek poet is thus considered as a ‘messenger’ or a ‘herald’ and sometimes even ‘the lover’ or ‘the beloved son’ of the Muse (Murray 8). A stunning depiction of this relation can be found in the opening section of Parmenides’ philosophical poem On Nature, wherein the speaker (a male philosopher-poet) describes his journey to the divine realm wherein he is about to receive from Dike, the goddess of justice, an account of the ultimate truth of Being. The poet’s passive posture is emphasized by the vigorous activity of the female maidens, the daughters of the sun, and the goddess: The steeds that bear me carried me as far as ever my heart Desired, since they brought me and set me on the renowned Way of the goddess, who with her own hands conducts the man who knows through all things. On what way was I borne along; for on it did the wise steeds carry me, drawing my car, and maidens showed the way. And the axle, glowing in the socket – for it was urged round by the whirling wheels at each end – gave forth a sound as of a pipe, when the daughters of the Sun, hasting to convey me into the light, threw back their veils from off their faces and left the abode of Night. There are the gates of the ways of Night and Day, fitted above with a lintel and below with a threshold of stone. They themselves, high in the air, are closed by mighty doors, and Avenging Justice keeps the keys that open them. Her did the maidens entreat with gentle words and skillfully persuade to unfasten without demur the bolted bars from the gates. Then, when the doors were thrown back, they disclosed a wide opening, when their brazen hinges swung backwards in the sockets fastened with rivets and nails. Straight through them, on the broad way, did the maidens guide the horses and the car, and the goddess greeted me kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and spoke to me these words: -

7

For a discussion, see: Barbara M. Breitenberger. Aphrodite and Eros: the Development of Erotic Mythology in Early Greek Poetry and Cult. London: Routledge, 2007.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 157 — #157

i

  :     

i

157

Welcome, noble youth, that comest to my abode on the car that bears thee tended by immortal charioteers! It is no ill chance, but justice and right that has sent thee forth to travel on this way. Far, indeed, does it lie from the beaten track of men! Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of persuasive truth… (Tr. J. Burnet)

This is a variant of the traditional myth of inspiration: here the poet enters into the divine realm, instead of being penetrated by supernatural powers. Yet the basic picture is maintained – that of a divine gift bestowed by divine feminine forces upon a chosen receptive man. In addition to the idea of the receptiveness to inspiration, Greek literature tends to describe the poet as a skillful craftsman. Besides being an inspired man, the poet is praised as one who polishes and distills the form of his inspiration, molding a creation that reflects his own personal voice. Thus, as Murray notes, the Greek poet is portrayed both as a ‘wise man’ (sophoi), who has accessed supernatural knowledge through the inspiration of the Muses, and a ‘craftsman’ (demiourgos), who possesses the secrets of extraordinary skills (techne) (p. 9).8 It turns out that the pre-Platonic poet is taken to be an extremely potent man, one who has the blessing of possessing both divine knowledge and supreme human skill. In this manner, the notion of inspiration functions as (1) a symbol of the poet’s command of professional and divine secrets – a sort of an artistic shaman – and (2) a mark of his unshakable epistemological and moral authority, as well as (3) a reminder of his total subordination to supernatural forces. These functions are considered in Greek tradition as complementary, not antithetical. Plato’s own view of poetic inspiration is, in fact, a complex negotiation, or a struggle, with the traditional myths of his time. As shown in the first chapter, according to the Platonic dialogues he ingeniously manages to reorganize the general scheme of traditional myths, and this action applies also to the dominant myth of poetic inspiration. Generally, he tends to accept, or pretends to accept, the basic assumption that supernatural or ‘divine’ forces are the source of the poet’s inspiration. But at the same time, he entirely alters the image of the poet, conceiving of him as an empty vessel, a fragile receiver. It is thus hard to

8

Regarding the notion of ‘techne,’ it should be kept in mind that, as Murray remarks, “the Greeks had no word to denote those activities that we now subsume under the term ‘art.’ [The notion of] Techne covered anything from poetry, painting, and sculpture to shoemaking, carpentry, and shipbuilding, there being no linguistic or conceptual distinction in the Greek world, or in antiquity generally, between craft and the ‘fine arts’” (p. 1).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 158 — #158

i

158

i

  :     

determine whether he presents a serious set of arguments concerning the true nature of inspiration or, rather, a sheer negative myth that aims at extolling the philosopher to the detriment of the poet. This negative or ambivalent approach is already manifested in the Apology, wherein Socrates seeks a true wise man. Among others, he turns to the poets and asks them to specify the meaning of their own poems, of their own ‘product,’ which will serve as a sign of their divine wisdom and craftsmanship. Regretfully he realizes that they fail to fulfill his hopes: For after the public man I went to the poets, those of tragedies, and those of dithyrambs, and the rest, thinking that I was less learned than they. So, taking up the poems of theirs that seemed to me to have been most carefully elaborated by them, I asked them what they meant, hoping that I might at the same time learn something from them. Now I am ashamed to tell you the truth, gentleman; but still it must be told. For there was hardly a man present, one might say, who would not speak better than they about the poems they themselves had composed. So again in the case of the poets also I presently recognized this, that what they composed they composed not by wisdom, but by nature and because they were inspired, like the prophets and givers of oracles… (22 b-c)

Socrates underscores here the poet’s epistemological helplessness, his inability to understand and explain the meaning of his own poems. His implicit presumption is that poems must have a rational ‘meaning,’ a view that changes the focus to the question of ‘what they mean’ while overlooking their emotional or spiritual impact (let us bear in mind Susan Sontag’s disapproval of this stance). This assumption overemphasizes the role of the philosopher, which from now on is supposed to function as the ultimate hermeneutical authority, at the expense of the authority of the poet. Plato clearly displays this outlook in other dialogues as well. In the Meno, Socrates claims that the poets should be considered as ‘divine men,’ but in the same breath he insists that they do not really know what they are speaking about (99 a-c). Likewise, in the Laws, Plato reveals this basic argument using the metaphor of the fountain: “When the poet sits on the tripod of the Muses,” he says, “he is not in his right mind, but like a fountain he lets whatever is at hand flow forth. Since his skill is that of imitation, he is often forced to contradict himself, when he represents contrasting characters, and he does not know whose words are true.” (719c)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 159 — #159

i

  :     

i

159

This analogy between the poet and the fountain suggests that the latter is nothing but a passive medium, someone who does nothing but transfer the ‘water’ of inspirational speech. Moreover, the paradoxical trait of the poets’ utterance – his ability to speak from the mouths of antithetical characters and thus to ‘contradict himself’ – is a sign of his poor epistemological incompetence. The most refined literary handling of this topic is seen in Socrates’ famous monologue in the Ion. Let us carefully examine this text. The Ion is one of Plato’s shortest dialogues. Considered as an ‘early’ dialogue, there are some commentators who have doubted its authenticity due to its lack of structural unity that characterizes Plato’s mature work, and its surprisingly oversimplified argumentation. Goethe, for instance, considers this dialogue as no more than a minor Platonic satire.9 Nevertheless, this text reflects the philosophical and philological traits of ‘early’ Platonic writing and, which is more relevant to our present discussion. It includes a highly elaborated view – or rather, ‘philosophical myth’ – regarding the nature of inspiration. The central figure is Ion the rhapsode (etymologically, ‘a sewer of poems’). In Plato’s times, it was the task of the rhapsodes to move from town to town, to participate in mass civil festivals, and to recite and interpret the ‘divine’ words of the great epic poets, especially those of Homer and Hesiod.10 Regarding Ion, he proudly presents himself as someone who “exceeds all men in speaking of Homer,” so that Socrates, ironically reflecting his vanity, calls him “the best of all rhapsodes.” The dialogue’s point of departure is Ion’s arrogant claim that he can easily manage to “understand Homer better than anyone.” In fact, the Greek claim “I understand Homer” (Homéron epistemai) is ambiguous, meaning either that one can recite Homer from memory or that one can fully understand Homer. Socrates, unsurprisingly, focuses on the second meaning of the phrase and demands that the rhapsode explain the nature of his own skill. Ion, baffled, admits that he cannot explain why he actually manages to speak so vividly about Homer while “simply dozing off” when it comes to other poets. He appeals to Socrates for help, asking him to observe what that means. At this point in the conversation, the philosopher takes over and thus becomes the supreme epistemological authority, the true wise man (sophoi), whereas the poet and his representative, the rhapsode (Plato does not distinguish between the two, as can be

9

10

On Ion’s history of reception, see: Tigerstedt, Eugene. Plato’s Idea of Poetical Inspiration. Commentationes Humanarum Literarum, Helsinki, vol. 44 NR. 2, 1969, pp. 18-20. On the social role of the rhapsodes, see: Kirk, R. The Songs of Homer. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 312-5.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 160 — #160

i

160

i

  :     

seen in the Symposium), are portrayed as ridiculously helpless mediums of inspiration. The function of the poet-rhapsode thus becomes extremely limited: the sublime Muses get credit for the source of inspiration whereas the philosopher is acclaimed as the one who can understand its meaning; there is not much left in favor of the inspired poet and his herald, the co-inspired rhapsode. In his reply to Ion’s question, Socrates overwhelmingly manifests his own ‘philosophical’ view of inspiration (533d ff.), using the novel metaphors of a magnet and iron rings: …this is not an art in you, whereby you speak well on Homer, but a divine power, which moves you like that in the stone which Euripides named [in the Oeneus] ‘a Magnet,’ but most people call “Heraclea stone” [named after Heracles]. For this stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imports into them a power whereby they in turn are able to do the very same thing as the stone, and attract other rings; so that sometimes there is formed quite a long chain of bits of iron and rings, suspended one from another; and they all depend for this power on that one stone. In the same manner also the Muse inspires men herself, and then by means of these inspired persons the inspiration spreads to others, and holds them in a connected chain. (533 d-e)

Thereafter, Socrates specifies the meaning of his new myth, turning it into an abstract allegory: the first ring in the chain represents the poet, the second – the rhapsode, and those that follow are the audience. He flaunts the total dependence of the receivers in their divine source “it is the god who through the whole series draws the souls of men whithersoever he pleases, making the power of one depend on the other,” he says, emphasizing that “one poet is suspended from one Muse, another from another: the word we use for it is ‘possessed’ but it is much the same thing, for he is held” (536b). Plato’s symbol of the magnet is in line with the general scheme of the traditional myth of his time, according to which, as seen before, inspiration is bestowed on the poet from the outside, by divine forces that are beyond his control and grasp. But he makes conspicuous some parts of this myth at the expense of others, thus completely reorganizing the meaning of it. Thus, Plato skillfully manages here to create a new meta-myth in which the ‘hero’ is the god and the ‘fool’ is the poet. In the reorganized tale, the only prerogative of the poet over other ‘rings’ in the chain is his contingent priority in receiving divine inspiration, being the first ring; but this is certainly not a substantial differentiation. The ‘divine man’ thus becomes a hollow tube, a ‘chain of iron’ that passively accepts and transfers the powers of the magnet. “To show this forth,” mocks Socrates, “the god, of set purpose, sang the finest of songs through the meanest of poets” (535 e).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 161 — #161

i

  :     

i

161

In addition, Plato also emphasizes the generic limitedness of inspiration, in line with traditional myth. The poet can only sing in a style that is dictated to him by his specific Muse-patron. Hence, he or she is totally ignorant of other modes of literary styles – lacking, once again, the encompassing eyesight of the philosopher. The rhapsode’s puzzlement – the question why he manages to speak of Homer only – reflects the poet’s own generic limitedness. Thus, here Plato also implicitly attacks Homer’s own authority (an attack that becomes explicit in Rep. X, as will be shown in the next chapter). At this point of the conversation, Plato concludes that it is perhaps his central attack on the inspired poet: the stylistic limitedness of the poet indicates that he is not a demiourgos (craftsman), since he lacks any sort of techné (skill). In other words, the content of inspiration is given to the poet from the outside in its entirety, leaving him no space for a personal touch. Here Plato is at odds with the traditional myth that considers the poet as a unique man who manages to possess inspiration without losing his grip on his idiosyncratic craftsmanship. More generally, the question at stake here is the poet’s glorious epistemological authority: maintaining it, as the traditional myth does, portrays him as a wise man; annulling it, as Plato does, turns him into an empty vessel. In the Timaeus Plato even provides a pseudo-biological justification for this epistemological inferiority of the poet, focusing on the function of the liver. The task of the liver in the human body, he explains, is to serve as ‘a bright and clear mirror’ of the brain. When the liver overflows with sweetness, man gains the gift of divination or inspiration, but no man can achieve this gift when he is rational. The state of being possessed by inspiration is thus portrayed as biologically possible only when the power of man’s intelligence is, to use Plato’s words, “fettered in sleep.” Thus, “it is not the task of him who has been in a state of frenzy, and still continues therein, to judge the apparitions and voices seen or uttered by himself; for it was well said of old that to do and to know one’s own and oneself belongs only to him who is sound of mind” (Timaeus 72a). Divine inspiration and rational judgment are conceived as, strictly speaking, discrepant mental states. Returning to the Ion, here Plato intensifies this discrepancy through the analogy of the poets and the adherents of mystery cults. All poets utter their poems as inspired and possessed, he says, just as the Corybantian worshippers (the priests of Cybele or Rhea, mother of Zeus) and the Bacchants (the female worshippers of Dionysus) do not dance when in their senses.11 He cor-

11

This analogy between the poet and the mystery worshippers relates poetic inspiration to mysticism. It is interesting to note that the Platonic conception of inspiration as ex-

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 162 — #162

i

162

i

  :     

roborates this analogy by comparing the poets to some sort of mythological bees: For the poets tells us that the songs they bring us are the sweets they cull from honeydropping founts in certain gardens and glades of the Muses – like the bees, and winging the air as they do… for a poet is a light and winged and sacred thing, and is unable even to incite until he has been inspired and put out of his senses, and his mind is no longer in him. (534a-b)12

The bee, the magnet, the fountain: all these Platonic symbols exhibit the poet as a passive, irrational, and fragile vessel. Similarly, the analogy between the poet and the ecstatic worshiper implies that poetic inspiration is a sort of madness. In the Phaedrus Plato goes further, straightforwardly regarding divine madness (mantiké) as the sole criterion of good poetry: the poet who relies on his own craftsmanship, he claims, “pales into insignificance” beside the one whose soul is possessed by the frenzy of the muses (245a); then again, later on (248d-e) the poet is rated sixth in the sequence of the ‘lovers of the Muses,’ far beyond the philosopher, the king, the man of affairs, the doctor, and the seer. And yet why did Plato take such pains to reorganize the traditional view of poetic inspiration? Why should he overemphasize the divine source of inspiration and harshly underestimate the role of the poet? Plato’s commentators have addressed these questions, relating them to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry. For instance, Murray assumes that the Platonic view of inspiration – the divine speech that annuls reasoning and skill – indicates an acute ambivalent approach (p. 9); Havelock infers that it reflects a historical tension between the traditional poetic state of mind, which is oral in essence, and the new written philosophical prose (p. 164); Tigerstedt surmises that Plato’s main goal here is to maintain the general scheme of the traditional myth while undermining the cultural role of the poet (1969, p. 72). I suggest one more explanation: that

12

pressed here is in agreement with William James’ depiction of the three universal fundamentals of the mystical experience: passivity (in Plato: the reception of inspiration), ineffability (in Plato: the inability to give an account of the content of inspiration), and transience (in Plato: the temporality and arbitrariness of inspiration). Nevertheless, Plato strongly opposes James’ fourth fundamental that speaks of the total noetic value of the mystical experience: the Greek philosopher considers inspiration as a complete irrational phenomenon. Cf.: James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. NY: Mentor Books, 1958, Chapters XVI-XVII. The image of the poet as a bee was probably drawn by Plato from Aristophanes’ Birds, clause 750.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 163 — #163

i

  :     

i

163

Plato’s aim goes beyond the ‘ancient quarrel,’ striving to present a new model of human life, a new rational-minded and autonomous person. This autonomy is based on the Platonic separation between man and divine forces, whereas the inspired poet is scorned as a will-less vessel of divine speech, the philosopher, as manifested in the Apology, is someone who examines and endeavors to refute God’s final judgment by means of his own wisdom. In other words, the immanent logos is posed as the antithesis of the external force of inspiration, and the autonomous philosopher is the alternative and new model of man vis-à-vis the traditional ideal of the possessed axis-mundi poet. Consequently, the function of human memory is also altered in the Platonic worldview: memory is no longer associated with the Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne, but is grasped as an intrinsic mental faculty that underpins the act of self-investigation, an act that leads toward attaining genuine knowledge. This is memorizing as anamnesis: an inward movement into man’s own consciousness that reveals his innate metaphysical knowledge, totally independent of external – although divine – forces and influences. It means that, all things considered, Plato’s attitude toward inspiration is quite negative. The state of inspiration is portrayed in his writing as the exact antithesis to rationality, to existential autonomy, to genuine wisdom, and to epistemological responsibility. In light of this analysis, let us proceed to probe the Borgesian view of inspiration. I have never hidden my opinions, even through the difficult years, but I have never allowed them to intrude upon my literary production… the craft [of literary creation] is mysterious; our opinions are ephemeral, and I prefer Plato’s theory of the Muse to that of Poe, who argued, or pretended to argue, that the writing of a poem is an operation of the intelligence. I never cease to be amazed that the classical poet professed a romantic theory while a romantic poet espoused a classical one. (CF 346)

The quotation is taken from Borges’ prologue to Brodie’s Report (1970). Here he unequivocally upholds Plato’s theory ‘of the Muse,’ comparing it with Edgar Allan Poe’s outlook. At first sight, the Plato-Poe dichotomy is meant to support the Borgesian separation between literary creation and the narrator’s own worldview, and it envelops the act of writing with a mysterious aura. Borges’ mentioning of Edgar Allan Poe is in fact not surprising in this context. Poe, a romantic poet and a writer of fantastic stories, wrote theoretical essays as well, and there is no doubt that Borges alludes here to his essay “Philosophy of Composition”, which explores the nature of literary creation. As Poe declares at the outset of this somewhat arduous essay, his aim is to depict “with scientific precision and lucidity” how he actually wrote his famous poem “The Raven.” His

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 164 — #164

i

164

i

  :     

basic argument is sharply contrasted with the Greek conception of inspiration, assuming that the act of writing is purely rationalistic and entirely conscious, lacking any mysterious or transcendental aspect. Thus he declares at the outset of the treatise: It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its [The Raven] composition is referable either to accident or to intuition – that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.13

In order to verify this assumption, he retrospectively depicts how he carried out the writing of “The Raven,” reconstructing backwards, step by step, the entire process of literary creation. As he reports, when he began to write his text, he sought a certain word that would contain the letters “o” and “r.” That is, the sought word will be chosen on account of its sound, not its meaning. This was the grounds for repeating the pivotal word “nevermore.” He goes on to say that he had to explain to the reader why this word should be repeated at the closing of every stanza of the poem, which led him to think of an inhuman creature. At first, he considered using a parrot, but it appeared to be too colorful for his needs, contradicting the melancholic aura of the sounds ‘o’ and ‘r,’ so he decided – so he reports – to use a black raven instead. Then, for esthetic purposes, the blackness of the raven had to be conspicuous, so he imagined a clear marble, and so on: the entire poem comes to life in front of the reader’s eyes. Poe thus reduces poetic inspiration to an extremely self-conscious process that consists of a set of purely cognitive acts such as consideration, selection, decision making, and adjustment. Inspiration is replaced by a series of rational, scientific-like procedures, and literary creation becomes pure cognitive skillfulness. Borges harshly declines this stance, considering it as no more than an intellectual joke. “Poe was very fond of hoaxes,” he said in an interview, “I do not think that anybody could write a poem this way” (Eighty 146). So in Borges’ view, this approach cannot even be regarded as a serious explanation for a literary creation. This disapproval is based on the aforementioned distinction between the metaphorical and the abstract modes of thought (cf. Chapter 2), and on the assumption that literary creation belongs, by nature, to the former. Put simply, Borges consistently assumes that literary writing and reasoning are essentially different procedures. Moreover, he supposes (as was already seen in his lecture on Nathaniel Hawthorne) that the author’s intention is “a meager human thing,

13

Poe, Edgar Allan. E. A. Poe’s Works. Vol. XIV. NY: AMS Press, 1979, p. 195.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 165 — #165

i

  :     

i

165

a fallible thing” and that “a book goes far beyond its author’s intention” (Alifano 33), so that the author’s intention cannot possibly be the exclusive source of literary creation, as suggested in Poe’s ‘theory’ of composition. However, this stance seems to be in conflict with some Borgesian fictional texts. Consider especially the story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1941), wherein it is told how Menard, a twentieth-century French writer, intentionally manages to rewrite, letter for letter, some chapters of Cervantes’ classic novel. This act seems to suggest not only that that the writer’s intention is the exclusive driving force of literary creation, but that this intention can be intentionally reproduced by one of his future readers – much the same as in the case of a mathematical theorem. Menard astutely states the theoretical assumptions of his weird task in a letter sent to the narrator: “Thinking, meditating, imagining,” he wrote to me, “are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be.” (CF 95)

Menard’s operation seems at first sight to subscribe to the anti-inspirational stance of Poe, and to demonstrate the possibility of an act of writing that stems entirely from the writer’s (and thereafter, the reader’s) intention and intelligence. If a writer can rationally plan every aspect of his work, as Poe suggests, why shouldn’t he retrieve, step by step, the process of other writers’ creations? And why shouldn’t other people retrieve his thoughts? And yet, a close look at the story shows something entirely different. Menard, Borges reports, does manage to rewrite the ninth and the twenty-eighth chapters of the first part, as well as a fragment of Chapter XXII of the second part of Cervantes’ Quixote. But these literally identical texts are still essentially distinct in their meaning. “The Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical,” says Borges, “but the second is almost infinitely richer (more ambiguous, his detractors will say – but ambiguity is richness)” (p. 94). Borges moves on and demonstrates this dissimilarity between the identical texts by focusing on the phrase “truth, whose mother is history,” which appears in Chapter IX of the first part of the Quixote. This phrase, he explains, written by the seventeenthcentury ‘ingenious layman’ Cervantes, is nothing more than a “mere rhetorical praise of history.” On the other hand, in Menard’s twentieth-century text the idea is staggering, defining history “not as a delving into reality but as the very fount

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 166 — #166

i

166

i

  :     

of reality” (ibid.). The meaning of the (identical) texts is totally different since they are written in different historical contexts. Philosophically speaking, this observation is in line with what has been called ‘Leibniz’s law’ or ‘the principle of the identity of indiscernibles,’ according to which, two entities are logically identical if and only if any predicate possessed by the first is also possessed by the second; but in that case they will also become indiscernible. In the matter of Menard and Cervantes, their words vary, of course, based on the function of language at the time that they are written (compare Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games’); thus, their meanings are basically different. In fact, Borges directly refers to the idea of the temporal aspect of the meaning of words in one of his Harvard lectures (1968). Alluding to the Homeric metaphor ‘the dark-wine sea,’ he remarks: If I or if any of you… write in a poem “the dark-wine sea,” this is not a mere repetition of what the Greeks wrote. Rather, it goes back to tradition. When we speak of “the dark-wine sea,” we think of Homer and of the thirty centuries that lie between us and him. So that although the words may be much the same, when we write “dark-wine sea” we are really writing something quite different from what Homer was writing. Thus, the language is shifting… (Craft 14)

