borges mirror

Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos

Wor(l)ds Through the Looking-Glass: Borges's Mirrors and Contemporary TheoryAuthor(s): BEATRIZ URRACASource: Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Otoño 1992), pp. 153-176Published by: Revista Canadiense de Estudios HispánicosStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27762982 .

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BEATRIZ URRACA

Wor(l)ds Through the Looking-Glass: Borges's Mirrors and Contemporary Theory Este estudio examina la figura del espejo en dos cuentos de Borges, "Tl?n,

Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" y "La biblioteca de Babel" a trav?s de teor?as

contempor?neas sobre el espejo, la duplicaci?n, y la representaci?n en literatura

y filosof?a. En particular, se utiliza el concepto de mise en abyme de Lucien

D?llenbach, el "reverso" del espejo en el pensamiento de Derrida seg?n lo desarrolla Rodolphe Gasch?, y la semi?tica del espejo, la enciclopedia y el laberinto de Umberto Eco. Este marco conceptual, cuyo origen se encuentra en

la obra misma de Borges, nos permite una relectura del espejo como un

instrumente que duplica fielmente, sin invertir ni deformar, una realidad que nuestra propia mente es incapaz de percibir como id?ntica a si misma. Como

si fuera la otra cara de una misma moneda, el lenguaje se pr?senta como un

medio que inevitablemente desfigura la realidad. Ya que ?ste es el ?nico medio,

aunque imperfecto, de que los seres humanos disponemos para el conocimiento del mundo, la "diferencia" se introduce como una b?squeda de significado.

Mirrors should reflect a little

before throwing back images.

Jean Cocteau

The figure of the mirror in Borgess writing has inspired not only the work

of critics inside and outside Latin America, but also the conceptual systems elaborated by many contemporary U.S. and European literary theorists and

philosophers concerned with the problems of duplication, reflexivity, and

representation. These have, in turn, provided new perspectives for the reading of Borges's stories. We will base our argument on two stories, "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "La biblioteca de Babel." Here, the mirror gathers the

inner workings of the narratives into one symbolic motif, according to which

everything can be read as a result of duplication, multiplication, or reflection.

An analysis of the two stories based on an exploration of the multiple functions of the mirror figure as mise en abyme will serve a twofold purpose: to reconstruct Borgess theories of perception and representation, and to read

REVISTA CANADIENSE DE ESTUDIOS HISPANICOS Vol XVII, 1 OtofiO 1992



154

Borges's stories in the light of some of the contemporary work on mirrors in literature, of which his own writings are the point of departure.1

First, it is important to clarify what is meant by the term mise en abyme and the different kinds of structures that it involves. Lucien D?llenbach defines it as "any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it" (8). He distinguishes three elementary types of mise en abyme, according to whether they function at the level of the

utterance, the enunciation, or the whole code. The first has two sub-types: fictional - "an intertextual r?sum? or quotation of the content of a work"

(55) - and textual, which reflects the narrative "in its literal aspect as an

organization of meaning" (94). The function of the mise en abyme of the enunciation is to "bring into focus the agent and the process of production itself" by making present any aspect of the production and/or reception of the text (75). The third type, also called metatextual, "reveals [the text's] way of functioning

- but without being mimetic of the text itself* (98, my emphasis). These types rarely occur in a pure form, though often one will

predominate over the others.

D?llenbach's typology, the most comprehensive of the uses of mise en

abyme, is inspired by much that Borges wrote on the subject.2 This literary device fascinated Borges to the point of employing profusely all three types in isolation and in combination in his fiction, and of devoting some critical reflections to the topic in his discussion of Don Quixote and The Thousand and One Nights, among others. The work within the work, the character

reading about himself, the storyteller telling her own story in what can lead to the infinite regression of mirrors facing each other, the mirror in the text itself are narrative strategies whose endless possibilities Borges drew upon time and again. But we must not lose sight of the fact that Borges is

primarily a writer, whose objectives differ from those of a literary theorist

(Mignolo 297). D?llenbach's work, based on texts by this and other authors who have used mise en abyme, allows us to reread those texts from an abstract perspective, to distinguish the types and functions of each type of mise en abyme, and to reconstruct the theoretical assumptions behind them.