To put it more generally, Menard’s and Cervantes’ texts are distinct semantic objects, despite being identical regarding their set of signs. Consequently, Menard’s story does not verify the validity of Poe’s theory, but, on the contrary, it serves as its reduction-ad-absurdum, demonstrating how Menard’s book finally goes beyond the writer’s intention despite the fact that Cervantes’ text is exactly duplicated. Since the meanings of the words are altered, Menard has written a totally different book and thus has failed to accomplish his objective. This negation, both practical and theoretical, of Poe’s stance leaves us face to face with Plato’s theory of the Muse. But what was Borges’ exact view of the Platonic doctrine? It is interesting to note, first, that Borges’ judgment is highly selective in this case. He ignores both Plato’s epistemological criticism of the inspired poet and the Platonic link between inspiration and madness, thus overlooking what can be considered as the negative aspects of the theory. Alternatively, similar to the Romantic poets, he focuses on the ‘otherness’ quality of inspiration; that is, on the fact that it is given to the poet from the outside. For instance, as mentioned before, he is fond of the Platonic definition of the poet as “that light, winged, sacred creature,” considering it as the ultimate metaphorical definition of poetry (Alifano 37), while entirely disregarding its critical and parodic aspect. This selective preference indicates, in my view, that Borges is intellectually enchanted

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 167 — #167

i

  :     

i

167

by the fundamental Platonic notion, according to which, poetry is given to the poet. He examines and develops this idea in his aforementioned essay “Coleridge’s Dream,” which brings into focus the phenomena of dreamy inspirations (1951). Borges opens the discussion with a reference to the case of the illiterate shepherd, Cadimon, who is ordered in his dream to “sing about the origin of created things,” and thus manages, inexplicably, to recite verses he has never heard before (SNF 370). More mysterious is the correlation between the dreams of Kublai Khan and Coleridge: both men accepted their mission – to constitute a palace – in a dream. Following that dream, the 13th -century Mongolian emperor builds his palace in accordance with his vision, and the English Romantic poet writes a poem about Khan’s palace using the words that appeared in his dream – without being able to know that the palace itself is an outcome of a dream. “Compared with this symmetry of souls of sleeping men who span continents and centuries,” remarks Borges, “the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books seem to me quite little, or nothing at all” (p. 371). Thereafter, he suggests some alternative explanations to this symmetry of dreams; his last Platonic one is the most overwhelming: “Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object (to use Whitehead’s term), is gradually entering the world,” he hesitantly assumes; “its first manifestation was the palace; its second, the poem. Whoever compared them will see that they are essentially the same” (ibid., p. 372). Whereas Plato underscores the irrational aspects of poetic inspiration, Borges spotlights its mysterious quality. Inspiration is portrayed in his stance as an eternal task that pervades time and human souls. Similarly, in one of his interviews, he considers literary inspiration as a dictation, turning the writer into a kind of an amanuensis.14 This conception indicates, above all, that the writer is not the source of his writing and that, strictly speaking, the content of inspiration transcends human intention and will. Regarding his attempt to identify the nature of the source of inspiration – on this point Borges is more hesitant. “I know for a fact that I accept my inspiration,” he says in an interview, “but I am not sure where exactly does it come from” (Eighty 88). In fact, in the prologue to his Obra Poética (1967) he speaks of three possible sources of inspiration: “But all poetry is mysterious and nobody knows for

14

The Borgesian conception of writing as dictation is discussed at length, in its relation to Jewish ideas, in Aizenberg (1981) pp. 143 ff. I will return to discuss this subject in Chapter 7, in the context of the distinction between the holy and the classical book.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 168 — #168

i

168

i

  :     

sure what has been given to him to write,” he remarks, “The dreary mythology of our time speaks of the subconscious, or, what is even less lovely, of subconsciousness. The Greeks invoked the Muse, the Hebrews – the Holy Ghost; the meaning is the same” (my translation). “The meaning is the same”: this judgment signifies that in Borges’ view the heart of the matter lies not in exactly identifying the source of inspiration, but rather in recognizing the fundamental fact that inspiration transcends the writer’s intention and that the origin of literary creation is alien to the writer’s consciousness. Note that he considers modern psychoanalysis as one more mode of mythical explanation, a sort of “a dreary mythology,” rather than an alternative scientific account. Thus, inspiration is taken to be transcendent (that is, external) in essence and mythical (i.e., irrational) by nature. At the basis of this view lies a philosophical assumption regarding free will. In line with Spinoza, Borges assumes that free will is an illusion, “but an illusion essential to existence” (Eighty 88). If free will does not exist, then the writer’s intention, being a manifestation of his will (this is what Schopenhauer clearly espoused), cannot serve as a possible source of literary creation. This fact leaves us, again, with Plato’s theory of the separateness of inspiration. We have seen that Plato theorizes that inspiration is given to the poet as a complete and hermetic unit, so that there is no space either for the poet’s personal touch or for his reflective understanding of what he says. Consequently, in this perspective the poet should be considered neither as a demiourgos (craftsman) nor as a sophoi (wise man). Borges is at odds with Plato regarding this point. Like Plato, he basically assumes that inspiration is something given to the writer from the outside, that is – from an exterior source that lies beyond his conscious attention; yet, he also assumes that the content of inspiration is bestowed in a fragmented manner and not as a whole, so that the mission of the writer is to complete and distill the raw material he has been given. This means that he leaves space for the narrator’s personal touch in the process of literary creation. More concretely, Borges assumes that after receiving the offering of inspiration, the narrator’s task is to work out the details of his text by means of his personal experience and literary skillfulness, that is – to complete the missing parts of the plot or the poem and to determine the stylistic characteristics of his writing. Consider, for instance, the opening lines of the Borgesian story “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” (1944): Under the notorious influence of Chesterton… and the court counselor Leibniz…, in my spare evening I have conceived this plot – which I will perhaps commit to paper but which already somehow justifies me. It needs details, rectifications, tinkering – there are areas in the story that have never been revealed to me. Today, January 3, 1944, I see

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 169 — #169

i

  :     

i

169

it in the following way: the action takes place in an oppressed yet stubborn country – Poland, Ireland, the republic of Venice, some South American or Balkan state… Or it took place rather, for though the narrator is contemporary, the story told by him occurred in the mid or early nineteenth century – in 1824, let us say, for convenience’s sake; in Ireland, let us also say. (CF 143)

Here, the writer’s intention is intertwined with external influences and unclear elements that produce ‘areas in the story that have never been revealed’ to the writer (in other places Borges mentions a dream as the springboard to the text). This opens up the way to a more intricate mode of collaboration between the writer’s subjectivity and his inspiration. The exact nature of this view, applying both to Borges’ general outlook of inspiration as well as to his own work, seems to warrant further clarification. In a fragment generally called “how a text is born” (cómo nace un texto), drawn from a dialogue between Borges and Ferrari (1985), the Argentinean maestro explains in detail his own method of literary creation: In the case of a story, for instance, I receive the beginning, the starting point, the end, and sometimes the general idea. But then I should discover, through my very limited abilities, what happens between the beginning and the end. And thereafter there are other problems to solve; for instance, whether the plot should be told in the first person or in the third person. Then it is necessary to find the time and place [in which the plot takes place]; now, for my part (and this is my own personal solution), I believe that for me the most comfortable solution is to place the story in the last decade of the 19th century… (My translation)15

Here, writing requires impersonal inspiration as well as idiosyncratic technique and reasoning. It can thus be generally inferred that Borges’ view of literary creation is complementary in essence, combining both reception and reasoning, external content and personal craftsmanship; or, in short, that Borges dialectically intermixes Plato’s theory of the Muse and Poe’s philosophy of composition. He evinces this approach in the prologue to The Unending Rose (1975): “Apart from isolated cases of oneiric inspiration,” he says, “it is obvious that both doctrines [Poe’s and Plato’s] are partially true, unless they correspond to distinct stages in the process [of literary creation]” (SP 343). It appears that in Borges’ outlook, the first stage of creation is always a ‘Platonic’ one: it is the reception of some sort of fragmentary content from the out-

15

The fragment appears in a conversation recorded in: Ferrari, O. En diálogo. Vol. I. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005, pp. 6-7.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 170 — #170

i

170

i

  :     

side; the second, in line with Poe, is a self-conscious and intentional process of decision making, revising, shaping, and completing the content that was given to the writer. The first stage is impersonal and external, the second – autonomous and idiosyncratic. This integrated viewpoint means that Poe’s and Plato’s theories, per se, are wrong. Contrary to Poe, Borges insists that inspiration is the only genuine prima causa of literature, the exclusive source of any genuine literary creation. Contrary to Plato, he assumes that the narrator does possess, after all, an idiosyncratic craftsmanship. This complementary approach may serve to explain the tension between Borges’ conception of inspiration and other Borgesian ideas, such as the active role of the reader as a co-author of the text, the role of memory in the act of creation, and the historicity of literary writing. These issues can be grasped, I believe, as relating to the secondary phase of the process of creation, which occurs in time and depends on human culture and conventions. Put differently, if the writer can shape at will the material of his inspiration, there is no reason why the reader cannot do the same in his interpretation (I will carefully discuss Borges’ view of reading in Chapter 7). More abstractly, Borges admits preferring Plato’s theory of the Muse to that of Poe, since he conceives external inspiration as the genuine origin of any literary creation. Plato’s inspiration is logically prior to Poe’s self-aware craftsmanship, being the generating force of the entire process. Nevertheless, by combining both theories, Borges eventually transcends Plato’s theory, assuming that the narrator is an inspired man (enthousiasmus) in the first step of the process of creation, and a craftsman (demiourgos) in the second. It boils down to the conclusion that Borges returns to the pre-Platonic mythical tradition, a tradition that the Greek philosopher endeavored to undermine. Borges’ view of literary creation is reflected in his depiction of his own personal experience of writing. His most detailed account on this subject was given at Columbia University in 1971, during a symposium entitled “Borges on Writing.” Note that here, too, writing is considered, above all, as ‘mysterious’: This is a kind of central mystery - how my poems get written. I may be walking down the street, or up and down the staircase of the National Library…and suddenly I know that something is about to happen. Then I sit back. I have to be attentive to what is about to happen. It may be a story, or it may be a poem, either in free verse or in some form. The important thing at this point is not to tamper. We must, lest we be ambitious, let the Holy Ghost, or the Muse, or the subconscious - if you prefer modern mythology - have its way with us. Then, in due time, if I have not bamboozled myself, I am given a line, or maybe some hazy notion – a glimpse perhaps – of a poem, a long way off. Often, I can barely make it out; then that dim shape, that dim cloud, falls

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 171 — #171

i

  :     

i

171

into shape, and I hear my inner voice saying something. From the rhythm of what I first hear, I know whether or not I am on the brink of committing a poem, be it in the sonnet form or free verse… All this boils down to a simple statement: poetry is given to the poet. I don’t think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it. I do my best to resist this temptation. I often wonder how I’ve come to write several volumes of verse! But I let the poems insist, and sometimes they are very tenacious and stubborn, and they have their way with me. It is then that I think, “If I don’t write this down, it will keep on pushing and worrying me; the best thing to do is to write it down.” Once it’s down, I take the advice of Horace, and I lay it aside for a week or ten days. And then, of course, I find that I have made many glaring mistakes, so I go over them. After three or four tries, I find that I can’t do it any better and that any more variations may damage it. It is then that I publish it.16

The core of the first phase is the attentive receptiveness of inspiration. It is characterized as a sudden feeling of occurrence, and a passive attitude that strives, above all, ‘not to temper’ the event. The given content, though, is fragmentary in essence, a ‘dim cloud.’ Thus, the starting point of the process is, strictly speaking, an experience of a ‘revelation’; “but I use this word [revelation] modestly and not ambitiously,” he says elsewhere (Ferrari 7). The second stage, on the other hand, stems from the narrator’s own skills, decisions, and preferences. He should decide, initially, on the genre of his writing, and then he undertakes the task of fulfilling the missing parts in the rest of the text, setting it in a specific time and place. This is thus a complementary approach, in agreement with the general Borgesian view of creation that was analyzed above. Hence, it turns out that there is no gap between Borges’ depiction of his personal experience and his theoretical outlook on literary creation.17 Essentially, the crux of this view, according to

16

17

Di Giovanni, N. et al. (Eds.). Borges on Writing. Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1994, pp. 723. An almost identical depiction appears in Borges at Eighty, pp. 81-2. Compare also to Borges’ view of Shakespeare’s creativity expressed in the lecture “Shakespeare’s Enigma” (1964) (SNF 472-473). There are cases, though, in which Borges seems to be close to Poe’s calculated mode of writing. Consider, for instance, his depiction of the writing of the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” given at Michigan University on 1976: “I used to go to the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires — and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, or a librarian, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course, afterwards, I had that book at home, by my hand. And then I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. And then one night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden, and the Druids — a

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 172 — #172

i

172

i

  :     

which literature is ‘given’ to the writer, is in complete accordance with the Platonic theory of the Muse. Nevertheless, the secondary phase, which presumes that inspiration is fragmentary and that the narrator has an active role in the process of its completion, is at odds with the Platonic doctrine and is in line with Poe. As already noted, this combined Borgesian view of inspiration restores the pre-Platonic Greek myth in which the poet is considered an inspired demiourgos. We have seen earlier how Poe’s theory of composition is reflected in Borges’ story about Pierre Menard; now it should be noted that the compound Borgesian view of inspiration is reflected in his fiction as well. Consider, for instance, the thematic core of the story “The Mirror and the Mask” (1975). Here the task of the poet, Olan, is to mint in words the victory of the king at the battle of Clontarf. The first attempt of the poet is portrayed as highly technical, as nothing more than an ingenious interweaving of literary stratagems. The king, as expected, is not satisfied. The second attempt is another variation, far more modest and hesitant, of such a controlled mode of writing, which turns out to be insufficient as well. The third attempt is totally distinctive. The poet is different too: something that “was not simply time,” tells Borges, had furrowed and transformed his features. “At dawn,” the poet recalls with deep awe, “I awoke speaking words that at first I did not understand. Those words are the poem. I felt I had committed some sin, perhaps that sin which the Holy Ghost cannot pardon” (CF 454). The sin, the king explains, is that of having known eternal beauty, which is a

treasure trove, no? — all in the same volume, of course, “Dr”… Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. Where, for example, you would have, let’s say, a language and then a literature that went with the language, and then a history with it, and so on. Then I thought, well, I’d write a story of the fancy encyclopedia. Then of course that would need many different people to write it, to get together and to discuss many things — the mathematicians, philosophers, men of letters, architects, engineers, then also novelists or historians. Then, as I needed a quite different world from ours — it wasn’t enough to invent fancy names — I said, why not a world based on, let’s say, Berkeleyan ideas?… Then I wrote that story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that day.” Yet, he closes the interview with a remark that returns to Plato’s starting point, underestimating the rational aspect of the process: “But I would like to make it clear that if any ideas are to be found in what I write, those ideas came after the writing. I mean, I began by the writing, I began by the story, I began with the dream, if you want to call it that. And then afterwards, perhaps, some idea came of it.” (Conversation available online as an MP3 file: http://denisdutton.com/borges.mp3)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 173 — #173

i

  :     

i

173

gift forbidden to mankind; thus he lays in the hands of the poet a dagger and the poet commits suicide. This last variation of literary creation is linked to the Holy Spirit and to the conception of inspiration as a gift that comes from outside and comprises superhuman content. This is, thus, a case of a pure oneiric inspiration, in accordance with Plato’s theory. And yet Borges adds that such purity is a hybris, a trespassing of the divine realm, and thus the poet’s personality must be exterminated. In addition, he delves into the process of creation in another story, “The Circular Ruins,” published in Fictions (1944). It is a story of a magician who undertakes the task of dreaming a man in painstaking detail and imposing him upon reality. This task, adds Borges, “was not impossible though it was clearly supernatural.” Such an idealistic parallelism between existing and dreaming is, as mentioned before, quite frequent in the Borgesian oeuvre, and it is clearly reflected in the motto of the present story – “and if he left off dreaming about you…” – drawn from a section in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in which Alice encounters a king who maintains her existence in his dream.18 In light of this link between inspiration and dreaming, the magician’s task can be interpreted as a symbol of the process of literary creation: imposing a dreamed man upon reality is similar, in essence, to the writer’s attempt to share his inspirational vision with his readers. Thus, in the prologue to Brodie’s Report (1970) Borges defines literary creation as “guided dreaming” (CF 346).19 Nonetheless, the first mode of creation of the magician is portrayed as extremely active and all too self-aware. He dreams that he is standing in the center of a circular amphitheatre “which was somehow the ruined temple; clouds of taciturn students completely filled the terraces of seats” (CF 97). Aggressively

18

19

The comparison between existing and dreaming is splendidly manifested in “The Zahir” (1949), wherein the protagonist says: “I will no longer perceive the universe, I will perceive the Zahir. Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs ‘to live’ and ‘to dream’ are at every point synonymous; for me, thousands of thousands of appearances will pass into one; a complex dream will pass into a simple one. Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir. When every man on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?” (CF 248-9). In parallel, in one of his interviews Borges describes his own experience of a dreamy inspiration: “for example, when I was in America in East Lansing, several years ago, I had a dream. When I awoke the whole thing had been forgotten. But I retained this sentence: ‘I am about to sell you Shakespeare’s memory.’ Then I woke. I told that to María Kodama, my friend, and she said to me: ‘there might be a story lurking there.’ I let it wait… and I then wrote the story. It’s being published now in Buenos Aires. And the story is called ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’” (Eighty 81).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 174 — #174

i

174

i

  :     

seeking a soul worthy of taking his place in the universe, he lectures to his phantasmal students, asks them questions, and ponders their answers. Thereafter, he painfully realizes his failure. He understood, tells Borges, “that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake, even if he fathoms all the higher and the lower spheres – much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind” (CF 98). He realizes that his first attempt was too intentional and he seeks another way to fulfill his task. The second attempt at dreaming is much less ambitious and much more modest, attentive and receptive. “The few times he did dream during this period,” says Borges, “he did not focus on his dreams; he would wait to take up his task again until the disk of the moon was whole.” He prudently evokes divine forces, similar to the Greek poets, uttering “those syllables of a powerful name that it is lawful to pronounce.” Then he lays himself down to sleep, and dreams of a beating heart while carefully maintaining his receptive approach. “He did not touch it,” tells Borges, “he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances” (ibid.). Eventually he manages to realize his task, sending his dreamed son away from him and imposing his dream upon reality. It is not hard to realize the similarity between the magician’s second attempt and Borges’ own compound view of inspiration. Both processes are based on an attentive reception at the first stage and a careful formation at the second. “The Circular Ruins” can be read, then, as a symbol of the Borgesian return to the pre-Platonic image of the Greek poet: the inspired demiourgos, or el hacedor.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 175 — #175

i

i

C  The Literary Proteus: The Image of the Poet

“No one was as many men as this man: like the Egyptian Proteus, he used up the forms of all creatures.” (“Everything and Nothing”, SP 87)

An investigation of the image of the poet or the writer (the former pertains to oral tradition and the latter to a textual one) completes the issues that were already discussed in previous chapters. It is actually a crossroad in which the concepts of mythos, artistic representation, and poetic inspiration meet and intricately interact. The attempt to focus ad hominem on the image of the artistic ‘maker’ deals directly with the innermost core of his existence. In fact, the examination of ‘the image’ comprises two complementary yet distinct aspects: the psychological or existential aspect that focuses on the poet’s subjectivity, and the social role or the cultural function of his work. To use Carl Jung’s formulation, we are delving here into the delicate interaction between the poet’s persona and his personality, between his genuine subjectivity and his narrative identity. Borges would prefer to speak of the interaction between “Borges” and the “I.” While discussing the nature of the poet’s image, Plato focuses on the image of Homer, whom he calls “the leader of the poets.” This choice is in line with the fact that Homer was traditionally considered in his time as the exemplary and paramount poet of Greece. It is possible that in this case Plato also refers to a very personal question: if the traditional anecdote about him is correct, as a young man Plato composed lyric poems, dithyrambs, and tragedies (and also, it is said, painted) until his fateful encounter with Socrates took place, which led him to burn his writings and to dedicate his life to philosophy.1 This tale is surely anchored in the perspicuous, poetic quality that characterizes Platonic dialogues. Seen from this perspective, attempting to analyze the image of the poet must have also been for Plato an intimate and, perhaps, harsh act of self-examination.

1

For the artistic aspects of Plato’s persona and writing, see the section “Plato as Dramatist” in Blondell’s The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues, pp. 14-37. 175

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 176 — #176

i

176

i

  :     

Nevertheless, it turns out that Plato’s analysis of this issue has quite a negative orientation. The core of his discussion is the manifestation of a radical shift in the symbol of the poet’s image. He moves from the traditional conception of the poet as demiourgos, a preeminent craftsman, to the image of the Egyptian multi-formed god Proteus. This shift of symbols, this reorganization of traditional myth – so common to the Platonic work – paves the way for a radical transformation in considering the poet’s cultural function, and eventually to his deportation from the ideal state of the philosopher-king. In other words, the poet becomes in Plato’s work the complete ‘other,’ the ultimate anti-philosopher. Borges, ‘the writer of writers,’ was also preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with examining the various aspects of the images of poets and writers. This includes a most interesting act of self-examination of the narrative identity of “Borges” in its complex relation with the intimate “I.” This reiterative set of examinations manifests his attempt to reveal the core of “the most curious of human professions”: the literary faith, which is his own fate. As will be shown, Borges tends to underestimate the social aspects of the writer’s work and to intensively underscore the curious interaction between his subjectivity and what can be called ‘narrative identity.’ In the course of his examination he attends to numerous writers, focusing on the images of two of his favorite poets, namely, Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare. What is, then, the relation between Plato’s and Borges’ view of this matter? Our comparative discussion will embark, as usual, on a brief historical survey of the traditional image of the Greek poet. It is important to take into consideration that poetic activity in Plato’s times was quite different from our modern conception of poetry. It was not a minor intellectual elitist group engaged in refined esthetic pleasure, but rather, as Eric Havelock puts it, it was indeed an “overall cultural condition” that no longer exists: the very foundation of an entire oral tradition and culture. Historical records indicate that pre-Platonic Greek culture was actually based upon mousike (‘the education of the Muses’), and thus its educational system included core-activities such as singing, dancing, and chorusing.2 This dominance is vividly reflected, for instance, in Plato’s Symposium, wherein poetry reciting, interpretation, and singing are the central activities of the cheerful elitist group.3 As Murray suc-

2

3

Thus, for instance, in his Frogs Aristophanes praises the ‘good and beautiful’ citizens (kaloi kagathoi) who were educated “on the wrestling floor, in choruses, and on poetry” (727-9). For further reading, see: Lonsdale, S. H. Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 177 — #177

i

  :     

i

177

cinctly concludes, “Greece was indeed a ‘song culture’ until well into the fifth century [B.C.]” (p. 17). This pivotal function of poetry and mousike also underpinned the preeminent status of poets in ancient Greece. As seen before, the poet was considered a divine-man (the word enthousiasmos means literally ‘possessed by a god’), a wise-man (sophoi), and a skillful craftsman (demiourgos). Thus, he functioned as a supreme moral and epistemological authority in Greek culture. In fact, the harsh criticism of poetry and poets in the Platonic dialogues clearly reflects this supreme status in all its splendor. Consider, for instance, Plato’s Symposium wherein Diotima asks Socrates to glance “upon Homer and Hesiod and all the other good poets, envying the fine offspring they leave behind to procure them a glory immortally renewed in the memory of men” (209d). This leads us to consider the special cultural status of Homer. No doubt, ‘the best and most divine of poets’ (Republic 607a) was Homer (literally: ‘the blind’), the legendary creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey. A salient mark of his canonical status is the fact that one of the first sentences children learned to copy in the Hellenistic period was “Homer was not a man, but a god” (Murray 19). Another sign of his premier status, mentioned in the previous chapter while discussing the rivalry between the Sophists and the rhapsodes, was the fact that an adequate interpretation of the Homeric hymns was considered a hallmark of the intellectual authority of the speaker in Greece, similar to the status of Confucian writing in Classical China. In other words, Homer’s work served as a standard for evaluating what was considered to be good cultural behavior in Greek society. Eric Havelock’s influential study Preface to Plato is a groundbreaking attempt at considering Homer’s cultural role and Plato’s reaction to it.4 Havelock’s starting points are the assumption that “all human civilizations rely on a sort of cultural ‘book,’ that is, on the capacity to put information in storage in order to reuse it” (vii), and the historical fact that Greek culture was maintained through a wholly oral basis until about 700 B.C. Within this context, the cultural function of the poet was primarily to repeat and, in part, to expand the tradition; similarly, the Greek educational system was engaged in oral preservation. Poetry is thus conceived by Havelock as the main medium of information-storage in Greek oral culture, and this function molded its modus operandi. In order to effectively preserve and transmit cultural mores, the Greek citizen was trained

4

Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 178 — #178

i

178

i

  :     

to psychologically identify with the poetry he heard. Thus, the content of poetic utterance had to be phrased in such a way as to allow and intensify this identification: it could only attend to actions and events involving exemplary persons (p. 234). Greek poetry thus served, above all, as what Havelock calls ‘the oral encyclopedia’ of Greek culture; it provided a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of “encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history and technology,” which was the core of the Greek citizen’s educational and cultural initiation (p. 27). This view leads us to better understand Homer’s unique cultural role in Greek society. As he puts it: The overwhelmingly important thing about Homer is the thing that Plato said about Homer: in his day, and for many days later, he was the chief claimant for the role of educator of Greece… the representative of that kind of poetry which has to exist in a culture of oral communication, where if any ‘useful’ statement, historical, technical, or moral, is to survive, in more or less standardized form, this can be done only in the living memories of the members who make up the culture group. The [Homeric] epic therefore is… to be considered in the first instance not as an act of creation but as an act of reminder and recall. Its patron muse is indeed Mnemosyne in whom is symbolized… the total act of reminding, recalling, memorializing, and memorizing, which is achieved in epic verse. (p. 91)

Havelock’s thesis boils down to the claim that poetry in general, and Homer in particular, served as the main source of Greece’s cultural ‘oral encyclopedia’ and that Greek oral society existed in ‘a Homeric state of mind.’ This view is, of course, reductive, totally overlooking the aesthetic and mythical qualities of poetic utterance, highlighting its social function and its cultural utility. Nonetheless, it provides an elegant insight into the uniqueness of Greek poetry and the cultural image of the poet in the Classical era. In the next chapter I will consider this thesis from another perspective. Plato is well aware of the canonical status of the poets, hallmarked by Homer. His aforementioned metaphor, presented in the Ion, of the poet as the ‘first iron ring’ in a string of iron rings, indicates the latter’s privileged status in the hierarchy of Athenian society. This status is supported by records of the rhapsode’s (the reciter of oral poetry) hypnotic influence on his audience, as depicted in the Ion. “I look down upon them from the platform,” says Ion, “and see them at such moments crying and turning awestruck eyes upon me and yielding to the amazement of my tale” (535e). Plato’s handling of these issues is driven by the motivation to reformulate this cultural role of the poets and to undermine their status as the supreme cultural authorities in Greece. In order to carry out this task, he takes great pains

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 179 — #179

i

  :     

i

179

to re-organize the myth of poetic inspiration, thus destroying the conception of the poet as a divine demiourgos (craftsman), while overstressing the irrational and compulsive aspects of the previously discussed phenomenon of poetic inspiration. Accordingly, in the Republic he depicts the philosopher-king as the real demiourgos, the one who gazes at the archetype of the pure Good and imbeds it in the structure of the society of his ideal state (501a). Thus, it is the philosopherwho is the divine craftsman and wise-man, not the poet (we should bear in mind that in the Timaeus Plato depicts god as ‘the divine demiourgos’ as well). This is the first deconstructive step of the process of reshaping the poet’s image. Thereafter, Plato proceeds to actively reformulate the poet’s image, displaying him as a multi-formed and shape-shifting creature. This highly articulated process of mythical reorganization commences in the second Book of the Republic, in the context of discussing the feature of the form of God. Since God is necessarily free from falsehood and deception, says Socrates, then he has no motive to deceive, i.e., by manifesting an appearance that differs from his true nature. Thus, “God is altogether simple and true in deed and word, and neither changes himself nor deceives others by visions or words or the sending of signs in waking or in dreams”; thus “our second norm or canon for speech and poetry about the gods, [is] that they are neither wizards in shape-shifting nor do they mislead us by falsehood in words or deeds” (Rep. II: 382e-383a). Socrates then draws conclusions from this assumption, criticizing the poets. First, “there is no lying poet in God” (ibid.). Second, no poet must be allowed to tell us, as Homer does, that “the gods, in the likeness of strangers, many disguises assume as they visit the cities of mortals” (Odyssey XVII: 485-486). God, who manifests only truth, is unlike the poet who tends to mingle truth and falsehood; thus, the poetic utterance regarding the nature of the gods should be monitored by the philosopher. Among the gods that are mentioned in Homer as ‘assuming many disguises,’ is one whose very nature and most prominent trait is the act of shape-shifting: it is Proteus, the son of Tethys and Oceanus, the Egyptian god of the sea. It is interesting to note that in the Orphic tradition Proteus is taken to be the symbol of the shapeless and undefined material (to apeiron) that constitutes the universe. Similarly, in Book IV of the Odyssey Homer describes Idothea’s conversation with Odyssey regarding the nature of her father, the immortal god Proteus, “the old man of the sea”: First he will look over all his seals, and count them; then, when he has seen them and tallied them on his five fingers, he will go to sleep among them, as a shepherd among his sheep. The moment you see that he is asleep seize him; put forth all your strength

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 180 — #180

i

180

i

  :      and hold him fast, for he will do his very utmost to get away from you. He will turn himself into every kind of creature that goes upon the earth, and will become also both fire and water; but you must hold him fast and grip him tighter and tighter, till he begins to talk to you and comes back to what he was when you saw him go to sleep; then you may slacken your hold and let him go; and you can ask him which of the gods it is that is angry with you, and what you must do to reach your home over the seas. (Odyssey IV: 456-460)

Proteus’ first attribute is his power to foresee the future; the second is his dazzling capacity to rapidly shift his shapes in order to escape entrapment. Proteus thus symbolizes an entity that merges deception and truth, similar to the poet’s mythos that “likens the false to the true and so makes it edifying” (Rep. II: 382d). He also serves as the more general symbol of an unstable or shapeless entity that is the exact opposite of the Platonic ideal of the eternally unchangeable archetype. Proteus is thus implicitly related to the nature of poetry and the poets. In the Ion, Socrates makes this link explicit, directly accusing Ion the rhapsode of deceiving him like Proteus: But you are only deceiving me, and so far from displaying the subjects of your skill, you decline even to tell me what they are, for all my entreaties. You are a perfect Proteus in the way you take on every kind of shape, twisting about this way and that, until at last you elude my grasp in the guise of a general, so as to avoid displaying your skill in Homeric lore. (541e)

Since Plato does not distinguish the poets from the rhapsodes (consider, e.g., Rep. 600d), it can be deduced that this criticism is directed, indirectly, toward the traditional image of the poets as well. The implied analogy between the poets and Proteus becomes straightforward in Book III of the Republic. As mentioned before, while discussing the nature of artistic representation, Socrates underscored the harmful aspect of the poet’s first-person utterance (i.e., when Homer speaks directly through the mouth of Odysseus). Such an utterance, based on total identification, blurs the distinction between the personalities of the speaker and his literary image. “Or have you not observed,” asks Socrates worryingly, “that imitation, if continued from youth far into life, settles down into habits and (second) nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?” (395c). The mimetic utterance of the poet thus undermines the stable nature of both the speaker’s persona and his audience, generating instead indeterminate shape-shifting identities. Plato’s main point is, then, that artistic representation, practiced in first-person speech (the lexis of mimesis), turns one’s nature into a shape-shifting entity and turns his identity into a kind of a Proteus.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 181 — #181

i

  :     

i

181

This fact makes the poet an unwelcome, subversive citizen in the philosopher’s ideal state. In other words, the poet does not fit in the philosophical state “because there is no twofold or manifold man among us, since every man does only one thing… [here] we shall find the cobbler a cobbler and not a pilot in addition to his cobbling, and the farmer a farmer and not a judge added to his farming… and so of all the rest” (397 d-e). As a result, Socrates argues that a great poet should not be allowed in the ideal state. The similarities between the following section and Homer’s depiction of Proteus cannot be ignored (italics mine): If a man, then, it seems, who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wool.5 (398a.)

The poet’s capability of ‘assuming every kind of shape and imitating all things’ turns him into a poetic Proteus. The act of avoiding mention of Proteus’ name, while keeping the analogy conspicuous, is a rhetorical device that sharpens the attack. It is clear that here Plato exclusively refers to a certain kind of a poet, the preeminent ‘divine’ poet. Since the entire discussion of Book III is about the Homeric hymns and Homer’s lexis, it is tacitly understood that Plato turns the target of his attack, for the first time and in a most prudent mode, to none other than Homer himself. This is, then, the crux of the Platonic project of reorganizing the poet’s mythical image: the positive image of the divine demiourgos – implying stability, wisdom, and educational authority – is replaced by the negative (deceitful), unstable (multi-formed), and alien (Egyptian) image of Proteus.6 Note that Plato, despite his rather aggressive criticism, does not undermine here the divine facet of the poet’s image. He could have transformed the poet

5

6

‘Crowning with fillets of wool’: this is how holy statues were ornamented in Greek temples. See: Bruit Zaidman, Louise and Schmitt Pantel, Pauline. Religion in the Ancient Greek City. Tr. Paul Cartledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The poet’s shape-shifting ability is also understood by Plato as a preliminary condition for his ability to represent through identification, besides his inspiration (note that the tension between these aspects was never resolved in Plato’s thought). Thus, he remarks in Laws 719c that since the poet’s craft is based on the manifestation of different types of characters, he will necessarily say one thing and its opposite, creating antithetical characters.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 182 — #182

i

182

i

  :     

into, say, a shapeless beast, as he indeed does later. Additionally, Proteus does possess the precious ability to foresee the future – to see the truth – and he is, after all, a divine being. These facts might indicate an undercurrent of an ambivalent approach toward Homer and the poets (we should keep in mind that Plato himself, in his dialogues, speaks in a first-person style, in accordance with the poet’s mimesis). Thereafter, Plato reaffirms the superiority of simplicity over flexible complexity. While analyzing the preferred food and musical harmony in a utopian state, Socrates claims that variety engenders lechery, whereas “simplicity in music begets sobriety in the souls, and in the gymnastic training it begets health in the bodies” (Rep. III: 404e). Plato intensifies this argument in Book IX while illustrating a mythical portrait of the structure of the soul. Here Socrates depicts the soul as a threefold entity: reason is symbolized by a human being (notice the micro-macro or fractallike structure, in which the part reflects the whole);7 courage or will – by a lion; and lust, what Freud would call later ‘libido,’ is compared to “a single shape of a manifold and a many-headed beast that has a ring of heads of tame and wild beasts, and can change them and cause to spring forth from itself all such growths” (588d). This last image is clearly analogous to that of Proteus: both images manifest dynamic instability, multi-formation, and shapelessness. Glaukon’s reaction to this image, his assumption that ‘it is the task of a cunning artist’ to mold this shape, draws an explicit connecting link between the beast and the Protean-poet (cf. Rep. X: 596c). Socrates continues and recommends that, in the righteous soul, the inner man (reason) will “take charge of the many-headed beast, like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild” (589b). Such a recommended act reflects the handling of the poets by the king-philosopher, mentioned in Book III: the philosopher sends the shapeless poet away to another city, while maintaining the “more austere and less delightful poet” for his benefit (398b). Here the role and image of the poet in the ideal city parallel the role and image of the multi-headed beast in the soul. Thus, their treatments are also parallel. In Book X Plato radically intensifies his assault on the poet’s image, using an ad hominem attack on Homer himself, ‘the best and most divine of poets’ (Rep. X: 607a). He fastens the analogy between the poet and the ‘many-headed beast,’ stressing that poetic representation has the power even to corrupt ‘the better sort

7

Likewise, in the parable of the soul in the Phaedrus, reason is portrayed by the image of a human charioteer who controls a black and white horse (246 a-b).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 183 — #183

i

  :     

i

183

of souls’ since it waters and fosters negative feelings that are rooted in the lower parts of the soul. This claim sets the ground for ‘our chief accusation’ against poetry and the poets: The part of the soul that in the former case, in our own misfortunes, was forcibly restrained, and that has hungered for tears and a good cry and satisfaction, because it is its nature to desire these things, is the element in us that the poets satisfy and delight, and… the best element in our nature, since it has never been properly educated by reason or even by habit, then relaxes its guard over the plaintive part, inasmuch as this is contemplating the woes of others and it is no shame to it to praise and pity another who, claiming to be a good man, abandons himself to excess in his grief… That is, I think, because few are capable of reflecting that what we enjoy in others will inevitably react upon ourselves. (605e-606b)

This claim, he concludes, reaffirms the former decision to expel poetry and the poets from the philosopher’s state. Thus, Plato takes great pains in the Republic to drastically reformulate the image of the poet, using an ingenious system of mythical reorganization, implicit analogies, intertextuality, and subtle connotations. The poet is conceived, from now on, as a Proteus and a many-headed beast: thus, he is symbolized by irrational creatures whose most prominent quality is indeterminacy and shape-shifting. But what is theoretically wrong with shifting shapes and indeterminacy? In addition to their negative psychological impact on the receiver’s soul (which is challenged by Aristotle’s notion of katharsis), I believe that there is a more philosophical justification for Plato’s resentment. Shifting shapes and indeterminacy are related in his thought to the Heraclitean panta rhei principle, according to which, all things exist in a constant state of flux. As Socrates emphasizes in the closing of the Cratylus, this principle, if correct, abrogates the very possibility of substantial knowledge and, consequentially, of rationality itself: But we cannot even say that there is any knowledge if all things are changing and nothing remains fixed… If the very essence of knowledge changes, in the moment of the change to another essence of knowledge there would be no knowledge, and if it is always changing, there will always be no knowledge, and by this reason there will be neither anything to know nor anything to be known. (440 a-b)

Such a situation, totally unacceptable in the Platonic worldview since it brings us back to the harsh relativism of the Sophists, is associated in the Republic with the new image of the poet. So here lies the ultimate dichotomy: the ever-

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 184 — #184

i

184

i

  :     

changing Proteus-poet versus the immobile beholder of the eternal archetype – the demiourgos-philosopher.8 “Let us, then,” Socrates finally says in Book X, “conclude our return to the topic of poetry and our apology and affirm that we really had good ground then [Book III] for dismissing her from our city, since such was her character; for reason [logos] constrained us” (607b). Following this move, and following the shift from demiourgos to Proteus, the door is open to consider the poet a persona non grata in the philosopher’s ideal state.9 The one writer who explicitly considers the poet as ‘Proteus’ is, surprisingly, none other than Borges. Let us now examine his outlook. As mentioned before, Borges tends to underestimate the importance of the writer’s social role. This tendency is based on a more comprehensive political view that was probably influenced by Spencer and his father’s nihilism, which is clearly expressed in his essay “Our Poor Individualism” (1946):10 The Argentinean, unlike the Americans of the North and almost all Europeans, does not identify with the state… One thing is certain: the Argentinean is an individual, not a citizen. Aphorisms such as Hegel’s ‘the state is the reality of the moral idea’ strike him as sinister jokes… the world, for the European, is a cosmos in which each individual personally corresponds to the role he plays; for the Argentinean, it is a chaos. (SNF 310-11)

To the same extent that he disregards the individual’s national duty, he tends to tear down the link between the writer and his contemporary society. This is clearly manifested in his lecture “The Argentinean Writer and Tradition,” given in Buenos Aires in 1951. Based on Plato’s theory of inspiration, he assumes here that the writer is unaware of the true value of his work and, thus, that all the foregoing

8

9

10

This Proteus-demiourgos dichotomy is echoed in Nietzsche’s sharp statement: “Plato versus Homer; this is the complete, the genuine antagonism” (The Genealogy of Morals 3.25). This criticism joins the previous Platonic discussion on the nature of the poet’s inspiration, a discussion that reveals the ontological rift between the poet’s subjectivity and his state of inspiration. In both cases the poet’s personality cannot be considered as stable and simple. Hence, he does not fit into the philosopher’s ideal state. In his “Autobiographical Essay” he recalls: “My Father, Jorge Guillermo Borges… was a philosophical anarchist – a disciple of Spencer… Once, he told me that I should take a good look at soldiers, uniforms, barracks, flags, churches, priests, and butcher shops, since all these things were about to disappear, and I could tell my children that I had actually seen them. The prophecy had not yet come true, unfortunately.” (Quoted in: Monegal 9)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 185 — #185

i

  :     

i

185

discussions regarding the cultural function of literary creation are based on “the error of supposing that intention and plans matter much.” The whole idea of auteur engagé is thus fallacious; hence, the Argentinean writer (that is, Borges himself in particular, and in general – every possible writer) is liberated from any social indebtedness. Paradoxically, it is exactly this liberation that enables him to fulfill his cultural duty. As he wittily puts it in the closing of his lecture: We [writers] cannot confine ourselves to what is Argentine because either it is our inevitable destiny to be Argentine, in which case we will be Argentine in whatever we do, or being Argentine is a mere affection, a Mask. I believe that if we lose ourselves in the voluntary dream called artistic creation, we will be Argentine and we will be, as well, good or adequate writers. (SNF 427)

That is to say: Borges considers literary creation as a most intimate act. Essentially, the writer writes for his own sake and is required to be true to his dreamy imagination or inspiration, not to social, or worse, national benefits. Nonetheless, writing is not necessarily a solipsistic act. At the end of his solitary work, which lasts many years, and “if the stars are favorable” (as Borges puts it in his lecture given upon receiving the Premio Cervantes in 1979), the writer might discover that he is not alone, that he is “placed in the center of a vast circle of companions, familiar and unfamiliar, of people who have read and enriched his work, and in this moment he would feel that his life is justified” (TR: III, 300). The writer thus creates his own social circle rather than being committed to it; but this social aspect is only secondary to the act of literary creation, which is, by essence, a solitary act.11 Borges deals here, of course, with the faith of the creator of the written-word conceived in the context of textual cultures – a fact that makes separating the writer from society more natural than in the case of the oral bard in Plato’s times. However, his justification for this separation is much more fundamental than any cultural circumstances: it is anchored in the very essence of literary creation, in the aforementioned acknowledgement that inspiration goes beyond the writer’s intention and thus beyond his cultural function and personal preferences. The bottom line is that Borges, in sharp contrast to Plato, refuses to

11

Notice the similarity between this view and Immanuel Kant’s discussion of aesthetic genius. A genius, says Kant, is totally liberated to create his work. His radical originality is his paramount quality. But one of the marks of the genuine work of a genius is ¯ le: a group of fervent followers. that after it is done, it constitutes, by necessity, a scho See: Critique of Judgment, sections 49-50. Regarding Borges, the question as to who exactly stands in the center of this circle of readers, Borges the individual or “Borges” the narrative identity, is yet to be discussed.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 186 — #186

i

186

i

  :     

regard social function as the ultimate criterion for evaluating the writer’s creation. He simply would not consent to reducing aesthetic value on social benefits.12 The next Platonic point, the discussion of the poet’s personality, is handled in a much more complicated manner and with a serious approach. It is linked to Borges’ more general contemplation on personal identity, an issue that troubled him throughout his life. Already in his early essay “The Nothingness of Personality” (1922), he manifests a clear anti-essentialist approach toward subjective identity. Based on quotations drawn from his favorite philosophers – David Hume, Berkeley, Buddhist philosophy and, of course, Schopenhauer – he undermines the metaphysical foundations of personal identity, conceiving it as nothing more than an imaginary construct. “I propose to prove,” he unhesitatingly states at the outset of the essay, “that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without a metaphysical foundation of visceral reality” (SNF 3). He strives to erect upon this annihilation a new aesthetic stance that will be “hostile to psychologism inherited from the last century, sympathetic to the classics, yet encouraging to today’s most unruly tendencies” (ibid.). This stance – anti-essential, anti-psychological, and idealist by nature – appears as a theoretical argument in other Borgesian essays such as “Berkeley’s Crossroads” (1923), “A History of Eternity”(1936), “Personality and the Buddha” (1950), and “The New Refutation of Time” (1947).13 This view is also prominent in many Borgesian stories and poems, wherein the character’s identity is solemnly disintegrated or annihilated. This idea becomes the very thematic axis of several texts, such as “The Circular Ruins” (wherein the protagonist, a sorcerer, who dreams a man and imposes him upon reality, realizes that he himself represents a dream of another); “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim “ (wherein the group of the bird-pilgrims comprehend that they are the Simorg, the aim of their spiritual quest); and “The Theologians” (wherein the protagonist discovers that

12

13

Cf.: “[For Plato] art cannot be accepted as its own valuation; the claims of its practitioners must be scrutinized from a moral point of view, and it is morality that provides the standard of art… Morality gives us an independent standard that judges between good and bad art; the censoring of Homer and the tragedians is just the applications of this standard” (in: Moravcsik and Temko (Eds.). Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982, p.17. A great deal of ink had been spilled upon the issue of Borges’ negation of personality. The discussions are generally linked to his general skeptical or nihilistic view. A discussion that elegantly concludes the studies on this issue can be found in: Jaén, D. T. Borges’ Esoteric Library: Metaphysics to Metafiction. NY: University Press of America, 1992, Chapter 4.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 187 — #187

i

  :     

i

187

in the eyes of the unfathomable deity, he and his lifelong rival, the orthodox and the heretic, were a single person).14 Nevertheless, a more careful examination shows that Borges had never formulated a systematic approach that negates personal identity, and that his essays and lectures are replete with discussions on the unique nature of the characters of individual writers, e.g., Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Kafka, Poe, Whitman, and many others. This means that his view of this matter is quite complex, perhaps even ambivalent. Such a complex approach is clear in the closing lines of the aforementioned essay “A New Refutation of Time” (1947). The paradoxical, perhaps self-ironic title of the essay (if time is refuted, then a ‘new’ refutation is impossible) foreshadows its closing. Following a long discussion regarding the refutation of time and identity, he finally remarks: And yet, and yet… To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, appear to be acts of desperation and are secret consolations. Our destiny… is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it’s irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am that river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am that tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. (SNF 332)