The theme or concept that designates the text en abyme is also discussed

by Derrida as an illusion that refers only to the text's representational function and "not to its representation of something outside the text or its

self-representation." For him, the mirror embodies the image of the

representation of a representation, which "keeps the difference endlessly open and thus prevents any ultimate self-representation or self-presence of the text" (Gasch? 291). We shall return later to this notion of the functioning of

reflection, which is not incompatible with D?llenbach's, and which is found in Borges's use of mirrors not merely as a duplication of the work, but also as an illustration of his theory of representation.



155

D?llenbach distinguishes a fourth type, which, although also a mise en

abyme of the utterance, determines the ways in which all the other kinds function within the text. This transcendental mise en abyme, or "fiction of

origin," reflects "what simultaneously originates, motivates, institutes and unifies [the narrative], and fixes in advance what makes it possible" (101),

standing in reciprocal mimetic relationship with the narrative. In these two stories by Borges this pivotal point, which exercises the utmost control over

meaning and every function of meaning, is realized in the mirror. "The mirror in the text," D?llenbach's other name for mise en abyme, acquires a

special meaning in these two stories. Rather than a figure that indicates reflection metaphorically, what we first encounter when we start reading is indeed a looking glass. The controlling role of the mirror begins with its

strategic placement in the opening page of each story as a "threshold" that must necessarily be crossed if we are to enter Borges's fantastic, imaginary worlds. In "La biblioteca de Babel" the mirror is symbolically located in the

doorway into the Library, which is also the entrance into the story; in "Tl?n" the mirror is mentioned in the very first line, and its presence, through a

process of association of ideas, triggers the narration.

But the passage through the mirror not only takes us into a fictional

world; it forces us to observe the laws that make reflection work. In this

respect, Rodolphe Gasch?'s concept of the "tain" of the mirror develops what is only suggested in Borges's fiction, and complements D?llenbachs idea of mise en abyme insofar as both terms indicate the ways in which the technique of reflection functions within the narrative:

To look through the mirror is to look at its reverse side, at the dull side doubling the mirrors specular play, in short, at the tain of the mirror ... On this lining of the

outside surface of reflection, one can read the "system" of the infrastructures that

commands the mirrors play and determines the angles of reflection. (Gasch? 238)

According to Gasch?, the tain of the mirror exposes the imperfections and limits of reflection because it allows an inside vision of what makes reflection

possible. To read Borges always demands a skilful exercise in looking at both sides of the mirror. Its effects dazzle us, yet its inner workings are also in full view. However, the magic of Borges's mirrors will not be diminished by the

uncovering of the functional pattern inscribed on their tain, for this is

precisely what opens up the endless possibilities of meaning and what lends coherence to the worlds on either side of the looking-glass.

The threshold mirror, then, forces the reader to transgress its surface. In "La biblioteca de Babel," once we have transgressed the doorway mirror, the

words "biblioteca" and "universo" are used interchangeably so we are no

longer sure what is meant. A similar confusion of wor(l)ds on either side of



156

the mirror takes place in "Tl?n," where a double transgression complicates

things further. On the one hand, we cross the line between our reality and

Borgest fiction; on the other, between Borges's fictional world - the framing scene in which Borges and Bioy Casares are discussing a nonexistent country - and the embedded narrative constituted by the description of that country. The effect reaches total confusion when transgression becomes possible in reverse. Borges makes his readers cross from one side of the mirror to the

other, until we do not know which side we are on. Our world3 is first

reflected in the form of Tl?n, and at the end of the story we are led to

believe that it is beginning to resemble Tl?n. Does this mean that our world

has become an image of an image of itself? Jaime Alazraki's answer is that

H?n es al comienzo de la narraci?n un planeta ficticio; hacia el final entendemos que su realidad es nuestra realidad, e inversamente, que nuestra realidad, lo que hemos

definido como nuestra realidad, no es menos ficticia que H?n. (Alazraki 1976: 195)