The “I” or the self is thus far from being a simple illusion according to Borges. This view seems to contradict the aforementioned criticism of the self, presented for instance, in “Our Poor Individualism.” Does Borges contradict himself? A close reading of his work indicates that his criticism is directed toward the attempt to delineate the fixed form of the self, rather than its very ontological status. In other words, Borges assumes that the self or the “I” exists as an indeterminate entity. This view is made clear in his commentary to his text “Borges and I” (which will be analyzed next), given in English at Indiana University. He focuses here on the ontological status of the self, referring to his own “I”: Of course I know that the ego has been denied by many philosophers. For example, by David Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Moore, by Macedonio Fernández, by Francis Herbert Bradley. And yet I think of it as a thing … well, you may think [that] I stand simply for the thing I am, that intimate and secret thing. Perhaps one day I will find out who he is, rather than what he is. (Eighty 49)

14

This idea is in line with the Borgesian conception of the classicist approach to literature: a pan-psychic outlook that assumes that literary creation is an impersonal task, that all writers are like one abstract writer, and that literature surpasses the individual writers; consider, for instance, the essay “Coleridge’s Flower” (1952).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 188 — #188

i

188

i

  :     

In line with the Upanishad’s concept of the ‘atman,’ the Borgesian “I” is conceived as an indefinite, undefined, ‘intimate and secret’ thing: an unshaped phenomenon, and yet an entity. This indeterminacy turns the self, in some sense, into nothingness. But it is a conceptual nothingness, not an ontological one. This point may be clarified by an analogy to Zen-Buddhism’s concept of shunyata. According to Zen doctrines, reality is, strictly speaking, a ‘shunyata,’ emptiness. But this does not mean that reality does not exist, but rather that it escapes man’s logical analysis or rational order (consider, for instance, the division of the year into ‘winter,’ ‘spring,’ etc.; when exactly does winter turn into spring?) ‘Shunyata’ thus indicates the indeterminate quality of each phenomenon in reality, but this does not mean that reality is an ontological illusion.15 Rather, it means that reality exists in itself beyond rational definition, that it can be directly experienced, not abstractly contemplated. I assume that Borges’ consideration of the “I” as an ‘intimate and secret’ thing means, basically, the same thing.16 The “I” turns out to be an intimate ‘thing.’ Borges beautifully manifests this intimacy, which he calls “my secret center,” in the second half of his poem “In Praise of Darkness”(1969), where he speaks of old age as ‘the time of our greatest bliss’: From South, East, West and North The paths converge that have led me To my secret center… Now I can forget them. I reach my center, My algebra and my key, My mirror. Soon I will know who I am. (SP 301)17

15

16

17

For a detailed analysis of the concept of ‘shunyata’ in Zen Buddhism, see: Watts, Alan W. The Way of Zen. NY: Pantheon Books, 1957, part I, Chapter 3. Borges is aligned here with (perhaps even influenced by) Schopenhauer’s depiction of man’s will-to-live. According to this idea, man’s private will-to-live is actually the thingin-itself (Kant’s Noumena), since it participates in the cosmic Will, which is the ontological essence of entire reality, “the substance” that everything is made of. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer insists that man can only experience his will-to-live directly, ‘from within,’ not to abstractly contemplate or speak of it. It is, in Borges’ words, man’s ‘intimate and secret’ core of existence. See: The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Chapter XVIII. “Del Sur, del Este, del Oeste, del Norte, / convergen los caminos que me han traído / a mi secreto centro… / Ahora puedo olvidarlas. Llego a mi centro, / a mi algebra y mi clave, / a mi espejo. / Pronto saber quién soy.”

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 189 — #189

i

  :     

i

189

More exactly, the riddle of time serves as the foundation and the key to the enigma of ‘intimate and secret’ subjectivity. Thus, he said in the aforementioned quotation “Time is the substance of which I am made.” This general view of subjectivity is linked in Borges’ work to a more specific investigation of the writer’s identity. Here, the Platonic assumptions of the protean nature (Republic) and the double-faced (Ion) identity of the poet permeate the Borgesian discussions. Let us examine them one by one. The concept of the poet’s double-faced identity is based, both in Plato and in Borges, on the theme of poetic inspiration previously discussed. Since inspiration is essentially external to the poet’s or the writer’s personality, and since literary creation goes beyond its creator’s intention, then a substantial gap exists between the poet’s psychological subjectivity and his narrative image. Borges slashingly manifests this gap in the following remark: Every writer undertakes two quite different works at the same time. One is the particular line he is writing, the particular story he is telling, the particular fable that came to him in a dream, and the other is the image he creates of himself. Perhaps the second task that goes on all throughout life is the most important. (Eighty 143)

He reveals this stance using specific examples of some of his favorite writers. Regarding Edgar Allan Poe, he says that the image he created of himself “is more important than any of the lines on the pages that he wrote” (ibid.). Elsewhere he similarly says of Valéry that the value of his work is less important than the exemplary symbol that stems from this work, “a symbol of a man who is endlessly sensitive in the face of each and every phenomenon, a man for whom every phenomenon produces endless series of thoughts” (OC, II: 65). More generally, as he puts it in his essay on Quevedo, whom he calls ‘the writer’s writer’: “no writer has ever won the gift of eternal fame without impressing people with some symbol that caught the imagination of his readers, and it was exactly this disadvantage of Quevedo’s work that damaged his recognition as a genius” (OC, II: 40). In other words, according to Borges, one of the most important symbols a writer can create is a symbol of himself, an image of his own narrative identity. A writer who splendidly managed to do so was Walt Whitman, the renowned creator of Leaves of Grass. In fact, Borges was overwhelmed by the image of Walt Whitman already in his early writings, in which he considered Whitman as, more or less, the archetypical poet. In his “Autobiographical Essay” he remarks: It was also in Geneva that I met Walt Whitman, through a German translation… For a time, I thought of Whitman not only as a great poet but as the only poet. In fact, I

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 190 — #190

i

190

i

  :      thought that all poets the world over had been merely leading up to Whitman until 1855, and that not to imitate him was a proof of ignorance. (p. 30)

Borges centers on Whitman’s image more abstractly in two early essays published in Discussions (1932). In the first, “The Other Whitman,” he draws an overwhelming analogy between Whitman’s mythical image and the infinite God from the Cabbalist book Sefer Hazohar: both images, he says, are so overwhelmingly gigantic that they become abstract or invisible to the reader’s eye (OC, II: 206). The main point of the argument is the false glorification of Whitman’s image carried out by his critics, which implies a gap between public image and personal subjectivity. The second essay, “Note on Walt Whitman” (reprinted in Other Inquisitions) is more meticulous in nature. For the first time in his theoretical writing Borges directly indicates the dual nature of the writer’s image. There are in fact, he says, two ‘Whitmans’: the amiable, eloquent wild writer (el amistoso y elocuente salvaje) of Leaves of Grass, and the ‘poor man of letters’ (el pobre literato) who invented it (ibid., p. 250). The first image – the mythical one – is compared, once again, to the image of God in pantheistic systems; the other one is simply the unhappy man who lived his dull life in America. The distinction between the two, the man (el hombre) and the poetic personality (el personaje poética) is considerable. The first represents the fervent reader of Hegel and Emerson, the second – the mythical symbol of the new North American democracy. This is therefore a clear-cut dichotomy of two distinct identities that are somehow related to each other: (1) the existing-in-time subjective personality, and (2) the mythical narrative identity. In short: it is subjectivity or the ego vis-à-vis narrative or mythical identity. The relationship between Whitman’s distinct identities was clarified in a lecture given at Indiana University in 1980. Here Borges recalls Whitman’s lines in Song of Myself : “these are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, / they are not original with me” (17: 355-6). These words, he says, reflect Whitman’s great experiment, perhaps the most daring and the most successful ‘experiment’ in all literature: The central character would be called after the author, Walt Whitman, but he was, firstly, Walt Whitman, the human being, the very unhappy man who wrote Leaves of Grass. Then a magnification, or transmogrification of that Walt Whitman, called Walt Whitman, who was not the real Whitman at all, or at least not the Whitman his contemporaries knew, but a divine vagabond. (Eighty 136)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 191 — #191

i

  :     

i

191

This task constitutes the overwhelming narrative image of “Walt Whitman, a cosmos” (24: 497), so that he manages to create the narrative image of himself, the ideal image of the perfectly happy man (so different from the poor wretched journalist from Brooklyn that he was). And it was exactly this megalomaniac project that makes him, in the eyes of young Borges, the archetypical poet in the history of literature. In Plato, such an act is impossible since, as seen above, the subjective personality of the poet is totally unaware of his purely divine inspiration: The ‘hosting’ soul is totally ignorant of the nature of its ‘visitor.’ In order to manifest this total separation, Plato wittily claims in the Ion that God puts the best poems in the mouth of the worst poets. But in Borges a relation between the two is made possible and is even quite symbiotic, since he perceives inspiration as an act in which the writer receives partial content from the outside and then turns to formulate and mold it using his own personality. The bone of contention between Borges’ and Plato’s view of poetic identity is, then, their outlook regarding the nature of inspiration. Returning to Whitman, the American poet symbolizes for Borges, then, the deep gap between subjectivity and narrative identity. The first reflects an invisible (i.e., intimate), miserable man; the other – the myth of the general soul of America, an endlessly happy image, a cosmos. In Borges’ view, this gap is the basis of the main existential task of the poet: to constitute, over the course of time, his own narrative myth. He displays the burden of Whitman’s task in his poem “Camden 1892”, published in a book whose very title – The Self and the Other (1964) – reflects the problem of identity in a marked manner:18 The smell of coffee and of the newspapers. Sunday and its lassitude. The morning, And on the adjoining page, that vanity – The publication of allegorical verses By a fortunate fellow poet. The old man, Lies on a white bed in his sober room, A poor man’s habitation. Languidly, He gazes at his face in the worn mirror. He thinks, beyond astonishment now: that man Is me, and absentmindedly his hand

18

Also, in the prologue to The Self and the Other Borges defines one of the central themes of the book as “the contradiction between the passing of time and the ego which endures” (SP 147). For a detailed and eloquent discussion on Borges’ complex view of subjective identity, see: Nahson, Daniel. La crítica del mito: Borges y la literatura como sueño de vida. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009, Chapter 2.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 192 — #192

i

192

i

  :      Touches the unkempt beard and the worn-out mouth. The end is close. He mutters to himself: I am almost dead, but still my poems retain Life and its wonders. I was once Walt Whitman. (SP 213)19

The gap here is clear: it lies between the wretched and weary that surround the individual, and the ‘life and wonders’ of his poems. This is an existential perspective: the writer actively formulates the outlines of his own image, using his daily life as the raw material for his literary work. On the other hand, the totality of his work, which is constantly growing and changing, turns back and constitutes his ‘other’ self: his ‘mythical face’ or his narrative image. The process is thus dynamic in nature. As Borges puts it, “a writer is being changed all the time by his output” (Eighty 92). More exactly, the writer’s psychological persona or his subjectivity is the platform upon which the other identity, the narrative or mythical one, is being constructed over the course of time and by the act of writing. This process is, in fact, circular; as Heidegger observes in the outset of his book The Origin of the Work of Art (1935), the artist creates his artwork and, simultaneously, the artwork creates the artist. This is a sort of an ‘aesthetic circle’ in which the whole forms the parts and vice versa. Each particular work, each particular line is drawn anew and glorifies the outlines of the artist’s subjectivity. And yet, if the interrelation between the artist’s narrative identity and his work is circular, what exactly is the relation between his subjectivity and his narrative identity? Is the dynamic process presented here unidirectional in nature, moving from the artist’s subjectivity to his work and to his narrative identity? Or, rather, is it bidirectional or once again circular, which

19

El olor del café y de los periódicos. El domingo y su tedio. La mañana Y en la entrevista página esa vana Publicación de versos alegóricos De un colega feliz. El hombre viejo Está postrado y blanco en su decente Habitación de pobre. Ociosamente Mira su cara en el cansado espejo. Piensa, ya sin asombro, que esa cara Es él. La distraída mano toca La turbia barba y la sequenda boca. No está lejos el fin. Su voz declara: Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritman La vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 193 — #193

i

  :     

i

193

means that narrative and subjective identities are interrelated and inseparably interact, like Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy? This question can be related to one of Borges’ favorite themes, the theme of the double. This issue can also be seen from a Platonic perspective, in relation to the notion of mimesis, that is, in the context of the relationship between the archetypical source and its reflection (in this case, the literary image might be conceived as either the fictional reflection of the ‘real’ subjective personality, or, alternatively, as a symbol of the archetypical form of personality). Anyway, since the core of the whole process is, in Borges’ view, time in its relation to identity, we should examine this relationship from an existential viewpoint. This leads us to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who focused on art as man’s supreme existential activity, and on artistic creation as the ultimate medium for formulating one’s own character. Alexander Nehamas delves into the issue of Nietzsche’s thesis of selfformulation by means of literary writing, in his influential study Nietzsche: Life as Literature.20 He examines Nietzsche’s famous imperative “become what you are!” (Z. IV: 1) and points out its paradoxical merging of present, past, and future. He illuminates this paradox against the background of Nietzsche’s famous anti-essentialism, that is, against his repudiation of any predetermined or timeless entity (e.g., Plato’s eidos). Since there are no such timeless entities, the notion of truth – in its relation to time – is radically modified. Truth is not conceived as an eternal notion anymore; it is created within time (The Will to Power 552). This means that we create truth in the course of our existence rather than discover it (Nehamas 173 ff.). Consequently, man’s personal identity too cannot be perceived as a predetermined entity or ‘thing’ (e.g., the Platonic notion of ‘soul’ and the Hindu notion of ‘¯atman’), and identity, likewise, is something that is being created. Man’s character or personal identity is self-created over the course of time. In Nietzsche’s words, the ‘will to power’ (i.e., the fundamental principle or life-force of every life form) transcends itself incessantly and strives to reinterpret and mold itself, as well as its surroundings. As Nehamas puts it, this is “a continuous process of integrating one’s character, traits, habits, and patterns of actions with one another” (p. 185). Once again, the most important factor in this process is time or, more precisely, our existence-within-time. Nietzsche strik-

20

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 194 — #194

i

194

i

  :     

ingly displays this thought in The Gay Science (1882). He relates the process to artistic style and regards self-creation as an aesthetic act: One thing is needful – to ‘give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic-plan, until every one of them appears as art, and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye… (§ 290)

Since the core of the process of self-creation is ‘to give style to one’s character,’ and since this process is aesthetical in nature, this mission can be fulfilled by the act of literary writing. Nehamas’ fundamental idea, demonstrated using Marcel Proust’s work (pp. 188 ff.), is that literary writing becomes, for Nietzsche, the leading medium for self-creation. Literary writing is conceived as the ultimate act of ‘giving style to one’s character,’ since it gives style to literary characters in the text. Thus, the process is circular, in line with Heidegger’s stance: the molding of literary artwork is also the self-molding of one’s own personality, and the key notion in both cases is ‘style.’ In line with this analysis, Nehamas concludes that Nietzsche’s own work can be conceived as a manifestation of “a philosopher who has made of these views a way of life… Nietzsche wanted to be, and was, the Plato of his own Socrates” (p. 234). This thesis brings Nehamas closer to Borges’ view of the matter. It is unnecessary to assume that Borges upholds Nietzsche’s anti-essentialism; as shown before, it would simply be too dogmatic a stance for him. Nevertheless, it seems that Nehamas’ Nietzsche and Borges’ Whitman do have something essential in common. As we recall, Borges assumes that the writer’s most important task, which goes on over the course of his entire life (i.e., in time) and accompanies his writing, is the delineation of ‘the image he creates of himself’ (Eighty 143). The empirical subjectivity of the writer serves as the platform and the generating force of his created narrative identity.21 This outlook strikingly resembles Nietzsche’s view, as it is presented in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): The ‘work,’ whether of an artist or of the philosopher, invents the person who has created it, who is supposed to have created it: the ‘great’ [personas], as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction. (§ 269)

21

More philosophically, using Aristotle’s notions, subjectivity in Borges’ view is both the material cause, “the ‘stuff’ it is made of,” and the efficient cause, the generator, of narrative identity.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 195 — #195

i

  :     

i

195

More specifically, Nietzsche assumes that literary creation serves as a catalyst for existential self-integration. Finding the right artistic style, finding ‘the great style’ of the artist is the key to this process. It is a point where, as he puts it in The Will to Power (1901), the artist becomes “the sole ruler of the chaos of his own subjectivity” (§ 842). In line with Nietzsche, Borges assumes that literary creation is an act carried out over the course of time by the active subjectivity of the artist. This act matches the secondary phase of inspiration – a phase in which the conscious subjectivity of the artist actively expresses itself. However, there are substantial differences as well. According to Nietzsche’s theory, it is the artist’s own subjectivity that is at stake: his own chaotic personality becomes a cosmos, a unified structure governed by aesthetic order. Borges, on the other hand, underscores the gap between narrative identity – which is a mythical construct and an ideal glorification of the writer’s subjectivity – and a subjective personality. Borges’ view is, therefore, a mid-point between Nietzsche’s existential theory and Plato’s view of poetic inspiration. He presents a bipolar process that comprises subjective and narrative identities; the question regarding the exact relation between the two will be discussed later. This Borgesian tendency to separate the two ‘identities’ of the writer is expressed in his report of his collaboration with his intimate friend, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Back in the forties, Borges and Bioy signed their collaborative work under the name ‘Honorio Bustos Domecq’ (Bustos was the great grandfather of Borges and Domecq was the great grandfather of Bioy). In his conversation with Ronald Christ, Borges remarks that ‘Bustos Domecq’ was more than a mere pseudonym; he actually was a third person created by this collaboration – a fantastic author: B: When we [Borges and Bioy] write together, when we collaborate, we call ourselves H. Bustos Domecq. Now the queer thing is that… when our writing is successful, then what comes out is something quite different from Bioy Casares’ stuff or from my stuff; even the jokes are different. So we have created between us a kind of third person; we have somehow begotten a third person that is quite unlike us. C: A fantastic author? B: Yes, a fantastic author with his likes, his dislikes, and a personal style that is meant to be ridiculous; but still, it is a style of his own, quite different from the kind of style I write when I try to create a ridiculous character. I think that’s the only way of collaborating. (in: Monegal 366)22

22

Borges repeats this observation in his “Autobiographical Essay,” underscoring Domecq’s separateness: “in the long run, he [Domecq] ruled us with a rod of iron and

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 196 — #196

i

196

i

  :     

Two issues are of special interest here: the creation of a separate narrative identity in the course of writing, and the interior relations between subjective personality (in this case, the personalities of Borges and Bioy) and narrative identity. The first point is close to Plato, the second – to Nietzsche. Let us step back and consider the issue against the background of Borges’ more general reflections on personal identity. When he refers to his own experience, and to his own duality, he reveals a complex and a deeply ambivalent relationship. Consider, for instance, his poem “The Watcher” (1972). The very opening of the text manifests the fullness of the dichotomy: “the light enters and I remember who I am; he is there.” The “I” stands face to face with the other, “he.” In the second stanza the tension reaches its boiling point; the word ‘suicide’ is mentioned: On the last flight of stairs, I feel him at my side. He is in my footsteps, in my voice. Down to the last detail, I abhor him. I am gratified to remark that he can hardly see. I am in a circular cell and the infinite wall is closing in. Neither of the two deceives the other, but we both lie. We know each other too well, inseparable brother. You drink the water from my cup and you wolf down my bread. The door to suicide is open, but theologians assert that, in the subsequent Shadow of the other kingdom, there will I be, waiting for myself. (SP 325)23

This depiction manifests the complex structure and the tension of the existing-in-time identity. Borges touches on this issue in the story “The Other,” published in The Book of Sand (1975). Here he describes a strange encounter between the old protagonist ‘Borges’ and a young teenager, who turns out to be

23

to our amusement, and later to our dismay, he became utterly unlike ourselves, with his own whims, his own puns, and his own very elaborate style of writing…” (Monegal, p. 246) En el ultimo tramo de la escalera siento que está a mi lado. Está en mis pasos, en mi voz. Minusiosamente lo odio. Advierto con fruición casi no ve. Estoy en una celda circular y el infinito muro se estrecha. Ninguno de los dos engaña al otro, pero los dos mentimos. Nos conocemos demasiado, inseparable hermano. Bebes el agua de mi copa y devoras mi pan. La puerta del suicida está abierta, pero los teólogos afirman que en la Sombra ulterior del otro reino estaré yo, esperándome.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 197 — #197

i

  :     

i

197

none other than himself: the protagonist’s present identity encounters itself as it was in the past. The dimension of time is, then, the heart of the matter. In the epilogue to the book Borges mentions that his task in this story was “to ensure that the interlocutors were different enough from each other to be two, yet similar enough to be one” (CF 484). Borges points out the inner tension of otherness and sameness that underpins personal subjectivity. This tension is based on the relation between everchanging time and the fixation of identity, and Borges is interested in it due to its metaphysical or philosophical quality, not as a psychological issue. As shown in Chapter 2, this tension is most significant in Plato’s thought as well: it stems from the pivotal Platonic link between the eternal eidos and the existing-in-time concrete object (consider, for instance, the discussion of the nature of Being in the Sophist, and the ‘third man argument’ in the Parmenides).24 Plato relates this issue to the question of the endurance of personal identity in the Symposium, during the analysis of human yearning for immortality. Despite the different context, when it comes to the consideration of subjective identity the similarity to Borges’ story becomes quite apparent: For here, too, on the same principle as before, the mortal nature ever seeks, as best it can, to be immortal. In one way only can it succeed, and that is by generation; since so it can always leave behind it a new creature in place of the old. It is only for a while that each live thing can be described as alive and the same, as a man is said to be the same person from childhood until he is advanced in years: yet, though he is called the same he does not at any time possess the same properties; he is continuingly becoming a new person, and there are things also which he loses, as appears by his hair, his flesh, his bones, and his blood and body altogether. And observe that not only in his body, but in his soul besides, we find none of his manners and habits, his opinions, desires, pleasures, pains or fears, ever abiding the same in his particular self; some things grow in him, while others perish. (207 d-e)

Thus, the metaphysical consideration of human subjectivity reveals a fundamental tension between sameness and otherness, and it seems that Borges and Plato share similar interest in this tension. Yet, in Borges’ case things become far more complicated once narrative identity enters the picture. Let us conclude our discussion thus far. In the context of the scrutiny of poetic inspiration, Plato manifests an abyssal gap within the poet’s identity. It is

24

For a detailed discussion of the theme of the double in Borges’ work in relation to the formation of literary characters, see: Molloy, ibid., Chapter 3. For an analysis of Plato’s handling of the metaphysical identity, see: Harte, Verity. Plato on Parts and Wholes: The Metaphysics of Structure. NY: Oxford University Press, 2005, Chapter 2.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 198 — #198

i

198

i

  :     

a gap between (1) his ‘cavitary’ subjectivity, which passively accepts inspiration without any reflexivity, and (2) inspiration itself, which is the penetration of direct divine speech into the poet’s personality. Borges, on the other hand, presents a far more complex relation between the parts of the writer’s identity: (1) his existing-in-time subjectivity, which maintains the tension of sameness and otherness, and (2) the narrative identity, which is constructed by the writer’s work and life. Borges assumes the latter is a mythical glorification of the writer’s subjectivity, yet it is separate from it.25 The exact relationship between the two in his view still requires further elucidation. Besides this consideration of what can be called ‘the duality of the poet’s identity’ (which is based, in Plato’s theory, on his view of poetic inspiration), the other aspect of Plato’s conception of the poet’s subjectivity is derived from his notion of artistic imitation. As shown before, in Book III of the Republic Socrates shows that imitation entails, in essence, identification. “Have you not observed,” he asks, “that imitation, if continued from youth far into life, settles down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?” (395d). Consequently, the poet is conceived as a “twofold or manifold man” (397e), one that can become each and every creature. Plato reinforces his argument by drawing an implicit analogy between the poet and the mythical image of Proteus. This indeterminate trait of the poet appears to be most harmful to social order, and it thus serves as a basis for the claim that the great poets in general (Rep. III), and Homer, in particular (Rep. X), should not be allowed in the ideal state of the philosopher-king. Proteus then becomes the negative symbol of the indeterminate nature of both the poet’s personality and his effect on the souls of his audience (notice that, ironically, Plato uses one of Homer’s literary figures in opposing his cultural authority.) Apparently, the symbol of Proteus is most dominant in Borges’ work as well; the question is: what does this symbol actually mean in his work? It is worth mentioning that he already deals with the image of the Egyptian god in his early writing. In fact, in his first published poem, “Hymn to the Sea” (Seville, 1919), he compares Proteus, the sea, and human identity:

25

It is interesting to apply this Borgesian view to ‘the Socratic problem’ (i.e., the question of the relation between Socrates and Plato’s identities in the Platonic dialogues). Borges remarked in his first Harvard lecture that Plato can be conceived as a great playwright who has created the image of Socrates in his dialogues (Craft 7-8). In that case, and in light of Borges’ view of narrative identity, it can be said that the figure of Socrates in the dialogues is the narrative identity of Plato – the mythical glorification of the ideal philosopher.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 199 — #199

i

  :     

i

199

O sea! O myth! O sun! O wide resting place! I know why I love you. I know that we are both very old, That we have known each other for centuries… O Protean, I have been born of you – Both of us chained and wandering, Both of us hungering for stars, Both of us with hopes and disappointments…! (in: Autobiographical Essay, 31)

Borges returns to deal with Proteus in his late poetry. In The Gold of the Tigers (1972, reprinted in Unending Rose, 1975), we find two sequential poems that focus on the Egyptian god, “Proteus” and “Other Version of Proteus.” Like Plato, he alludes here to the image of Proteus based on Homer’s Odyssey: Proteus’ dominant characteristic is his dazzling ability to alter his form; hence the need for ‘the other version’ of the first poem arises. This ‘liquidity’ of the Egyptian god, which has so alarmed Plato’s thought, overwhelms Borges’ imagination and thought. Following a literary redescription of Homer’s text, he closes his poems with surprising remarks of his own. He points at the similarity between Proteus and the reader’s (that is – everyone’s) identity. “Do not be astonished by Proteus the Egyptian / you, who are one and many men” (De Proteo el egipto no te asombres / Tú que eres uno y eres muchos hombres), he says in the first poem. And in the second: “you are as well made from inconstant yesterdays and tomorrows” (Tú también estás hecho de inconstantes ayeres y mañanas) (OC: II, 486-487). So here Borges extends the meaning of the symbol of Proteus. For him, the Egyptian god represents the indeterminate nature of human existence in general. More precisely, Borges’ Proteus symbolizes man’s ever-changing existence in the flux of time. In another poem, “Poem of the Fourth Element” published in The Self and the Other (1964), Proteus is depicted as a more abstract symbol: the symbol of water, the fourth element in Classical thought. In the first stanza we read: The god, whom the soldier of the line of Atreus, Had corned on a beach burned by the sun, Changes in turn into lion, dragon, panther, Tree and then water. For water is Proteus. (SP163)26

26

El dios a quien un hombre de la estripa de Atreo / Apresó en una playa que el bochorno lacera, / Se convirtió en león, en dragón, en pantera, / En un árbol y en agua. Porque agua es Proteo.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 200 — #200

i

200

i

  :     

Shortly afterwards, he draws another analogy: “restless time, that wounds us and moves on, / [is] only another of your metaphors, water” (y el tiempo irreversible que nos hiere y que huye, / Agua, no es otra cosa que una de tus metáforas). As shown before, time is symbolized by water or a river in Borges’ thought: this is one of the archetypical patterns of metaphors, and it is frequently related to man’s existence-within-time. Borges clarifies this relation among time, water, and human existence using Heraclitus’ dictum, one of his favorite quotations, in one of his Harvard lectures: And then there is the famous sentence of the Greek philosopher [Heraclitus]: “No man steps twice into the same river.” Here we have the beginning of a terror, because at first we think of the river as flowing on, of the drops of water as being different. And then we are made to feel that we are the river, that we are as fugitive as the river (Craft 26).27

Whereas Proteus represents for Plato the unstable personality of the poet, for Borges it is a more profound symbol: the symbol of time in general, and of man’s restless existence-in-time, in particular. This makes Proteus a fundamental symbol in the Borgesian work: he stands for time, “the essential riddle of metaphysics” (OC: IV, 163), which is also “the essential problem of our existence” (Alifano 62). In a more concrete manner, when Plato depicts the poet as a double-faced persona while discussing inspiration in the Ion, and as a protean persona while discussing artistic representation in Rep. III, he spotlights the image of Homer. In Borges’ case, however, we have two distinct representatives: whereas Walt Whitman symbolizes, as seen above, the gap between the writer’s subjectivity and his narrative identity, it is William Shakespeare who stands for the protean nature of the writer.28 An examination of Borges’ view of Shakespeare will shed light on the relation that he draws among time, human existence, and narrative identity.

27

28

Cf. the closing lines of “A New Refutation of Time”: “Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am that river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am that tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” (SNF 332) For a detailed discussion of Borges’ view of Shakespeare, see my essay: “The Literary Proteus: The Image of Shakespeare in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges,” in: Latin American Literary Review, Issue # 68, Volume # 34, (July/Dec), Pittsburgh University Press, USA, 2006, pp. 83-105 (in Spanish).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 201 — #201

i

  :     

i

201

Borges recognizes a unique aesthetic quality in Shakespeare’s work: the uncommon ability to bring to life each and every character. In the lecture “The Enigma of Shakespeare” (1964), Borges explains this quality: In Marlowe’s work we always have a central figure… the other characters are mere extracts, they barely exist, whereas in Shakespeare’s work all the characters exist, even incidental characters. The apothecary, for example, who sells poison to Romeo and says ‘my poverty, but not my will consents,’ has already defined himself as a man by this single phrase. This appears to exceed Marlowe’s possibilities. (SNF 470)29

Consequently, he tends to think of Shakespeare “not as a man but as a multitude” (ibid.): a writer who can modify his form endlessly – a ‘literary Proteus.’ The protean nature of Shakespeare is theoretically handled in the essay “From Someone to No One” (Other Inquisitions, 1950). In the same manner that he has compared the magnified image of Whitman to the Cabbalistic God, here Borges links the image of Shakespeare to monotheistic divinity. He commences the discussion with a historical delineation of the development of God’s image in Western theology. In the bible God is “someone” (alguien), a concrete divine identity. Following a complex theological argumentation lasting centuries, God becomes a “nothing” (nada). Thus, in the work of the Irish mystic Scotus Erigena (9th century) God is perceived as the empty origin of all creation; the principle of ‘creation ex nihilo’ is thus interpreted as meaning that the ‘nihilo’ (nothingness) is God himself. Borges concludes the crux of this paradoxical process, which he calls “magnification unto nothing” (magnificación hasta la nada), as follows: “to be one thing is inexorably not to be all other things; the confused intuition of this truth has induced men to imagine that not to be is more than to be something, and that, in some way, is to be everything” (SNF 342). He goes on and associates this theological idea with the image of Shakespeare. Hazlitt felt that Shakespeare was “nothing in himself, and yet he was all that others were, or that could become,” pointing at the paradoxical combination of nothing and everything in his image. Coleridge was more radical, conceiving Shakespeare no longer as a man, but as a literary variation of the infinite god of Spinoza.

29

Cf.: “The character should be more than a string of words. And if he is not more than words, he would not be a real character…Even in the case of a character who exists, let’s say, within ten lines: ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio,’ that character exists by himself. Yet he only exists as a string of words within ten lines, or perhaps even less… And so, Yorick came into being through that technical necessity of Shakespeare. And he came into being forever. In that sense Yorick is far more than a string of words” (Eighty, 27-28).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 202 — #202

i

202

i

  :     

In fact, Coleridge alludes here to Spinoza’s dichotomy of natura naturans and natura naturata; in Ethics I:29, Spinoza explains that the latter comprises all the concrete objects that appear to us (e.g., a tree, a cat, or a rock), whereas the former stands for God’s creative power, which maintains these objects. In Spinoza’s words, natura naturans is the concrete object (the natura naturata) conceived under the aspect of eternity, in its relation to God’s essence. Natura naturans is, thus, the logical and ontological source of every natura naturata. Thus, we have here two complementary aspects of each object: it can be grasped as a concrete phenomenal ‘thing’ among things, and alternatively as a logical product of divine creative power. Coleridge projects this dichotomy onto Shakespeare’s image: whereas his subjective personality is nothing but a particular object, a thing among things or an effect in reality (cf. natura naturata), his literary creative force – his ability to animate each and every character in his work – is a manifestation of a general creative force (cf. natura naturans). As Coleridge puts it: “the universal which is potentially in each particular opened out to him [to Shakespeare] … not as an abstraction of observation from a variety of men but as the substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal existence was but one. (SNF 342)

Hugo compared him later to the ocean, which is the seedbed of all possible forms. Put simply, Shakespeare’s literary creativity, the driving force of his narrative identity, is conceived here as a formless force that can take all forms, or a shapeless substance capable of endless modifications (SNF 470). So here we encounter a combination of two aspects of the poet’s image that were discussed separately in Plato’s work: the dichotomy of the poet’s subjectivity and his narrative identity are merged with the protean quality of his persona. This combination is made possible since, unlike Plato’s assumption of external inspiration, Coleridge and his contemporaries do not distinguish the poet’s creative power from his narrative identity. Nonetheless, Coleridge and Plato do share two fundamental presumptions: (1) that the subjectivity of the literary creator is indeterminate and somewhat hollow; and (2) that the lack of form is potentially any particular form. This perspective implicitly conceives of Shakespeare as a “literary Proteus.” This implied conception becomes explicit in the story “Everything and Nothing” (1960), which is Borges’ most intricate handling of the enigma of Shakespeare. The first lines fiercely manifest the puzzle:

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 203 — #203

i

  :     

i

203

There was no one inside him [nadie hubo en él], nothing but a trace of chill, a dream dreamt by no one else behind the face that looks like no other face (even in the bad paintings of the period) and the abundant, whimsical, impassioned words. He started out assuming that everyone was just like him; the puzzlement of a friend to whom he had confided a little of his emptiness revealed his error and left him with the lasting impression that the individual should not diverge from the species. (SP 87)30

Note, first, that the protagonist has no name; throughout the text he is mentioned impersonally, in the third person, and it is only in the closing lines that his name ‘Shakespeare’ is revealed. This namelessness is a symptom of the central difficulty of the protagonist’s life, of his existential emptiness. In the opening lines this emptiness is intensified by the fact that ‘he’ has neither a name nor a face, and yet his words (his literary work) are “abundant, whimsical, impassioned.” This tension leads him to conceive of his existence as dreamy or illusionary, and Borges uses here the term “a dream dreamt by no one,” clearly alluding to the Buddhist doctrine of ‘shunyata’ (emptiness).31 Consequently, the protagonist seeks a cure for his suffering, turning first to books and later to the profession of an actor “who stands on a stage and pretends to be someone else in front of a group of people who pretend to take him for that other person” (ibid.). But theatrical work gave him only temporary relief. Hard pressed, he begins to imagine his own heroes, engaging in literary writing. Here the clash between the emptiness of subjectivity and literary creativity takes place. And here the analogy between the protagonist (Shakespeare) and Proteus becomes explicit: No one was as many men as this man: like the Egyptian Proteus, he used up the forms of all creatures [nadie fue tantos hombres como aquel hombre, que a semejanza del

30

31

Compare this odd feeling to Borges’ report of his own early childhood: “Throughout my boyhood, I felt that to be loved would be amounted to an injustice. I didn’t feel I deserved any particular love, and I remember my birthdays filled me with shame, because everyone heaped gifts on me when I thought that I had done nothing to deserve them – that I was a kind of fake” (Autobiographical Essay 24). Compare these lines to Borges’ depiction of the existence of the Buddha in the essay “Forms of a Legend” (1952): “a game or a dream is, for Mahayana [doctrines] the life of the Buddha on this earth, which is another dream. Siddhartha [the Buddha] chooses his nation and his parents. Siddhartha creates four forms that will overwhelm him; Siddhartha orders that another form shall declare the meaning of the first forms, all of which is reasonable if we think of it as a dream dreamt by Siddhartha. Or, more exactly, if we think of it as a dream in which Siddhartha figures…and as a dream which no one dreams, for in the eyes of Northern Buddhism the world and the proselytes and nirvana and the wheel of transmigration and the Buddha are equally unreal” (SNF 376).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 204 — #204

i

204

i

  :      egipcio Proteo pudo agotar todas las apariencias del ser]. Every now and then he would tuck a confession into some hidden corner of his work, certain that no one would spot it. Richard states that he plays many roles in one, and Iago makes the odd claim: “I am not what I am.” The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting inspired him to write famous lines. (ibid.)

Out of his emptiness, out of his formlessness, the protagonist procreates every possible form of human existence. This is the crux of the fundamental tension: as Proteus switches his appearance, Shakespeare manages to create a multitude of literary characters. Here we face again the assumption that only a shapeless substance is capable of endless modifications. In the last lines of the story, we face a surprising twist. Here Borges clearly alludes to the closing of the Book of Job: finally, our nameless creator-protagonist faces his own creator: The story goes that before or after his death, when he found himself in the presence of God, he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain want to be one man only, myself.” The voice of God answered him out of a whirlwind: “Neither am I what I am. I dreamt this world the way you dreamt your plays, dear Shakespeare. You are one of the shapes of my dreams: like me, you are everything and nothing. (SP 89)

This encounter links, once again, the literary creator and the divine creator. In God’s response to Shakespeare, Borges turns upside down the famous biblical dictum, converting God’s reply to Moses – “I am what I am” (eheye asher eheye, Exodus III: 14) – into the negative form “Neither am I what I am” (yo tampoco soy). This is a dazzling Buddhist modification of the biblical God, and, consequently, a negative variation of the Christian ideal of imitatio dei (imitating God). The sudden appearance of the protagonist’s hitherto hidden name can be understood in relation to other Borgesian essays. While dealing with the biblical dictum “I am what I am” in the essay “History of the Echoes of a Name” (1955), Borges points to the fact that God keeps his name hidden. He remarks that in primitive or magical cultures names are not arbitrary symbols but rather a vital part of what they define; thus, in ancient Egypt each person received two names, the common ‘little’ name known to all and the true ‘great’ name that was rabidly kept hidden (SNF 405). The true name serves, then, as the emblem of the essence of its bearer (compared to Heidegger’s notion of language as ‘openness’). Similarly, in the closing lines of the discussed story, God does not reveal his name to the protagonist, and for the very same reason he finally reveals the protagonist’s

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 205 — #205

i

  :     

i

205

true name, “my Shakespeare.” For the first time in the text, the protagonist has a proper name: he is no longer a general “he,” his essence has been revealed. This fact is connected with Borges’ aforementioned view that the writer constitutes his narrative identity throughout his entire work. This is why only now, “before or after his death,” does Shakespeare’s name appear. Put simply: the formless subject has managed to constitute, throughout his entire literary work, his narrative identity which is, as Borges puts it, “a kind of fantastic projection” of himself (Craft 104). Contradicting Plato, Borges assumes that this narrative identity is idiosyncratic, that it comprises a distinctive “narrative voice” and a certain mythical ‘face.’ Then again, what is the relation between the writer’s subjectivity and his narrative ‘voice’ or his mythical ‘face’? For Borges, this question is the key to the enigma of his own strange fate as a man of letters. In his view, this relation appears to be ambivalent, dynamic, and highly intricate. He leaves no stone unturned to manifest this complexity in the concise fragment “Borges and I” (1960). In the opening lines he displays the bare bones of the conflict: The other one, Borges, is the one things happen to. I wander around Buenos Aires, pausing perhaps unthinkingly, these days, to examine the arch of an entranceway and its metal gate. I hear about Borges in letters, I see his name on a roster of professors and in the biographical gazetteer. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typeface, the taste of coffee and Stevenson’s prose. The other one likes the same things, but his vanity transforms them into theatrical props. (SP 93)

As seen before, Plato leaves no room for such tension. He conceives of the poet as either a hollow person who serves as a passive vessel of inspiration (Ion), or a protean imitator (Rep. III). In both cases, since the poet lacks any contemplative awareness, there is no inner conflict within his identity.32 Borges’ case is much more intricate. The “I” is aware of its narrative identity, its “Borges,” which is, simultaneously, his own self and his ultimate ‘other.’ The mention of Stevenson’s name is not accidental; Borges alludes to Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, which presents exactly the same bipolar tension of sameness and otherness.

32

Compare this view with Fernando Pessoa’s famous notion of “heteronym,” meaning that the poems are composed by a separate persona. For instance, in the opening lines of his famous poem “Tabacaria” (1928), we read: “I am nothing / I shall never be anything / I cannot wish to be anything. / Aside from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world.” (Não sou nada. / Nunca serei nada./ Não posso querer ser nada. / À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.). Here, as in Plato’s theory, there is no inner tension, but a differentiation of separate personalities.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 206 — #206

i

206

i

  :     

The tension between “I” and “Borges” reaches its culmination in the following lines: To say that our relationship is hostile would be an exaggeration: I live, I stay alive, so that Borges can contrive his literature, and this literature is my justification (yo vivo, yo me dejo vivir, para que Borges pueda tramar su literatura y esa literatura me justifica.) I readily admit that a few of his pages are worthwhile, but these pages are not my salvation, because good writing belongs to no one in particular, not even to my other, but rather to language and tradition. As far as the rest, I am fated to disappear completely, and only a small piece of me can possibly live in the other one. (ibid.)

‘My justification’ is posed against ‘my salvation’: the first is fulfilled, the other fails. Likewise, the relation appears to be symbiotic, since “Borges’” existence depends on the raw material provided by the experiences of the “I,” whereas the “I” consents to stay alive for the sake of the literary work of “Borges.” Narrative identity, belonging by nature to language and tradition, cannot maintain the intimacy of subjectivity (as Borges puts it, “that intimate and secret thing”(Eighty 49)) since every use of language, every literary handling of the subject’s nature, turns the existing-in-time subjectivity into a public issue and thus belongs, once again, to “Borges.” Thereafter, Borges manifests this existential hesitation more philosophically, mentioning Spinoza’s concept of self-preservation conatus: “Spinoza knew that all things desire to endure in their being: stones desire to be stones, and tigers tigers, for all eternity. I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self [si es que alguien soy]) and yet I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or in the rich strumming of a guitar” (ibid.). By blurring the borderlines, Borges transcends Coleridge’s Spinozistic dichotomy of natura naturans and natura naturata. Which one of the two serves here as the source (naturans) and which, the effect (naturata)? The closing line is quite indeterminate: “I do not know which of us is writing this page” (no sé cual de los dos escribe esta página). This line concisely manifests the bare bones of the problem of the writer’s identity. In my previous writing I used Hegel’s dialectics in order to interpret this hesitant last line in terms of ‘self-alienation’ and ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung). Now I believe that a Socratic closing, an aporia, fits our present interpretation: “I do not know which of us wrote this page.” All in all, it appears that Borges blends Plato’s aspects of the poet’s identity, the duality and the protean, into a complex pattern. In his view there are two ‘rivals’: subjectivity and narrative identity; the two that are also one. Each one serves as ‘el otro, el mismo’ (the other, the same) in opposition to the other. And

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 207 — #207

i

  :     

i

207

each one is a sort of Proteus: subjectivity exists in and is made of protean-time; narrative identity is the literary Proteus. Thus, they rival and interplay like two mirrors that endlessly reflect each other, carrying out (to use Borges’ subtitle of one of his imaginary books, which is also the subtitle of the present study) ‘a game with shifting mirrors.’