The need to explain this image of our world resembling its own double as

found in Borgess work - particularly in his discussion of the "self

swallowing" structure of The Thousand and One Nights - is what prompts

Katherine Hayles to invoke Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum:

At some point the original disappeared altogether, no longer serving to anchor the chain of these proliferating signifiers. Then the copies "imploded" into a new order of non-referential signification that operated by displacement rather than representa

tion. Baudrillard calls this the "hyper-real," a theatre where everything is at once

non-referential and as real as anything else. (262)4

Yet, rather than merely indicating the disappearance of the reality that

inspired the copy, Borges is pointing toward the fictional, illusory character of both.

Umberto Eco uses the phrase "threshold phenomenon" to describe the mirror in Lacanian terms as the boundary between the imaginary and the

symbolic, and to explain mans experience with mirrors as one "on the threshold between perception and signification" (203, 210).5 The latter

explanation illustrates what is happening in Borges's stories, since at this

point in the narrative, the doubling leads us to believe that we are someone

else, that the world we live in and the world we read about have traded

places on either side of the mirror. This property of the mirror as threshold, which allows us to cross back and forth between reality and its fictional

representation, is also the primary function of the transcendental mise en

abyme, insofar as it raises the. question of how the work "thinks of its



157

relationship to the truth and behaves with regard to mimesis" (D?llenbach 101).

The fictional mise en abyme, which duplicates the narrative at the referential level, provides the work with a guide to its structure and meaning: a means of interpretation. According to D?llenbach, when it occurs at the

beginning of the narrative, it reflects the story to come, which is in turn limited to playing out that initial reflection. This technique, of course,

"programs" the way in which the story is read and interpreted by the reader, and affords the author the utmost control. Control is precisely what Borges is after when he opens "Tl?n" first with a mirror, and immediately after with the description of an imaginary novel that the narrator is discussing with his friend:

Bioy Casares habia cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demor? una vasta pol?mica sobre la ejecuci?n de una novela en primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o

desfigurara los hechos e incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permitieran a unos

pocos lectores - a muy pocos lectores - la adivinaci?n de una realidad atroz o banal.

(Borges 1974: T, 431)6

This passage functions as a mirror, not of glass but of words, that produces a condensed image of the story and prepares us for what is also a first-person narrative, whose narrator is unreliable, and whose contradictions are the key to the understanding of the reflected reality.

Contradictions, such as the proliferation of incredible philosophies, impossible sciences, and nonexistent substantives, are the basis of Tl?n. The fictional mise en abyme mentioned above is echoed in a metatextual one, which reveals the text's way of functioning and operates as "instructions" to

enable us to read the work "in the way it wants to be read" (D?llenbach 100). The following passage thus allows us to see, through the contradictions and chaotic description of "Tl?n," the laws of a world that is meant to reflect ours:

Al principio se crey? que Tl?n era un mero caos, una irresponsable licencia de la

imagination; ahora se sabe que es un cosmos y las intimas leyes que lo rigen han sido

formuladas, siquiera en modo provisional. B?steme recordar que las contradicciones

aparentes del Onceno Tomo son la piedra fundamental de que existen los otros: tan

lucido y tan justo es el orden que se ha observado en ?l. (T, 435)

The story, therefore, wants to be read as a "cosmos," not merely as a work of the imagination; yet, insofar as it is a product of the imagination, it

constantly directs our attention toward its inner rules and its coherence. The

passage also seems to corroborate the idea that contradictions contain the



158

basic clue for the identification of the referent with the mirror image. By opposing Tl?n to earth immediately after having said that Tl?n is based on

contradictions, Borges draws attention to the fact that what appears as an

inversion is in fact an identical reflection. We must count on the narrators

unreliability and read between the lines, applying to the story only its own rules and not those of our world.