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 208 — #208

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 209 — #209

i

i

C  The Living Labyrinth: Reading and Writing the Book

“El libro puede estar lleno de erratas, podemos no estar de acuerdo con las opiniones del autor, pero todavía conserva algo sagrado, algo divino, no con respeto supersticioso, pero sí con el deseo de encontrar felicidad, de encontrar sabiduria.” (OC: IV, 171)

“I still continue pretending that I am not blind. I still buy books. I still go on filling my house with books… I think that the book is one of the possibilities of happiness that we possess.” (OC: IV, 170; my translation). This statement, delivered in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Coliseo in 1977, sums up Borges’ personal cult of books. Indeed, the themes of the book, the act of reading, and the practice of writing are the most salient characteristics of his work; as Molloy observes, all characters in Borges’ works are ‘evident textual constructs’: they always appear with a book, a book they read, write, or interpret, a book in which they themselves may be mere signs (Molloy 33).1 Then again, what else can be expected from the writing of a man who stated that the chief event in his life was with the existence of his father’s library (Autobiographical Essay 24), and who “always thought of paradise in form and image as a library” (SP 95)? The present chapter, which concludes our entire investigation, is thus an attempt to shed light on the nature and the interrelations between the most intimate issues of Borges’ thought and existence: the nature of the book, the conflict between the written and the spoken word, the act of reading, and the ‘mystery adventure’ of the vocation of writing. On the other hand, Plato’s view of these issues is notoriously

1

We can trace this textual nature of Borges’ characters in the aforementioned fantastic story “The Other” (1975), in which the old protagonist ‘Borges’ encounters a young man on a bench along the Charles River, just to discover that the other was no other than he himself in his youth. Interestingly, the two ‘Borgeses’ identify their idiosyncratic personalities by revealing to each other their reading habits, and by interpreting and recalling literary texts. 209

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 210 — #210

i

210

i

  :     

negative. He clearly displays the inferiority of the written word in the face of the spoken one, he views reading as a futile dialogue, he considers the book as a lifeless object, and he insists that nothing ever written in verse or prose is worth taking very seriously (Phaedrus, 277e). And yet, this harsh criticism of the book manifests one of the greatest Platonic paradoxes: it is presented in the Platonic dialogues, which are carefully written texts composed by the greatest writer of ancient Greek prose. As Guthrie puts it, the question at stake is whether Plato himself regarded dialogues as a medium for communicating serious philosophy.2 How can this Platonic view be compared with the Borgesian cult of books? At first sight, we are facing here the ultimate antithesis, so that Plato’s approach can only serve as a negative background for Borges’ bibliophilia. And yet, as I will strive to show, the comparison will appear to be more intricate and some subtle points of similarities and parallel thoughts will be revealed. It appears that both Plato and Borges base their view of the book on the conflict between the written and the spoken word; both relate the act of writing to playfulness; and both praise the ideal of a dynamic and organic interpretation that stems from the free thought of the receiver. As in the previous chapters, our discussion will commence with a short historical review of the tension between the written and the spoken word in ancient Greece. The springboard will be Havelock’s historically oriented study Preface to Plato, which was discussed earlier in relation to Homer’s status in Greek culture. Havelock’s preliminary assumption is that all human civilizations rely on the capacity to store essential information in order to reuse it. From this perspective, Plato is considered as a thinker who works within the framework of a specific cultural conflict, namely, the tension between the ear and the eye – between the oral and the written word: Between Homer and Plato, the method of storage began to alter, as the information became alphabetized, and correspondingly the eye supplemented the ear as the chief organ employed for this purpose. The complete result of literacy did not supervene in Greece until the ushering of the Hellenistic age, when conceptual thought achieved as it were fluency and its vocabulary became more or less standardized. Plato, living in the midst of this revolution, announced it and became its prophet. (p. vii)

In this viewpoint, the entire spectrum of Greek philosophy is conceived in terms of a linguistic task. Thus, the Presocratics are conceived as oral thinkers

2

Guthrie, W. K. C. History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. V. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 56.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 211 — #211

i

  :     

i

211

who strove “to devise a vocabulary and syntax for a new future” (p. x) and attempted to invent a new language rather than to decipher the metaphysical structure of the universe. In this way, Socrates’ intellectual quest is “an experiment in the reinforcement of language and a realization that language had a power when effectively used both to define and to control action” (p. xi). In other words, early Greek philosophy is regarded as a reaction to a historical transition of the method of cultural storage, a transition from the oral to the written and from the concrete to the abstract.3 Plato’s work is no exception. Conceived as no less than the ‘prophet’ of the storage revolution, Plato’s main task comprises, according to Havelock, two principal goals: (1) the affirmation of a ‘subject,’ of the autonomous thinking personality, and (2) the affirmation of an ‘object,’ of an area of knowledge that will be entirely abstract (p. 234). These goals were achieved by inventing the abstract language of descriptive science, which replaced the concrete language of oral memory. Naturally, such a revolutionary invention undermined the all-too-human ‘Homeric state of mind’; the previously discussed ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry is thus conceived as a manifestation of the conflict between two modes of linguistic expression: the oral-concrete one versus the written-abstract one. Havelock’s view is based on solid historical evidence. Greek culture was indeed maintained on a wholly oral basis until the 7th or the 8th centuries B.C.; hence, the philosophic enterprise, from the Presocratics to Plato, did act within the framework of the transition from the oral to the written word. Nevertheless, the thesis seems to be too sweepingly reductive, conceiving of philosophy as a mere reaction to linguistic procedures. There is no reason to reject outright the possibility that the rise of rational thought and the transition of cultural storage were two parallel and subtly interconnected processes. At the same time, Havelock’s theory does underscore one of the most important intellectual disputes in Plato’s time: the quarrel between Isocrates and Alkidamas regarding the justification of written speeches, which might shed light on Plato’s view of the nature of the book. Documents regarding this feud include the opponents’ direct writings on the subject. Alkidamas, in his treatise “Against the Authors of Written Speeches” (indeed, a paradoxical title for a written treatise),

3

Havelock’s theory is founded on the works of Collingwood (1938), Stenzel (1927), and Tate (1928). In fact, this view is in line with the ‘linguistic turn’ of analytical philosophy, in which philosophical activity is linked to the function of language. Compare it, for instance, to Wittgenstein’s claim that “philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions,’ but rather in the clarification of propositions” (Tractatus 4.112).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 212 — #212

i

212

i

  :     

dogmatically claims that only the word that arises spontaneously out of man’s thought during the act of oral speech is “possessed of soul and life,” and that the carefully pre-prepared written speech – a text such as this, which is written by Isocrates ‘the maker of words’ – is, in fact, not a ‘speech’ (logos) at all but only a faint copy, an imitation or an “unmoving and useless painted figure” (quoted in Friedlander, p. 111). This stance is clearly reflected in Plato’s Phaedrus, both in its critical argumentation and in its use of the ‘unmoving figure’ metaphor. But are Plato and Alkidamas’ viewpoints identical? In order to address this question properly, let us have a closer look at the Phaedrus. Following a detailed discussion of the nature of oratory, Socrates reflects on the condemnation of the “speech-writer” Lysias, which clearly reflects Alkidamas’ attack on Isocrates. The fundamental tension here lies in the conflict between the written and the spoken word. Following a short examination of the issue, Socrates reaches the conclusion that “it is clear to all that writing speeches is not in itself a disgrace” (258d), and that ‘the disgrace’ depends on the poor quality of the logos, that is, in speaking and writing ‘not well but disgracefully and badly.’ This leads to the question of the propriety and impropriety in writing: how writing should be done well and how it is improper (274b). Socrates begins his examination by mentioning a myth regarding the nature of the written word. He underscores, first, the difference between tradition and truth: “I can tell something I have heard from the ancients; but whether it is true, they only know. But if we ourselves should find it out, should we care any longer for human opinion?” (274). Thus, the following tale serves as a philosophical myth: not a manifestation of authoritative tradition but a stimulus for autonomously investigating the issue. Thereafter, Socrates depicts an Egyptian myth that tells of Theuth, “the father of letters.”4 Theuth is an Egyptian god, the incessant inventor of numbers, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, draught and dice and, most important of all – letters. He presents his inventions to Thamus, the great king of Egypt who lives in the great city of the upper region. The gods discuss the virtues of Theuth’s inventions and when they arrive at the uses of letters, the inventor proudly assesses that they “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered” (274e).5

4

5

It is interesting to point out the phonetic similarity between the Egyptian name of the father of letters, Theuth, and the Hebrew name of letters “otiout”. The function of the spoken word as an elixir, a pharmakon, is the gist of Derrida’s interpretation of the Phaedrus in his treatise Plato’s Pharmacy. In his analysis, Derrida

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 213 — #213

i

  :     

i

213

Surprisingly, Thamus’ response is quite unenthusiastic. He distinguishes innovation from judgment, reflecting Plato’s distinction between the originality of the inspired poet and the mastery of the philosophers’ interpretation: “one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another” (ibid). The question at stake is pragmatic: what is the exact effect of letters on the memory and wisdom of their users? Thamus explains: And now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no parts of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. (275 a-c)

The fundamental conflict lies in the gap between appearance and reality, which is related to the difference between inward and outward reliance. This tension accommodates Plato’s dominant epistemological notions of genuine knowledge (episte¯me¯) and philosophical memorizing (anamnesis) that presuppose an introverted process of self-examination. As Tigerstedt remarks, the fundamental problem arising in this myth is not the gap between hearing and reading, but rather the passive approach of the reader versus the active dialogue between the philosopher and his disciple (Inspiration 10). Additionally, Nightingale’s intertextual reading of the myth is most revealing. Theuth’s inventions, she claims, as well as his status as ‘the father of words,’ parallel the image of Palamedes in Greek mythology. The popular myth relates that Odyssey, shaken by his envy of Palamedes’ invention of letters, buries a treasure in Palamedes’ tent and writes a cryptic letter in which the latter expresses his gratitude to the King of Troy for his gift, given to him for ‘betraying’ the Greeks. Palamedes – a tragic figure – is executed; the father of letters is destroyed by his own offspring (Nightingale

seems to overstress the contradictory etymological meanings of the Greek word pharmakon, which depicts both ‘cure’ and ‘poison.’ He bases his whole interpretation of Plato’s theory of language on this notion, linking Phaedrus to his own notion of ‘différance.’ This seems to me a rather speculative interpretation of Plato’s thought - an inverted hermeneutical pyramid, so to speak.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 214 — #214

i

214

i

  :     

10). This paradox parallels the Platonic myth regarding the fact that Theuth ascribes to letters a power opposite to their real function. In both cases the ‘father,’ blinded by his faith, is unaware of the trickery of his children; in both cases the written word is untrustworthy. Put more correctly, the main point here is the nature of the written word: Plato concludes that it is potentially harmful, and yet he seems to refrain from negating its value altogether. Thus, his criticism of the written word resembles his ambivalent attack on poetry expressed in Rep. III: in the positive pole, both writing and poetry might be useful only if properly and carefully handled; in the negative pole, it is recommended to leave them off. Thereafter, manifesting the outcome of this assumption, Socrates depicts the proper approach toward writing: “He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person… if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written” (275c). In other words, written words should be considered as catalysts, not as vehicles of new knowledge. This claim is in line with Plato’s statement in the Seventh Epistle that there can be no book of philosophy and that real knowledge – the sudden light ‘kindled in the soul’ – is achieved by “much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together” (341 d-e). Hence, only oral conversation, accompanied by the living presence of the philosopher-teacher, can lead the pupil to the path of philosophical knowledge; books can only serve as catalysts to the process (Borges says the same thing about aesthetic theories). This disapproval of the written word is based, in fact, upon Plato’s aforementioned ideal of the ‘ongoing shared search’ (suzêtêsis); any process that fails to accomplish this ideal is turned down.6 Socrates’ following claim is the apex of this attack on the written word. In an almost verbatim repetition of Alkidamas’ argumentation he compares the written text to lifeless paintings: Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. (275d)

6

In other texts Plato adds more general arguments against language, which is perceived as a second-rate mimesis (Cratylus) or a ‘weak instrument’ (Seventh Epistle). But these arguments apply to language as such, written and spoken, rather than attempting to express knowledge through the written word.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 215 — #215

i

  :     

i

215

Plato repeats this sardonic analogy in the Protagoras, aiming at the speeches of the Sophists: when one has a question to ask any of them, “like books, they can neither answer nor ask; and if anyone challenges the least particular of their speech, they go ringing on like brazen pots, which when struck continue to sound unless someone puts his hand on them” (329a). Here, the image of the lifeless book is intensified by that of the empty pot. More analytically, the analogy between books and painting should be considered in relation to Plato’s criticism of artistic representation, presented in Rep. X and discussed in Chapter 4. There, he claims that paintings – the representatives of all mimetic arts – are lifeless, and at the same time pretend to be real. This means that painting, mimetic arts, and books maintain delusional and deceptive aspects. But we should also bear in mind that Plato’s image of painting is not entirely negative and that in Rep. VI he depicts the philosophers as painters who envisage the idea of the Good and imprint it in the structure of the just society of the ideal state (500e). This may indicate that the written word, if used properly by the writer, can be useful.7 Socrates, continuing, reveals another Achilles’ heel of the written text. “Every written word,” he says, “when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly revealed it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself” (275e). The father-child relation, used in the former myth to depict Theuth’s baseless affinity with written letters, underscores the helpless dependence of the book upon its writer. The book, then, is depicted as the total antithesis of the philosopher. It does not distinguish between the proper pupil and the dull one, it cannot defend itself against false interpretations, it cannot explain its own meaning, and it relies totally

7

The tension between Plato’s repetition of Alkidamas’ arguments against the book and his claims that writing speeches is not in itself a disgrace (258d) seem to indicate an ambivalent approach toward the act of writing - an ambivalence reflected by the fact that the greatest prose writer of ancient Greece was the most severe prosecutor of the written word. Some Platonic scholars tried to settle this ambivalence by assuming that Plato had an esoteric doctrine that was delivered orally in the Academy and which is only slightly alluded to in his writing. This assumption indeed justifies his negation of writing. The question is what, then, was the motivating force that led him to invest so much energy in writing and refining so many dialogues. For a further discussion of the link between the criticism of writing and Plato’s Esoterism, see Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy: IV, § 63 ff.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 216 — #216

i

216

i

  :     

on the writer. Plato focuses, thus, on the pedagogical aspects of the book. Visà-vis the flaunted weakness of the book, as an educator he poses the “living and breathing word” of philosophical dialektike¯, “of whom the written word may justly be called the image” (276a). This means that the written word is a conceived as a mere reflection of the spoken one: that oral utterance is the original speech and writing is its inferior reflection. Plato beautifully describes this superiority of the spoken word by making it “the word which is written with intelligence in the mind of the learner, which is able to defend itself and knows to whom it should speak, and before whom to be silent” (276a). Writing a book versus writing in the mind: this is an antithesis that totally subordinates the former to the latter. Then he uses an organic metaphor to depict ‘the living and breathing word’ in total contrast to the lifeless-picture metaphor of the book. He compares serious oral discourse (which pertains, of course, to philosophy) to writing: [oral discourse] Is far nobler, when one employs the dialectic method and plants and sows in a fitting soul intelligent words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, which are not fruitless but yield seed from which there spring up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process for ever, and which make their possessor happy, to the farthest possible limit of human happiness. (276e-277a)

The growth of the spoken word is constant, dynamic, and vivid – in contrast to the inanimate letters. The philosopher, a writer in the soul, is the total opposite of the pathetic ‘father of letters.’ Finally, the adequate receiver of philosophical discourse, someone carefully chosen, is far from the ‘ignorant and hard to get along with’ passive reader of the written word. This set of arguments is in accordance with the description of philosophical discourse in the Symposium. There, too, philosophical dialogue is seen as a ‘pregnancy of soul,’ belonging to persons “who in their souls still more than in their bodies conceive those things which are proper for soul[s] to conceive and bring forth” (209a). Interestingly, in the Symposium Plato includes among these persons Homer and Hesiod ‘and all the other good poets,’ who leave behind fine offspring “to procure them a glory immortally renewed in the memory of men” (209d). The main point, and the sole criteria of evaluating speaking and writing, is the superiority of the active, dynamic, evolving process carried out in the minds of the receivers. We will see next that regarding this issue, Plato is not so far from Borges. All the above leads Plato to carefully consider the value of writing. We have seen that his starting point was the claim that writing is not disgraceful per se. But now, following criticism of the written text and analysis of the disadvantages of

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 217 — #217

i

  :     

i

217

the act of reading, what can be said about a man who decides to write? Extending the organic metaphor, Socrates wonders (276b): would a sensible husbandman, who has seeds that he cares for and which he wishes would bear fruit, plant them with serious purpose in the heat of the summer in some garden of Adonis and delight in seeing them appear in beauty in eight days, or would he do that sort of thing only in play and for amusement? Would he not prefer to have his seeds planted in fitting ground, and be pleased when those that he had sowed reached their perfection in the eighth month? This approach indicates that Plato’s golden path – located between the poles of supporting and repudiating writing – is the consideration of writing as a playful activity. The crux of his argument is the claim that writing is justified only as a mode of a play. As he puts it (possibly, referring to himself): he who has knowledge of the just and the good and the beautiful, The gardens of letters he will, it seems, plant for amusement, and will write, when he writes, to treasure up reminders for himself, when he comes to the forgetfulness of old age, and for others who follow the same path, and he will be pleased when he sees them putting forth tender leaves. When others engage in other amusements, refreshing themselves with banquets and kindred entertainments, he will pass the time in such pleasures as I have suggested. (276d)

Writing appears to be a noble pastime, no more and no less. But what kind of writings does he exactly refer to here? It can be assumed that he points his words toward philosophical – that is, abstract intellectually oriented – writing. But Socrates’ concluding remark extends the scope. He claims that any man who thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much that is playful and that no written discourse, whether in meter or prose, deserves to be treated very seriously should not be called ‘a writer of poetry,’ ‘a writer of speeches’ or ‘a writer of law’ (he explicitly mentions here the great names of Homer, Lysias, and Solon). Rather, “he ought not to derive his title from such writings, but from the serious pursuit which underlies them.” That is: such a writer is entitled to be called ‘philosopher’ or ‘lover of wisdom’ (278c). We should pay attention to two pivotal points here. First, that it is the approach toward the written word, not the genre of writing, which counts: any writer who (1) considers writing as play, (2) can defend his writing, and (3) writes with real knowledge – will be considered a philosopher. Second, that in genuine writing playfulness underlies the serious pursuit of the writer. This means that the writer’s intention should be completely earnest, whereas his mode of writing is allowed to be frisky. Genuine writing, thus, sustains the tension between

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 218 — #218

i

218

i

  :     

the inner core and external appearance.8 The last point is reflected in the (possibly spurious) Sixth Epistle, wherein the closing sentence states that “seriousness (spoude¯) and playfulness (paidia) are sisters” (323d). This paradoxical claim might point at Plato’s ambivalent approach toward his own lifelong engagement in writing. It may also justify his dialogic and dramatic mode of writing, which leads us back to the question of the merging of logos and mythos in the Platonic work discussed at length in the first chapter.9 Guthrie seems to hit the nail on the head when he concludes the issue: We can see that when he [Plato] describes writing as the wise man’s paidia he was not denying its serious value. At the very least it could be educative, and by making it a mimesis of dialectics, the ‘common search’ [suzêtêsis] which was in his eyes the ideal of philosophy, he has done his best for those who… have not had the good fortune to listen to Socrates or the discussions in the academy. (Ibid., p. 63)

The close reading of the Phaedrus which was offered here indicates that eventually, Plato’s view of the book is not wholly negative. His springboard supports the claims that the written word is a mimesis of the ‘living and breathing’ oral conversation, that reading is in essence a passive activity, and that the book is a lifeless instrument. And yet he also tends to justify writing as a philosophically oriented activity, assuming that it will be done in a playful manner. Writing is, strictly speaking, a serious game; likewise (back to Guthrie’s question) the Platonic dialogues might be regarded as a medium for communicating a serious pursuit. Once again, the ideal and the measuring criteria in Plato’s viewpoint is the ability to generate an organic, continuous process in the mind of the receiver. In light of these insights, let us now move to examine Borges’ cult of books.

8

9

Doesn’t this seeming/being tension of the written word repeat the case of Socrates’ eironeia? Consider, for instance, Alcibiades’ praise of Socrates in the Symposium: “he spends his whole life in chaffing and making game of his fellow-man. Whether anyone else has caught him in a serious moment and opened him, and seen the images inside, I know not; but I saw them one day, and thought them so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous, that I simply had to do what Socrates bade me” (261e-217a). This tension is also the gist of Socrates’ last and enigmatic prayer in the Phaedrus: “O beloved Pan and all ye other gods of this place, grant to me that I be made beautiful in my soul within, and that all external possessions be in harmony with my inner man” (279b). From this point of view, Plato’s view of writing reflects Socrates’ ironic mode of oral philosophizing; it is ironic writing that combines playfulness and seriousness. Many rivers of ink have been spilled over Plato’s notion of play in its relation to philosophy and writing. For a detailed discussion of these issues, see: Morgan pp. 168-178; Friedlander pp. 123 ff.; Guthrie (History of Greek Philosophy, vol. IV) pp. 56-63.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 219 — #219

i

  :     

i

219

Interestingly, Borges speaks of Plato (following Bernard Shaw) as a great playwright, a writer, despite his awareness of the latter’s harsh criticism of the written word. Consider his remark in one of his Harvard lectures: I remember that Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates, even as the four evangelists were the dramatists who invented Jesus. This may be going too far, but there is a certain truth in it… in order to make the book into a living thing, he invented – happily for us – the Platonic dialogue, which forestalls the readers’ doubts and questions… in some of these dialogues, Socrates stands for the truth. In others, Plato has dramatized his many moods. And some of those dialogues came to no conclusion whatsoever, because Plato was thinking as he wrote them; he did not know the last page when he wrote the first. He was letting his mind wander, and he was dramatizing that mind into many people. (Craft 7-8)

This is, indeed, quite a Borgesian variation of Plato’s image. Perhaps Borges does here to Plato the same thing that Plato did to Socrates, recreating him in his own image. In any case, he ties here philosophical writing with the quest for truth, with the act of ‘letting the mind wander,’ in a manner quite close to the Platonic ideal of suzêtêsis. Regarding Borges’ own approach, there is no doubt that books, writing, and reading are the very cornerstones of his oeuvre and his ‘literary destiny.’ His work is the outcome, and the emblem, of the modern ‘cult of books.’ That being so, in the epilogue to his book Borges, Oral (1979) he crowns the book as “this instrument without which I cannot imagine my life, and which is no less intimate for me than my hands or my eyes” (OC: IV, 163; my translation).10 Consider also his most intimate remark in the epilogue of his book of poems History of the Night (1977): “Like certain cities, like certain persons, books have been a most delightful part of my life. May I repeat that the library of my father was the capital event of my life? The truth is that I have never left it, in the same manner that Alonso Quijano has never left his library” (OC: III, 202; my translation). Besides these expressions of emotional enthusiasm and zealous devotion, the question is about Borges’ intellectual approach: what does he have to say in regard to the nature of the book, the act of reading, and the justification of writing? And how does his view on these subjects relate, if at all, to Plato’s outlook? Let us focus first on the nature of the book. Borges did theoretically consider this issue in his essays and public lectures. He distilled his view on the book in his famous essay “On the Cult of Books,” published in Other Inquisitions

10

Cf. the poem “Mis libros,” OC: III, 110.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 220 — #220

i

220

i

  :     

(1951), and, in a more detailed manner, in his lecture “The Book,” published in Borges, Oral (1979). Obviously, his emotional starting point is quite different from Plato’s and he works within the context of the modern, and his own, ‘cult of books.’ He even mentions “the friendly gravitational force” of the book (Alifano 34).11 Even so, his analytical discussion of the book is based upon the tension between the written and the spoken work – similar to Plato’s investigation in the Phaedrus. His historical survey of the evaluation of books follows, here and elsewhere, Spengler’s treatise The Decline of the West (Untergang des Abendlandes).12 Therefore, he opens his lecture “The Book” by mentioning that the Western ancients – the Greeks and the Hellenics – conceived the book as no more than a substitute (sucedáneo) for the spoken word. This view is supported by Plato’s claim that the written word is a dim mimesis of the spoken one and by Aristotle’s claim that writing functions as no more than a guide to accompany oral instruction. This approach is sharply expressed in the Latin dictum ‘Scripta manent verba volant’: ‘the written word stays, the spoken word flies.’ It is a mistake, explains Borges, to think that this phrase means that the spoken word is ephemeral and empty; rather, it indicates that the ancients assumed that the written word is something rigid and lifeless (duradero y muerto), whereas the spoken one is winged and light (alado y liviano) (OC: IV, 165). As a result, all the great ancient masters of mankind have been oral. One of the leading representatives of this approach was Pythagoras, or, more precisely, his disciples, the Pythagoreans. To our knowledge, Pythagoras himself never wrote a word so that he would not tie himself to the written word. He surely felt that writing kills and the spoken word, conveyed by the spirit, animates. From this approach sprung the Latin phrase ‘Magister dixit.’ As Borges explains: Pythagoras never wrote, wishing that his thought would keep on living in the minds of his disciples. From this came… the Latin phrase ‘magister dixit,’ the master has said. This doesn’t mean that the master imposes his opinion on his disciples, just because he said so; on the contrary, it affirms the disciple’s liberty to keep expounding upon the initial ideas of the master… Pythagoras dies completely and they, by a sort of transmigration, keep thinking and rethinking his thoughts, but if someone denounces them for expressing something new, they find refuge in this formula: the master has said. (OC: IV, 166; my translation)