Similarly, the doorway mirror of "La biblioteca de Babel" offers us a

sophisticated clue for the understanding of the story as a mirror in itself, which casts an identical reflection of our own universe:

En el zagu?n hay un espejo, que fielmente duplica las apariencias. Los nombres suelen inferir de ese espejo que la Biblioteca no es in finita (si lo fuera realmente ̂a qu? esa

duplication ilusoria?); yo prefiero sonar que las superficies brunidas figuran y

prometen el infinito ... (B, 465)

The textual mise en abyme is usually represented by an "emblematic

metaphor" - a fabric, a work of art - of the text; in Borges's case, it

coincides with the transcendental mise en abyme: the mirror in the text is,

simply, a mirror (D?llenbach 96-97)7 The critics of Borges s work have explained the mirror phenomenon in

two classic ways. There are those who believe the mirror inverts the original: "So many things are identical between, say, a person and its reflected image, that one is inclined to consider that all points are identical. Yet, face to face, as Kant makes clear, there is always an inversion" (Agheana 246). A very common reading is also to consider mirror images not only as inverted, but distorted reflections of reality. For example, Jaime Alazraki has written that "La narration se estructura como un espejo concavo que proyecta una

imagen aberrada del objeto reflejado" (Alazraki 1977: 81).8 These readings are all based on the fact that if the reflected image does not correspond to the

original, then the mirror must be imperfect. Let us for a moment observe the effect of concave mirrors in a well

known episode of Valle-Inclans Luces de Bohemia. The "esperpento," a vision of absurdity and grotesque deformation of Spanish life, is not produced by the concave mirrors as much as by a combination of the protagonist's drunkenness and near-death hallucinations. The deformation is in Max Estrellas mind, and it represents in itself a kind of world order rather than chaos: "La deformation deja de serlo cuando esta sujeta a una matem?tica

perfecta. Mi est?tica actual es transformar con matem?tica de espejo c?ncavo las normas cl?sicas" (Valle-Incl?n 253). Borgess stories also provide clues to the fact that even if the mirror were concave - which it is not - it is the human mind, not the mirror, that produces the distortion or the reversal

necessary to make sense of the world.



159

However, there is also enough evidence to suggest that Borges's mirrors are plane. He never says that they are curved; instead, what we have is a statement that they faithfully duplicate appearances.9 Even though there

might be a distortion anyway, the plane mirror underscores the role of the

perceiving subject in the construction of the reflected image. In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Umberto Eco makes the distinction between

plane and curved mirrors that many critics of Borges seem to have over

looked. Only curved mirrors - and we could add that the human retina works like one - produce a distorted, disfigured image of the referent, but

plane mirrors do not even invert it:

Vertical mirrors themselves do not reverse or invert. A mirror reflects the right side

exactly where the right side is, and the same with the left side. It is the observer ...

who by self-identification imagines he is the man inside the mirror and, looking at

himself, realizes he is wearing his watch on his right wrist. But it would be so only if he, the observer I mean, were the one who is inside the mirror (Je est un autreX).