11 12

Cf. the poem “Al adquirir una encyclopedia,” OC: III, 296. Borges also mentions Spengler’s theory in: “On the Cult of Books” (1951), “The Cabbala” (1978), and the Harvard lecture “The Riddle of Poetry” (1968).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 221 — #221

i

  :     

i

221

The core of this interpretation is the total liberty of the disciple to expound upon and develop the thoughts of his master: the liberty to nourish the original ideas. This liberty is based on the mode of storage of the spoken word: the ideas of the master are stored (Plato would say: written) in the flexible memories of the disciples, and thus, dynamic development is made possible. This view is in accordance with Plato’s aforementioned organic metaphor of dialogic teaching, conceived as a “seed from which there spring up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process forever” (277a). In other words, the teaching of the spoken word enhances the liberty to interpret and fosters – by the flexible quality of memory – the creativity of the disciple. Later on, he says, there arrives ‘from the East’ a new concept, totally alien to the mentality of classical antiquity. The core of this concept is the claim that the written word anticipates and excels over the spoken one. This assumption is the Archimedean point of several ‘Eastern’ doctrines including the Cabbala, the circle of Jewish mysticism that has overwhelmed Borges’ thought and imagination. Similar to Democritus’ atomistic theory, the Cabbalists assumed that the Hebrew letters are the fundaments of all creation. In his lecture on the Cabbala (1978), Borges depicts this doctrine as something that “must shock our Western mind”: When we think of words, we think historically: that words were first spoken and then later they became composed of letters. In contrast, the Cabbala believes that letters came first, that they were the instruments of God, not the words signified by the letters. It is as if one were to think of writing, contrary to experience, as older than the speaking of the language. (Seven Nights 99)

This idea is conspicuous in one of the fundamental and most enigmatic books of the Cabbala, The Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzira), which Borges managed to read in several translations and which he repeatedly mentions in his essays and stories.13 In a nutshell, the book depicts how God created the universe by means of combining the letters of the alphabet. The fundamental assumption is that each letter contains a unique ontological force and that the combination of letters, the combination of their forces, creates separate entities that form the concrete objects in the universe. For instance, light has the qualities of being bright and warm due to the special traits of the Hebrew letters ‘O’ and ‘R,’ which compose

13

On Borges’ description of his reading of Cabbalistic texts, see: Alazraki, Borges and the Kabbalah, pp. 54 ff.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 222 — #222

i

222

i

  :     

the word OR (light).14 Letters determine reality: this idea is certainly not alien to Borges’ existential posture. As he admits, “somehow the central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry” (Craft 100). The fact that the Cabbalistic doctrine of letters ‘shocked’ his mind (as he admits in his lecture on the Cabbala) stems exactly from this surprising harmony between his inner feeling and the mystical doctrine. That is: the Cabbalist doctrine is a historical projection of Borges’ most intimate feelings toward the written word. So now he faces two alternative ideas: the Western (represented by Plato), which assumes that writing is a substitute for oral utterance, and the Eastern (represented by the Cabbalists), in which writing precedes and outshines speech and reality. This antithesis provides him with what Wittgenstein calls a ‘perspicuous representation,’ a synoptic perspective on the matter, which is similar to viewing a landscape from the peak of a mountain.15 From the heights of this viewpoint, Borges realizes that the Cabbalistic hypothesis is closer to our modern ‘cult of books’ than is the Greek-Hellenic one. This leads him to consider another fundamental antithesis that captures his thought and (as we will see below) his imagination, namely, the dichotomy between two distinctive types of books: the classical and the holy. As seen above, Plato draws one exclusive model of a book, a pictorial model, and focuses on two modes of writing – the naïve and the playful. Borges, on the other hand, conceives of two distinct models of book: the holy, which came from Hebrew tradition and underlies the idea of the Holy Ghost (Ruach Hakodesh), and the classical, which pertains to Ancient Greece and is based on the aforementioned oral inspiration of the Muses. It is interesting to note that whereas in other places he speaks of the ideas of the Holy Ghost and the Muses as ‘basically the same’ (see Chapter 5), here he stresses their differing cultural background. He manifests this antithesis in all its splendor in the outset of the famous essay “On the Cult of Books” (1951): In Book VIII of the Odyssey, we read that the gods weave misfortune so that future generations will have something to sing about; Mallarmé’s statement “the world exists to end up in a book” seems to repeat, some thirty centuries later, the same concept of an aesthetic justification for evils. These two teleologies, however, do not entirely

14

15

On an analysis and a historical survey of The Book of Creation, see: Scholem, Gershom. Elements of the Kabbalah and its Symbolism. Trans. Yosef Ben Shlomo. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1976, Chapter XI. See especially Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, § 122.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 223 — #223

i

  :     

i

223

coincide; the former belongs to the era of the spoken word, and the latter to the era of the written word, one speaks of telling and the other of books. (SNF 358)

What is the classic book in his eyes? As he explains in his lecture on the Cabbala, the word ‘classic’ stems from the Greek word classis, which etymologically denotes ‘a fleet.’ Thus, “a classical book is a well-run book; everything must be on board with it – shipshape as they say in English… A classical book is one that is eminent in its genre” (Seven Nights 95). Yet, he stresses that preeminence is not totality. A classic text is still a human creation; therefore, it is not infallible and it is by no means perfect word by word. Consequently, Horace could have said “at times, good Homer nodded” (no one would say that at times the good Holy Spirit nodded), and thus Plato could have ordered the expulsion of the great poets from his ideal state without being considered a heretic. He demonstrates this approach using the case of Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad was considered the apex of poetry but it was certainly not thought that every word, every hexameter, was inevitably admirable. Rather, it was considered as something changeable, and thus was studied in a historical fashion; put simply, “it was placed within a context” (Seven Nights 96). Borges expounds the analysis of this view in his essay “On the Classics” (1951). Here he assumes that the special rank of the classical book is not anchored in its own qualities, that is, by its unique structure or inner aesthetic traits. Rather, it stems from a certain mode of expectations and reading. In the closing lines of the essay he concludes: “A classical book (I repeat) is not one that possesses certain qualities; classical is the book which many generations of readers… read in certain zeal and with somewhat mysterious loyalty” (OC: II, 151; my translation). The classical book’s privileged rank is therefore a matter of nomos, an all-too-human convention determined by a community of readers. Vis-à-vis this concept, Borges poses the ‘Eastern,’ far more mysterious notion of the Holy book. “The diverse, and occasionally contradictory, teaching grouped under the name of the Cabbala derive from a concept alien to the Western mind, that of the sacred book,” so he declares in the outset of his lecture on the Cabbala (Seven Nights 95). The gist of this theory is that the Holy Spirit has condescended to literature, that divinity wrote a holy book (“which is as incredible as imagining that God condescended to become a man” (Seven Nights 78)). What would be, Borges wonders, the nature of such a book? He assumes that in it nothing can be accidental, absolutely nothing, since it was created by an infinite intelligence. The holy book ought to be, strictly speaking, a total book: each and every aspect of it must be predetermined and infinitely meaningful.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 224 — #224

i

224

i

  :     

This idea is found, so he indicates, in all monotheistic traditions. The Muslims consider the Koran as ‘the mother of the book’; as the Islamic mystic Al-Ghazali asserts (in a manner approaching the Platonic view of the archetype), “the Koran is copied in a book, is pronounced with the tongue, is remembered in the heart and, even so, continues to persist in the center of God and is not altered by its passage through written pages and human understanding” (SNF 360). The Jewish Cabalists approached the issue from a more human standpoint: they presumed that a total book must require a total act of interpretation. Hence, they treated the Scripture as if it were a coded text, a cryptogram, devising odd hermeneutical methods targeted at deciphering its infinite depths. Borges gives a few examples of these methods: taking a letter from a certain word and reading it as the first letter of the following one; reading a page line by line from right to left and then from left to right and so forth; calculating the numerical value of words (gematria), considering, the first letter as 1, the second letter as 2, and so on. Naturally, he finds great interest in this method since it expounds the possibilities of reading and the freedom of the reader. Consequently, in the early essay “Vindication of the Cabbala” (1932), he vindicates – as he points out – “not the doctrine but the hermeneutical procedures” of the Cabalists (SNF 83). He assumes that the premise that God, the perfect being, dictated the bible word by word, turns the holy book, necessarily, “into an absolute book where the collaboration of chance is calculated at zero.” Hence, it is absolutely justified as well to study the text to the point of absurdity, to numerical excess, as did the Cabalists (SNF 86). In light of this ideal, he imagines in one of his late stories a supernatural book, the “Book of Sand” (1975). In this book no page is the first page, and no page is the last; like sand, the book is without a beginning or an end (CF 482). In fact, he anticipates the nature of this extraordinary book in the footnote to the earlier story “The Library of Babel” (1941), when he suggests A single volume of the common size, printed in nine-or-ten point type, that would consist of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages… using that silken vademecum would not be easy: each apparent page would open into other similar pages; the inconceivable middle page will have no ‘back.’ (CF 118)16

16

Consider also the infinite library in the story “The Library of Babel” (1941), and the book, which is the total labyrinth of time, in the story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941). The latter is an ‘incomplete but not false image’ of the universe as conceived by Tsui Pen, who “believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another,

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 225 — #225

i

  :     

i

225

In these imaginary variations on the Cabbalistic ideal of the total book, Borges projects the principle of infinite interpretation (a finite book with an infinite meaning) onto the physical aspect of the imagined book, creating an infinite book with countless pages. Such a book is, of course, an eerie object for the human reader: it generates the horror infinitum, the horror in the face of infinity. The similarity between this view and Borges’ aforementioned emotional approach toward the Platonic archetype, discussed in “The History of Eternity,” is obvious. In a similar manner, the protagonist of “The Book of Sand” melancholically expresses his distress: Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous. It was cold consolation to think that I, who looked upon it with my eyes and fondled it with my ten flesh-and-bone fingers, was no less monstrous than the book. I felt it was a nightmare thing, an obscene thing, and that it defiled and corrupted reality. (CF 483)

So we have here the endless interpretation of the Cabbalists on the one hand, and the horror infinitum in the face of the physically infinite object, on the other. In a more general manner, Borges considers two different types of books: the classic and the holy. The first stems from Greek-Hellenic tradition, which considers writing as a mere substitute for the oral word; the second pertains to ‘Eastern’ Cabbalistic tradition and considers the written word as the source of reality, assuming the ideal of the total holy book as written by divine intelligence. The first is in line with Plato’s recognition of the superiority of oral dialogue over writing and the second concurs with Platonic metaphysics by assuming the possibility of a total, eternal object: the Cabbalistic view of letters clearly reflects Plato’s archetypes. Since the concept of the classic book is essentially and historically Western, it would be expected that modern readers would prefer it over the other, alien, ‘Eastern’ one. And yet, as Borges indicates in “The Cult of Books,” “a book, any book, is for us a sacred object” (SNF 358); that is to say, modern readers conceive the book as a somewhat sacred object, in line with the Cabbalistic approach. This is the core of the Western, and of Borges’, ‘cult of books’: the concept of the book as an end in itself, not as a means to an end, which would produce “the unique destinies of Flaubert and Mallarmé, of Henry James and James Joyce” (SNF 360) and, surely, of Borges himself. Borges strikingly manifests this approach in the closing lines of his lecture on the book:

fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities” (CF 127).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 226 — #226

i

226

i

  :      The concept of a sacred book, of the Koran or of the bible or the Vedas – where it is said that the Vedas have created the universe – this concept might belong to the past, but the book still possesses certain holiness [santidad] that we moderns must try not to lose… if we read an ancient book, it is as though we were reading the entire time that has passed from the day it was written to our present day. This is why it is important to maintain our cult of books. A book might be full of errors, we can reject its narrator’s opinion, but still it conserves something sacred, something divine [todavía conserva algo sagrado, algo divino] – not in a superstitious sense but indeed in the sense of our desire to find happiness, to find wisdom, in it. (OC: IV, 171; my translation)

It is not clear what exactly he means when he demands that we maintain the holiness of the book. Is it an ontological argument regarding the true nature of the book? An existential argument, regarding the function of reading in our life? An ethical imperative? What is beyond doubt is that at this point the former classic/holy dichotomy solemnly collapses. This means that every book maintains, or seems to maintain, a sacred aspect.17 This applies to the classical book as well: every classical book should preserve some aspect of sacredness. As he remarks in the essay “On the Classics” regarding the history of the reading of the I Ching (The Book of Changes), a classical book is a book “ that a certain nation or a certain group of nations decides to read as if everything in it is meaningful, fateful, deep as the cosmos and can become the subject of endless interpretation” (OC: II, 151. my translation). In a more comparative manner, it is obvious that in this point Borges is quite far from Plato’s criticism of the ‘lifeless’ book. A book that contains an apparently sacred aspect is certainly worth the effort of reading and rereading. The justification of the act of reading: this is indeed the crux of contention between their postures, but this seems to need further clarification. As seen before, Plato defines reading in the Phaedrus as either passive memorization or an inutile attempt to generate a dialogue with a lifeless picture-like object. In the face of this futility, he poses the ‘living and breathing’ oral conversation that ‘plants a seed’ in the soul of its interlocutors and generates real intellectual growth. Things are quite different, however, when it comes to Borges’ view of reading. Although the Argentinean writer never formulated a systematic

17

It is in this context that Borges repeatedly recalls that when Bernard Shaw was asked whether he truly believed that the Holy Spirit wrote the bible, he replied that “every book worth being reread has been written by the Holy Ghost”; he admits that he “completely concurs” with this claim (Alifano 33), which accommodates his aforementioned view of inspiration.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 227 — #227

i

  :     

i

227

‘theory’ of reading, he does have a certain fundamental opinion on the subject. He clearly manifests this opinion at the outset of his aforementioned lecture on the book (1979). He first ponders the uniqueness of the book as a physical object: Out of the different instruments that man has produced, the most outstanding is, without doubt, the book. The others are mere extensions of his body. The microscope and the telescope are extensions of man’s sight; the telephone is an extension of the voice; then we have the plow and the sword – the extension of his arm. And yet, the book is another thing: the book is an extension of man’s memory and imagination. (OC: IV, 165; my translation)18

Being the extension of memory and imagination turns the book into the precious repository of our dreams and past.19 It is interesting that, although he relates the book to man’s memory similarly to Plato, he does not distinguish memory from imagination (what could possibly be the difference between the two, he wonders). No doubt, this indicates his idealistic inclination. But this is still not the heart of the matter. The core of the Borgesian view of reading is found in his conception of reading as the space of what he calls “the aesthetic event” (el hecho estético). As he says in his lecture “On Poetry” (1979): Emerson said that the library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume – a thing among things. Yet when we open it, when the book surrenders itself to the reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for we change; we are the river of Heraclitus who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly and each reading of the book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text, too, is the changing river of Heraclitus. (Seven Nights 76-77)

More analytically, the Borgesian notion of the aesthetic event is, in depth, an idealistic concept. It is only the encounter of the book and the reader that produces the meaning of the text; hence, this meaning is dynamic, ever-changing.20 In his first Harvard lecture he straightforwardly associates the reader/text encounter

18 19

20

Cf. the article “El Libro” in: TR: III, 222-223. Cf. the poem “Alexandria, 641 A.D.” which depicts the ancient library of Alexandria, burned down by the caliph Omar, as the great memory of mankind (OC:III, 167). Borges’ notion of the aesthetic event as an encounter of reading is also in line with the reader-response theories. Both underscore the active role of the reader in construct-

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 228 — #228

i

228

i

  :     

with Berkeley’s assumption that the taste of an apple is neither in the apple itself nor in the mouth of the eater but in the contact between them (Craft 3).21 This encounter, this contact, animates the book in the mind of the reader, and Borges describes this event in a rather magical manner, as something that comes alive. Elsewhere he describes the aesthetic effect as the feeling of “that imminence of revelation as yet produced” (SNF 346). This ‘magic’ that involves reading is not merely a rhetorical artifice. It is related to the Borgesian notion of the aesthetic aspect of each and every word, according to which words are experienced not only as a means of communication but also as magic.22 Consider, for instance, his intimate closing remark in the epilogue to his book The Self and the Other (1969): The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. The Dane who pronounced the name of Thor or the Saxon who uttered the name of Thunor did not know whether these words represented the god of thunder or the rumble that is heard after the lightning flash. Poetry wants to return to that ancient magic. Without fixed rules, it makes its way in a hesitant, daring way, as if moving in darkness. Poetry is a mysterious chess, whose chessboard and whose pieces change as in a dream and over which I shall be gazing after I am dead. (SP 149)

21

22

ing the meaning of the text. For the theoretical aspects of this group, see the introduction in: Tompkins, Jane P. (Ed.). Reader-Response Criticism. From Formalism to PostStructuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Yet, it should be borne in mind that Borges relates his view to idealistic theories, not to literary ones. Cf. Craft 3-5; OC: III, 171. Borges beautifully manifests this idea in the poem “A Book” (OC: III, 181) in which he describes Shakespeare’s Macbeth as holding “sound and fury and night and scarlet.” The closing lines read: “That silent uproar sleeps / in the circle of one of the books / on the quiet shelf. It sleeps and waits” (Ese tumulto silencioso duerme / en el ámbito de uno de los libros / del tranquilo anaquel / duerme y espera). Needless to say, the book awaits its reader; as Borges explains at Indiana University in 1980: “…and this book is dead, this book is lifeless, and this book in a sense is lurking, is awaiting us. So I wrote the last line. I think it runs: ‘it sleeps and waits’” (Eighty 68). Borges directly expresses his view of the aesthetic aspect of language in his lecture on poetry (1979): “we apply aesthetic categories to languages… to say moon or to say mirror of time are two aesthetic events, except that the latter is the work of a second stage, because mirror of time is composed of two unities, whereas moon gives us, perhaps more effectively, the word, the concept of the moon. Every word is a poetic act” (Seven Nights 78). I have dealt with this issue in depth, comparing Borges to the early thought of Wittgenstein, in my essay: “What Can Be Shown Cannot Be Said: Wittgenstein’s Doctrine of Showing and Borges’ ‘The Aleph’,” in: Variaciones Borges, Journal of Philosophy, Semiotics and Literature, Vol. 13/2002, April 2002, pp. 41-56.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 229 — #229

i

  :     

i

229

The aesthetic event, the encounter between the reader and the text, is in essence an occurrence carried out in time. At this point Borges uses the metaphor of Heraclitus’ river, which, as seen in the previous chapter, symbolizes for him the constant flux of time. This is a view of literature – and generally of art – as a dynamic occurrence in which a ‘magical’ aesthetic event occurs; as he puts it at Harvard: “Whistler said ‘art happens,’ that is to say, there is something mysterious about art. I would like to take his words in a new sense. I shall say: art happens every time we read a poem” (Craft 6). Philosophically, Borges concurs here, first, with Bergson’s notion of ‘creative evolution’ (L’Evolution créatrice) and especially with his notion of ‘duration’ in which the subjective experience of time can be best understood through creative intuition.23 Besides, and in a more ontological manner, Borges’ view of the aesthetic act resembles Heidegger’s later thought, in which art is perceived as the scope of the occurrence of the ‘openness of Being.’ Lastly, there seems to be tension between the two fundamental aspects of reading and the aesthetic event in Borges’ outlook. The first aspect underscores the emotional reaction of the reader: the happiness or the pleasure that is beyond meaning and understanding. This aspect is dominant in the case of reading poetry. As he puts it in his lecture on poetry (1977): The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings? (Seven Nights 81)

This aspect is in alignment with Kant’s aesthetic theory, presented in his Critique of Judgment (1790). Like Kant, Borges assumes here that the core of the judgment of taste or the aesthetic event is a physical experience of aesthetic pleasure; like Kant, he assumes that this aesthetic pleasure is unique, direct, purposiveness without purpose, non-cognitive, and disinterested.24 On the other hand,

23

24

On Bergson’s view of creative evolution and intuition, see: Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, Chapter 3, § 237 ff. On Bergson and Borges’ work, see: Sawnor, Edna E. “Bergson y Borges.” In: Cuadernos Americanos, 185, # 6, Nov-Dec 1972, pp. 247-254. On Kant’s concept of the judgment of taste, see: Kemal, Salim. Kant’s Aesthetic Theory. 2nd Edition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, Chapter 1. Generally, the Kantian thesis pertains to subjectivist aestheticism. Eddy M. Zemach has outlined the formal argument of subjectivist aestheticism as follows: “Unlike the noncognitivists, subjectivist aestheticians hold that aesthetic sentences have a propositional content; unlike the real-

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 230 — #230

i

230

i

  :     

the second aspect of the Borgesian reading is essentially intellectual. It focuses on meaning-construction and interpretation, pointing out the demand for the active role of the reader, similar to Plato’s theory. Thus, he says in the closing of his essay “The Wall and the Books” (1950): Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, all want to tell us something, or have told us something we shouldn’t have lost, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of revelation as yet unproduced is, perhaps, the aesthetic event. (SNF 346)

I assume that, essentially, these aspects – the emotional and the intellectual – are complementary in Borges’ thought. It is obvious that Borges’ conception of reading is essentially different from Plato’s theory. In contrast with Plato’s depiction of the pathetic dialogue of the reader with the lifeless book, Borges poses a dynamic, enchanting encounter in which a ‘mysterious’ aesthetic event takes place. The Platonic metaphor of the inanimate object stands face to face with the Borgesian metaphor of Heraclitus’ river. The main point in Borges’ view is thus the dynamic and vivid quality of the act of reading. That being so, in one of his conversations he uses an organic metaphor to depict the nature of literature: I see it [literature] as something living and growing. I think of the world’s literature as a kind of forest, I mean it is tangled and it entangles us but it’s growing. Well, to come back to my inevitable image of the labyrinth, well it is a living labyrinth, no? A living maze. Perhaps the word labyrinth is more mysterious than the word maze. (Burgin 1998: 22)25

The beautiful metaphor of the ‘living labyrinth’ is associated, aside from the act of reading, with the conception of language as a shifting phenomenon.26 The

25

26

ists, they deny that “X is A” attributes the aesthetic property A to the object X. Instead, they hold that “X is A” states that as a result of having observed X, one undergoes a special experience: the aesthetic experience” (Zemach, Eddy M. Real Beauty. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997, p.23). As Zemach observes, the weak point of this approach resides in the difficulty to theoretically distinguish aesthetic sensation from other emotional reactions. Compare to the closing remark of the epilogue of The Book of Sand, wherein Borges says: “I doubt that the hurried notes I have just dictated will exhaust this book, but hope, rather, that the dreams herein will continue to ramify within the hospitable imagination of the readers who now close it” (CF 485). Compare to Borges’ comment on Homer’s metaphor ‘dark-wine sea’:

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 231 — #231

i

  :     

i

231

fundamental aspect of these organic images – the entangled forest, the living maze – is the vital evolution in time. Borges manages to create an overwhelming symbol of this vividness of the text in his story “The God’s Script” (1949), in which a priest-prisoner Tzinacán is in search of a hidden divine script – a magical phrase capable of warding off all evil. In the last leg of a long, arduous search, the priest realizes that the script, the hidden text, is ciphered on the skin of a jaguar that is imprisoned right next to his cell. The jaguar becomes for him a ‘living maze’: I imagined to myself the first morning of time, imagined my god entrusting the message [the divine script] to the living flesh of the jaguars, who would love one another and engender one another endlessly, in caves, in cane fields, on islands, so that the last men might receive it. I imagined to myself that web of tigers, that hot labyrinth of tigers, bringing terror to the plains and pastures in order to preserve the design. (CF 251)

The dynamic encounter between the reader and the organic-like book has another aspect: it involves a wide liberty of interpretation by the reader, and since meaning is constructed within time, every act of reading enriches the text and nourishes its growth. Note that here the Borgesian reader matches the Pythagorean disciple who had total freedom to continue to enhance his master’s thought; reading reflects the magister dixit principle: the reader relates to the narrator as the Pythagorean disciple relates to his master – both have the liberty to enhance the thought or the imagination of their predecessors. Thus, Borges reflects a Pythagorean concept that pertains to the spoken-word tradition in his conception of the act of reading that resides in the depth of ‘the cult of books’. So these are the fundamental ideas underlying Borges’ view of reading: (1) that the history of reading enhances the meaning of the text; (2) that meaning, the reader, the act of reading, and the book are inseparably interconnected; (3) that the pivotal aspect of reading and meaning-construction is time. These thoughts justify the existence of literary criticism, as well. Consider his remark in his lecture on the book (1979):

“When we speak of the ‘dark wine sea’ we think of Homer and of the thirty centuries that lie between us and him. So that although the words may be much the same, when we write ‘the dark-wine sea’ we are really writing something quite different from what Homer was writing. Thus, the language is shifting…” (Craft 14). See also his early essays “Literary Pleasure” (1927) and “An Investigation of the Word” (1927) and, of course, the case of rewriting Cervantes’ novel in the story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” (1941).