On the contrary, those who avoid behaving as Alice, and getting into the mirror, do not so deceive themselves. (Eco 205)

Yet, as Barrenechea and Molloy have pointed out, we cannot avoid getting into Borges's mirrors. Both critics single out the following passage, from

InquisicioneSy where Borges illustrates the sensation that mirrors are supposed to produce:

Hay que manifestar ese antojo hecho forzosa realidad de una mente: hay que mostrar

un individuo que se introduce en el cristal y que persiste en su ilusorio pais (donde

hay figuraciones y colores, pero regidos de inmovible silencio) y que siente el

bochorno de no ser m?s que un simulacro que obliteran las noches y que las

vislumbres permiten. (Barrenechea 175; Molloy 1979: 147)

Even then, there is no apparent indication within these two stories that

anybody is deceived by the reflection phenomenon, or even that the lack of

identity between a mirror image and its original is produced by inversion or

distortion. While I agree with Agheana that "the infinity of mirror reflections ... multiplies endlessly a similar but not entirely identical image" (Agheana 246), all duplications are based precisely on the fact that exact identity is

impossible because, as the inhabitants of Tl?n demonstrated in the case of the nine copper coins,10 people

- not the mirror - are unable to see the

original as identical to itself.

The example of the nine copper coins prefigures Derrida's insistence on

the exclusively representative function of the mise en abyme discussed above.

He denies the existence of an originary unity, because "the reflected or



160

doubled is also split in itself* (Gasch? 226). The double, that is, the mirror

reflection, brings to light the fact that what we think of as an "original" cannot be apprehended except through an Other that is its representation. Human beings are unable to see the original as identical to itself because there is no such identity, there can only be repetition. If "Tl?n" and "La biblioteca" appear to be distorted reflections of our own universe, we must look elsewhere for the source of the distortion. According to the beginning of "La biblioteca de Babel," the mirror does not reflect reality, but appear ances. Therefore, what is inside the mirror is an appearance of an appear ance; what is outside is already an illusion that the mirror does not distort. On the contrary, it duplicates faithfully what is already distorted by human

perception, that which does not exist except as different from itself. The human weakness lies in that when people believe that things appear in the mirror as they really are, they delude themselves; when things seem different,

they think - mistakenly - that the distortion is produced by the mirror, so

the image is considered untrustworthy. This way of reading the stories as an affirmation of the impossibility of self-identity is deeply embedded in their

imagery and in the statements made throughout the texts, which should be understood as the rules that govern the narratives' inner workings. The inhabitants of Tl?n explained the difference between "identity" and "equali ty," the latter being possible through repetition

- which implies a doubling, and therefore a difference - , the former absurdly implying that things that look alike are one and the same (T, 438). In "La biblioteca de Babel" this becomes clearer, for the library contains no two books that are exactly the same, since minute differences of even one letter, period, or comma keep repetition from becoming identity.

The mise en abyme of the enunciation contributes to the reinforcement of the ideas illustrated through the textual and fictional mises en abyme. This

type involves "the 'making present' in the diegesis of the producer or receiver of the narrative" (D?llenbach 75), most often through a character who is a writer or a reader. The narrator of "La biblioteca" is both a writer and a reader of his own story, who understands that there is no truth on either side of the mirror that humans are able to see.11 The fact that lamps in the

Library cast an insufficient light, and that the narrator's eyes are almost

incapable of deciphering his own writing, stresses the notion that mirrors

duplicate the referent faithfully, and the distorting effects are produced by the human eye. Being human, therefore, seems to entail the impossibility of

knowledge of the world we live in. The narrator is, like the inhabitants of Plato's Cave, a prisoner of his own limited perception. From inside the mirror, we deceive ourselves into believing his vision is distorted by the dimness, yet we have no assurance that we ourselves are not being blinded

by the light.



161

It is our eye that is interpreting th? mirror image, but the mirror neither distorts nor interprets reality for us. Mirrors arouse a fear that causes us to

fabricate the distortion effect as a defense. Borges says that the mirror

"inquietaba" (unnerved) and "acechaba" (spied on) him and Bioy Casares, and that they discovered that "los espejos tienen algo monstruoso" (T, 431). These characteristics of mirrors can now be understood in the light of the above discussion: mirrors are unnerving and monstrous precisely because

they duplicate appearances faithfully, and in doing so they split the original - or its imagined appearance

- from itself. Mirrors are also unnerving and monstrous because they mark the uncanny separation between the human

sphere of activity and consciousness and something unfathomable, uncontrol

lable, with its own laws that challenge our means of knowledge and

interpretation. What Borges and Bioy Casares see in the mirror is an image of themselves, so exact that they are afraid of not being able to tell the copy from the original, afraid that they may not be unique, or afraid that, like Herbert Ashe, they may be in fact only a mirror image without an original:12

Alg?n recuerdo limitado y menguante de Herbert Ashe, ingeniero de los ferrocarriles del Sur, persiste en el hotel de Adrogu?, entre las efusivas madreselvas y en el fondo ilusorio de los espejos. En vida padeci? de irrealidad, como tantos ingleses; muerto, no es siquiera el fantasma que ya era entonces. (T, 433)

This unreality of the mirror reflection, as we will discuss later, corresponds to a function of language that Jaime Rest has called "esa aptitud que tienen los nombres personales de borrar la realidad de los individuos a quienes designan, para convertirse en ficciones verbales aut?nomas" (97).

Fear and the limitations of human perception cause us to imagine the distortions of mirror reflections as a defense from the terrible truth that is our inability to see the absolute truth. But these negative traits also equip us

with the necessary baggage to make sense of our world through difference.

By means of a series of textual and metatextual mises en abyme in "La biblioteca de Babel," Borges dismisses exact duplications as meaningless and

impossible; even though the mirror may achieve them, they count for

nothing because they are inconceivable within the limits of the human mind. The Library

- and the story itself - is repeated in the books it contains: one

book is "a labyrinth of letters" with one "reasonable line," another contains "notions of combinatory analysis"

- the story is also the combination of

twenty-five symbols of language, in another the letters MCV are, like the

hexagons, a regular repetition of the same form. Yet because difference is

what accounts for meaning exact repetitions of the letters MCV do not have

one, and this book "cannot correspond to any language" (B, 467). All the

suggested explanations of the meaning of these letters imply allowing for

different values, cryptography, or anything that will introduce a difference.



162

The Library only makes sense because in its seemingly identical hexagons it

contains no two books which are the same. If we think of the fear that

Borges and Bioy Casares felt about mirrors duplicating appearances faithfully, perhaps we can consider distorted reflections as a search for meaning, rather than a disability.

The "mirror of words" that opens "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" acquires a new significance when we consider mirrors as a symbol for the human search for meaning. Borgess mirrors in the text are all of words, and words are our (imperfect) way of making sense of the world. This is the role of the

figure of the encyclopedia, a "double" of the mirror as a textual mise en

abyme. The encyclopedia is a work of language, and a reflection of the

totality of the universe through words.13 Similarly, the story is an attempt to

frame the infinite inside the mirror of its few pages.14 The encyclopedia is the

organizing principle of the story, since Borges presents the data about Uqbar and Tl?n according to the same divisions that we could find in any encyclopedia about our world, such as geography, history, language, literature, zoology, typography, philosophy, psychology, geometry ...15 At the same time, as Eco suggests, there are other things to be found in an encyclo pedia, and Borgess story, with its inclusion of all the possible philosophies and theories of the universe to be found in Tl?n, does not fall short here either:

[The encyclopedia] does not register "truths" but, rather, what has been said about the truth or what has been believed to be true as well as what has been believed to be false or imaginary or legendary, provided that a given culture had elaborated some discourse about some subject matter. (Eco 83)

Like the encyclopedia, the Library is also a double of the mirror, for it contains books which are also made of words. There is even a suggestion that the Library contains a circular, cyclical book that is God (B, 465), or that the

Library itself could be a book:

Letizia Alvarez de Toledo ha observa do que la vasta Biblioteca es in util; en rigor, bastaria un solo volumen ... que constara de un num?ro infinito de hojas infinita

mente delgadas. (B, 471 )'6

If the encyclopedia can reflect a universe, the library can be one, for it contains all the books.17 Two of the most frequent motifs in Borges's works - the encyclopedia and the labyrinth