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 232 — #232

i

232

i

  :      I spoke in the past against literary criticism but now I am going to contradict myself… Hamlet is not exactly the Hamlet that Shakespeare conceived in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Hamlet is the Hamlet of Coleridge, of Goethe and of Bradley. Hamlet was reborn [ha sido renacido]. The same happens with the reading of the Quixote… the reader has enriched the book. Thus, reading an ancient book is as if we were reading all the time that has passed since it was written. (OC: IV, 171; my translation)

Borges’ organic metaphor of the book draws a connecting link to Plato’s thought as well. As mentioned, it is this lack of the possibility of development-intime that led Plato to undervalue the book, and the very same principle is the basis of his praise of the philosophical dialogue. He even uses an organic metaphor, similar to Borges, to depict this process: the ‘living conversation’ is compared to planting ‘a seed in the soul’ of the disciple, a seed that may grow and flourish in his memory and thought in the course of time. Hence, the ideal of the dynamic growth-in-time might serve as a mutual measuring-criterion of both Borges’ concept of reading and Plato’s notion of the philosophical dialogue. They even use similar organic metaphors. Borges’ idea of creative reading is in accordance with Plato’s demand for free thinking; they both require developing an autonomous response from the receiver. That is to say: they share the same principle but they apply it to a different – even contradictory – mode of language-usage. In other words, the intellectual aspect of Borges’ notion of reading is, in essence, in line with Plato’s ideal of ongoing-shared-search: the intellectual aspect of the Borgesian hermeneutics and the Platonic ideal of suzêtêsis are, in fact, compatible procedures. This leads us to the last leg of our investigation, to comparatively consider the act of writing. As previously discussed, Plato wrote in the Phaedrus that, all things considered, writing is not disgraceful in itself; and yet, it should not be taken too seriously. The writer will write, if he writes, only in a playful manner (paidia). Nevertheless, this playfulness, if it manifests a serious quest, is legitimate and can be regarded as a philosophical activity. Borges approaches the issue from a different angle. “Many things have happened to me, as to all men,” he says, “but somehow the central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry” (Craft 100). And in the Autobiographical Essay he speaks of the burden of his father’s expectations: From the time I was a boy, when blindness came to him, it was tacitly understood that I had to fulfill the literary destiny of my father. This was something that was taken for granted (and such things are far more important than things that are merely said). I was expected to be a writer. (p. 26)

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 233 — #233

i

  :     

i

233

So writing is for him a vocation, a destiny (“that strange destiny of Borges,” as he says in one of his poems) that also serves to justify his existence. As he puts it in “Borges and I”: “I live, I stay alive, so that Borges can contrive (tramar) his literature, and this literature is my justification” (SP 93). Interestingly, here he shares with Plato the idea that human life should be justified by action: for him it is the act of writing, for Plato’s Socrates – the ongoing philosophical investigation. In addition, it is interesting to find some Borgesian considerations in which writing is perceived as a sort of play, or an exercise, in line with Plato’s thesis. As he says in “Borges and I”: “I went from suburban mythologies to playing games with time and space. But these games are Borges’ games now – I will have to think of something else” (ibid.). Likewise, in the preface of the 1954 edition of his History of Infamy, he admits that “the man who made it was a pitiable sort of creature, but he found amusement in writing it (se entretuvo escribiéndolo); it is to be hoped that some echo of that pleasure may reach the reader.” Directly afterwards, he adds that the stories of the book are “the irresponsible game of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself (se distrajo) by changing and distorting the stories of other men” (CF 4). Taking all differences into consideration, I assume that basically both Borges and Plato share the same meaning when they speak of writing as ‘play.’ Far from Kant’s notion of literature as a “free game with ideas” and unlike the concept of art as a free play aiming at producing ‘independent beauty’ and nothing more, I observe in Plato and Borges a deeper sense of the playfulness of art. It is a ‘serious’ play in which writing might express, and lead toward philosophical seriousness (Plato) or acknowledgement of the mystery of existence (Borges). As Borges sharply puts it in the epilogue of Brodie’s Report (1970): I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth – for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity. (CF 345)

The word, the book, reading, and writing: these aspects are all delicately interconnected in the thoughts of Plato and Borges. In general, Plato manifests quite a clear-cut approach. For him the spoken word is more efficient than the written; the book is a dull guide of the soul; reading is futile; writing is a playful activity. Similar to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry, I assume that here, too, Plato’s view stems from his attempt to construct and negatively define the special status of philosophical dialectics, vis-à-vis the imperfection of the written text. As for Borges, his approach is, as expected, more enthusiastic and complex. For him the written word, and language in general, are a magical and

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 234 — #234

i

234

i

  :     

aesthetic act; the book, besides being a physical object, possesses a certain kind of mystery or ‘friendly gravitational force’ or even remote traces of holiness; reading (and, more importantly, rereading) is one of the forms of happiness, being a dynamic ever-changing activity in which the mysterious aesthetic event takes place; and finally writing, besides its playfulness and despite its subordination to the act of reading, may also serve as a sort of existential justification. In an overall view, I assume that the act of reading is the Archimedean point of both the Borgesian and the Platonic approach to the subject of textual engagement. Both strive at achieving a lively, dynamic activity in the mind of the receiver. Whereas Plato poses reading vis-à-vis the ‘writing in the soul’ as two antithetical processes, Borges stresses that the emotional aspect transcends intellectual meaning-construction – especially in the case of poetry – and that the reader’s total liberty of interpretation enriches the meaning of the book in the course of time. Regarding the role of the readers of their own texts, I believe that here the intellectual aspect of Borges’ work and Plato’s dialogues share in common a certain invitation to the reader: an invitation to participate in the experience of an ongoing, shared search that Plato calls ‘dialectics’, whereas Borges refers to it as ‘constant amazement.’ From this aspect, as Aristotle suggests in his Metaphysics L (982b15), Platonic philosophy and Borgesian literature are derived from the same generating force, the same wonder (thaumatos) in the face of the mysterious existence of the world.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 235 — #235

i

i

S B

Works by Borges and Plato (I) Jorge Luis Borges Antología personal. Buenos Aires: Emecé. 1961. Obras completas (4 vols.). Barcelona: Emecé, 1989. Obras completas en colaboración. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1979. Textos recobrados 1919-1929. Barcelona: Emecé, 1997. Textos recobrados 1931-1955. Barcelona: Emecé, 2001. Textos recobrados 1956-1986. Barcelona: Emecé, 2003. Textos cautivos. Trans. Enrique Sacerio-Garí and Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1986. Poemas (1922-1943). Buenos Aires: Losada, 1943. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998. Selected Non-Fictions. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin, 1999. Selected Poems 1923-1967. London: Penguin, 1985. This Craft of Verse. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu (Ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. “An Autobiographical Essay.” In: Alazraki, Jaime (Ed.). Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. “Baruj Spinoza.” In: Aizenberg, Edna (Ed.). Borges and His Successors: the Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Dreamtigers. Trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Moreland. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. Other Inquisitions. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. Fictions. Anthony Kerrigan (Ed.). London: John Calder, 1964. A Personal Anthology. Anthony Kerrigan (Ed.). New York: Grove Press, 1967. The Book of Imaginary Beings (in collaboration with Margarita Guerrero). Trans. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. New York: Dutton, 1969. The Aleph and Other Stories (1933-1969). Trans. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. New York: Dutton, 1970. Seven Nights. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 2009. 235

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 236 — #236

i

236

i

 

(II) Plato The Dialogues of Plato (12 Vols.). Trans. H. N. Fouler, W. R. M. Lamb, P. Shorey, R. G. Bury. Cambridge: The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, reprint edition (1914).

Secondary Sources A, Ion Tudro. Reasoned Thematic Dictionary of the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges. Hanover: Ediciones del Norte. 1990. A, Edna. Religious Ideas/Eternal Metaphors: The Jewish Presence in Borges. Ann Arbor: Columbia University, University Microfilms International, 1981. A, Edna (Ed.). Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. A, Jaime. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Columbia Press, 1971. A, Jaime. La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges. Madrid: Gredos, 1983. A, Jaime (Ed.). Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. A, Jaime. Borges and the Kabbalah and Other Essays on his Fiction and Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. A, Roberto. Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges. Trans. Nicomedes Suarez Arauz. New York: Grove Press, 1984. A, Julia and R, Christopher (Eds.). New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient. Cambridge: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University Press, 2002. A, Louis and Z, Florian (Eds.). Bibliografía de la obra de Jorge Luis Borges. Paris: E. H. E. S. S., 1995. B, Daniel. The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges: An Index to References and Allusions to Persons, Titles, and Places in His Writings. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. B, Daniel. Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. B, Willis (Ed.). Borges at Eighty: Conversations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. B, Willis. “Borges, Poet of Ecstasy.” In: Carlos Cortínez (Ed.). Borges the Poet. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1986. pp. 134-141. B, Ana María. Borges the Labyrinth Maker. Trans. Robert Lima. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 237 — #237

i

  :     

i

237

B, Horacio Gorge. Jorge Luis Borges, Bibliografía total 1923-1973. Buenos Aires: Eardo, 1973. B-V, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to his Mind and Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. B, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911. B, George. A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. B, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Ed. H. Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. B, Ray. Understanding Eastern Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1997. B  B, Lisa. A Rhetoric of Silence and Other Selected Writings. Berlin: Mouton, 1995. B  B, Lisa. Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation. Trans. W. Egginton. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. B, Ruby. The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. B, Harold. (Ed.). Jorge Luis Borges: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. B, W.H. Borges and Philosophy: Self, Time and Metaphysics. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003. B, Barbara. Aphrodite and Eros: the Development of Erotic Mythology in Early Greek Poetry and Cult. London: Routledge, 2007. B Z, Louise and P S, Pauline. Religion in the Ancient Greek City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. B, Richard. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969. B, Richard (Ed.). Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. B, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. B, J. Greek Philosophy: Tales to Plato. New York: Macmillan, 1964. B, S. H. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics. New York: Dover Publications, 1951. C, Ronald. The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion. New York: New York University Press, 1969.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 238 — #238

i

238

i

 

C, Diskin. Platonic Questions: Dialogues with the Silent Philosopher. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. C, Kathleen (Ed.). The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Hitherto Unpublished. London: Pilot Press, 1949. C, Frederick C. A History of Medieval Philosophy. 2 vols. Westminster: Image Press, 1962. C, Francis Macdonald. Plato and Parmenides: Parmenides’ Way of Truth and Plato’s ‘Parmenides’. London: Routledge, 1958. C, Carlos, (Ed.). Simply a Man of Letters: Paper of a Symposium on J. L. Borges. Orono: University of Maine at Orono Press, 1982. C, I. M. An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1963. D T, Alfonso and D T, Fernando (Eds.). Jorge Luis Borges: Pensamiento y saber en el siglo . Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 1999. D, L. S. and P, Cyrena N. The Contemporary Writer; Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1972. D, Jacques. Plato’s Pharmacy. Trans. by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981. D G, Norman Thomas, H, Daniel and MS, Frank (Eds.). Borges on Writing. Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1994. D, Lowell and I, Ivar (Eds.). The Cardinal Points of Borges. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. D, Denis and R P, Michael. “Jorge Luis Borges: Interview.” Denis Dutton - Philosophy / Criticism / Aesthetics / Anthropology / Commentary / Amusements. Web. 24 Oct. 2010. . E, Arturo. Lengua y literatura de Borges. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2006. E, W. and J, D.E. (Eds.). Thinking with Borges. Aurora: Davies Group, 2009. E, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. London: Arkana, 1989. E, J. A. Plato’s Defence of Poetry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. F, Osvaldo. En diálogo. Vol. I. Buenos Aires: Siglo I, 2005. F, Gail (Ed.). Plato: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 239 — #239

i

  :     

i

239

F, Stanley Eugene. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenthcentury Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. F, Evelyn and P, Hughes. A Dictionary of Borges. London: Duckworth. 1990. F, David William. Jorge Luis Borges: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland. 1984. F, Paul. Plato: an Introduction. 2 Vols. Trans. Hans Meyerhoff. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. G, Lloyd P. Aristotle and Other Platonists. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. G, Christopher. “Dialectic and the Dialogue Form”. In: Annas, J. and Rowe, C. (Eds.) New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. G, J. E., K, C. and G, R. (Eds.). Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco. New York: Routledge, 2002. G, G. Plato and Other Companions of Socrates. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1875. G, W. K. C. Socrates. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. G, W. K. C. The Sophists. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. G, W. K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy. 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. H, Verity. Plato on Parts and Wholes: the Metaphysics of Structure. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. H, Eric Alfred. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. H, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. H, Nicolás. Jorge Luis Borges, Bibliografía completa. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997. H, Ted (Ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. H, M.C. (Ed.). The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. J, T. Didier. Borges’ Esoteric Library: Metaphysics to Metafiction. New York: University Press of America, 1992. J, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Mentor Books, 1958.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 240 — #240

i

240

i

 

J, Kate. Reading Borges after Benjamin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. K, C. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. K, George E. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. K, Salim. Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. K, Eva C. Plato and Greek Painting. Leiden: Brill, 1978. K, Søren. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Vol. 1, ed. and tr. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967. K, Søren. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. Trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. K, R. The Songs of Homer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962. K, Joseph J. Heidegger on Art and Art Works. Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1985. L, Susan B. The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. L, Rupert. Plato’s Theory of Art. London: Routledge and Kegan, 1953. L, C. Jared (Ed.). A Descriptive Catalogue of the Gorge Luis Borges Collection at the University of Virginia Library. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. L, Steven. Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. M, G. Donald (Ed.). Literature as Philosophy, Philosophy as Literature. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1987. M, Richard P. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. M, Gabriela. Borges: una estética del silencio. Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1980. MG, Robert. The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. M, Arne. Theories of Mimesis. London: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 241 — #241

i

  :     

i

241

M, Floyd. Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991. M, Deborah K.W. Aristotle’s Theory of Language and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. M, Sylvia. Signs of Borges. Trans. Oscar Montero. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. M, Emir Rodríguez. Jorge Luis Borges: a Literary Biography. New York: Dutton, 1978. M, J. M. E. and T, Philip (Eds.). Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. M, C. F. and O, A. “Entrevista con Borges.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 201 (1966). M, Kathryn A. Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. M, Raoul. From Word to Silence. 2 vols. Bonn: Hanstein, 1986. M, Shlomy. “What Can Be Shown Cannot Be Said: Wittgenstein’s Doctrine of Showing and Borges’ The Aleph.” Variaciones Borges, Journal of Philosophy, Semiotics and Literature 13 (2002). M, Shlomy. “The Literary Proteus: The Image of Shakespeare in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges.” Latin American Literary Review 34. 68 (2006). M, Shlomy. “Borges and Cabbalistic Language: Ontology and Symbolism in ‘The Rose of Paracelsus.’” Variaciones Borges, Journal of Philosophy, Semiotics and Literature 23 (2007). M, Shlomy. “Language as Picture in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Plato’s Cratylus.” Tópicos 35 (2009). M, Penelope. Plato on Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. N, Daniel. La crítica del mito: Borges y la literatura como sueño de vida. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009. N, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. N, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Vol. II. Trans. Paul V. Cohen. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934. N, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. N, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 242 — #242

i

242

i

 

N, Andrea Wilson. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. P, John and M, Coyle. Literary Terms and Criticism. London: Macmillan Press, 1984. P, F. E. Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon. New York: New York University Press, 1967. P, Edgar Allan. Edgar Allan Poe’s Works. Vol. XIV. New York: AMS Press, 1979. P, Roger. Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1993. P, Gerald A. (Ed.). Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993. R, Jaime. El laberinto del universo: Borges y el pensamiento nominalista. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Librerías Fausto, 1976. R, Kevin. Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy. New York: Hegeler Publishers, 1983. R, R. Plato’s Early Dialectic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. R, S. The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought. New York: Routledge, 1988. R, W. D. Plato’s Theory of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951. R, Bertrand. Mysticism and Logic. London: Penguin, 1954. S, Edna E. “Bergson y Borges.” Cuadernos Americanos 185. 6 (1972): 247254. S, D. N. The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato’s Theaetetus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. S, J.M. Art of the Modern Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. S, Gershom. Elements of the Kabbalah and its Symbolism. Trans. Yosef Ben Shlomo. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1976. S, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Trans. E. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. S, Arthur. “On Man’s Metaphysical Need.” In: The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009. S, J. E. “Plato’s Use of Myth in the Education of the Philosophic Man.” Pheonix 40 (1986): 20-34. S, F. “Parmenides and the Description of Perfect Beauty in Plato’s Symposium.” American Journal of Philology 92 (1971): 62-70.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 243 — #243

i

  :     

i

243

S, Myrna and F, Ruth (Eds.). Borges en Jerusalén. Madrid/ Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2003. S, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001. S, Joseph. Literary Criticism and Philosophy. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1983. S, John. Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. T, Eugene. Plato’s Idea of Poetical Inspiration. Commentationes Humanarum Literarum 44 (1969). T, Eugene. Interpreting Plato. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1977. T, Julius. “Socratic Midwifery.” The Classical Quarterly 37.01 (1987): 97102. T, Jane P. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. U, John. Picked-Up Pieces. New York: Knopf, 1976. W, P.A. The Socratic Movement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. W, Alan W. The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957. W, Carter. The Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969. W, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966. W, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. New York: Humanities Press, 1974. W, J.E. The Son of Apollo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. W, John Henry. “The Origin of Plato’s Cave.” In: Harvard Studies in Classical Philosophy XVII (1906). Y, Donald. Jorge Luis Borges: Life, Work and Criticism. New York: York press, 1985. Y, Donald. “A Colloquy with Jorge Luis Borges.” In: Richard Burgin (Ed.). Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Z, Robert. Platonic Myth and Platonic Writing. Washington: University of America, 1981. Z, Eddy M. Real Beauty. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 244 — #244

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 245 — #245

i

i

I  N*

Heidegger, Martin, 72, 88–90, 97, 192, 194, 204, 229 Heraclitus, 20, 103, 109, 151, 200, 227, 229, 230 Hesiod, 25, 29, 48, 76, 155, 159, 177, 216 Homer, 25, 29, 30, 48, 117, 131, 132, 135, 146, 155, 159–161, 166, 175, 177–182, 184, 186, 187, 198–200, 210, 211, 216, 217, 223, 230, 231

Aristophanes, 28, 52, 56–58, 88, 162, 176 Aristotle, 31–33, 36, 54–56, 75, 76, 78, 79, 89, 96, 101–103, 127, 149–151, 183, 194, 220, 234 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 132 Bergson, Henri, 229 Berkeley, George, 75, 147, 148, 186, 228 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 41, 195, 196 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 103, 187, 232 Buddha, 186, 203

James, Henry, 225 James, William, 98, 99, 103, 162

Calvino, Italo, 19, 81 Cansinos Assens, Rafael, 65 Cervantes, Miguel de, 48, 49, 154, 165, 166, 185, 231 Chesterton, Gilbert Kieth, 73, 168 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 83, 102, 103, 110, 112, 167, 187, 201, 202, 206, 232 Croce, Benedetto, 140, 141, 149

Kant, Immanuel, 53, 89, 103, 147, 185, 188, 229, 233 Keats, John, 102, 104, 111, 112 Kierkegaard, Søren, 59, 60, 64, 82 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 67, 69, 71 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 155, 222, 225

Dante Alighieri, 72, 146, 187 Derrida, Jacques, 212

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 41, 51, 64, 68, 78, 131, 155, 184, 193–196 Novalis, 111

Eco, Umberto, 19, 81, 101 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34, 43, 47, 190, 227

Parmenides, 19, 54, 55, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 100, 103, 108, 109, 128, 156, 197 Pessoa, Fernando, 205 Plotinus, 44, 105, 137, 139 Poe, Edgar Allan, 16, 163–166, 169–172, 187, 189 Protagoras, 53–56, 63, 64, 69, 71, 74, 75, 215

Fernández, Macedonio, 65, 68, 187 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 159, 232 Gorgias, 53–57, 63, 64, 69, 74, 75, 96 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 32, 138, 139, 164 245

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 246 — #246

i

246

i

  

Pythagoras, 220 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 32, 33, 40, 41, 65, 71, 72, 75–77, 107–109, 111, 119, 122, 168, 186–188 Shakespeare, William, 16, 32, 131, 171, 173, 176, 187, 200–205, 228, 232 Shaw, Bernard, 47, 219, 226

Spinoza, 36–39, 46, 65, 77, 97, 103, 110, 168, 201, 202, 206 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 205 Whitman, Walt, 16, 176, 187, 189–192, 194, 200, 201 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 13, 34, 39, 64, 65, 76, 77, 97, 102, 149, 166, 211, 222, 228 Wordsworth, William, 30, 32

Sontag, Susan, 131, 158 Spengler, Oswald, 220

Xenophon, 56

* Not included: Borges, Plato, Socrates.

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 247 — #247

i

i

i

i i

i

i

i “Mualem” — 2011/12/7 — 8:06 — page 248 — #248

i

i

i

i i

i