- are used here as symbols of totality contained within a limited linguistic space, and they are the only earthly alternatives to the ultimate goal achieved by the poets of Tl?n, who can



163

transcend the limits of language and make a single word integrate an entire

poetic object. "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "La biblioteca de Babel" not only

propose similar ideas and employ the same techniques, but also complement each other in a number of ways. From both of them the principle of

duplication and multiplication emerges as one which links mirrors, men,18 and books as reflections of one another. The mirror in "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" suggests to Bioy Casares a sentence about mirrors and men found in an encyclopedia: "Los espejos y la c?pula son abominables, porque

multiplican el n?mero de hombres" (T, 431). The mirror in the room is almost human, personified through verbs like "inquietaba," "acechaba;" in "La biblioteca" books are personified through the superstition of "el Hombre del Libro" (B, 469).19 In both stories, what we find is not a multiplication of

men, but of books, for men can multiply the number of books as well as the number of men, and books are written having other books as pretext. In the first page there is The Anglo-American Cyclopedia, which is an imperfect reprint of The Encyclopedia Britannica.20 Only one copy of this Anglo-Ameri can Cyclopedia contains the article about Uqbar, because, according to the

laws of the Library - which apply throughout the stories in Ficciones - "hay

siempre varios centenares de miles de facsimiles imperfectos: de obras que no

difieren sino por una letra o una coma" (B, 469). The article is finally found in a volume whose alphabetic notation does not include it; similarly, the

Library contains a book whose cover does not prefigure what is inside. The

forty-volume First Encyclopedia of Tl?n will be rewritten in one of the

languages of Tl?n as Orbis Tertius, and as The Second Encyclopedia of Tl?n, which has not been found yet; finally, "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" stands as a story written about all these books. Even this story masquerades as a

modified version of an earlier one:

Reproduzco el articulo anterior tal como apareci? en la Antologia de la literatura

fantdstica, 1940, sin otra escisi?n que algunas met?foras y que una especie de resumen

burl?n que ahora r?sulta frivolo. Han ocurrido tantas cosas desde esa fecha ... (T,

440)21

Similarly, "La Biblioteca de Babel" is attributed to a "ghost editor" who

reproduces it and changes its typographical style (B, 466).22 In this story, too, in order to find a book one has to consult other books, and books engender other books:

... la historia minuciosa del porvenir, las autobiografias de los arc?ngeles, el cat?logo

fiel de la Biblioteca, miles y miles de cat?logos falsos, la demostraci?n de la falacia de

esos cat?logos, la demostraci?n de la falacia del cat?logo verdadero, el evangelio



164

gn?stico de Bas?ides, el comentario de ese evangelio, la relaci?n veridica de tu

muerte, la version de cada libro a todas las lenguas, las interpolaciones de cada libro

en todos los libros ... (B, 467-68)

This is in turn analogous to the books of Tl?n, all of which also include their

symmetrical reflection: the counterbook. It is as though these books were

mirrors, always framing and containing others which are reflections of themselves.

To think of these two stories as mirror reflections of each other entails the admission that the worlds they represent function according to the same laws. Uqbar's geographic points of reference are exclusively internal, which

prevents the location of that country in a map, and the referents of the

language of the Library are also internal and do not allow us to be sure of

understanding the narrator.23 The paradox of these two stories is that each contains the other, as well as much more.24 The Library contains one of the

languages of Tl?n together with many others, and its books enclose the theories proposed by Tl?n's schools of thought. For example, the idea that all time has already passed and we are living a memory (T, 437) is analogous to the one that everything has already been written. This is one of the

principles of the Library (B, 470), and the indication that Tl?n contains it as one of the possible explanations of the universe. In Tl?n every book contains its counterbook, in "La biblioteca" we are told that "esta epistola in?til y palabrera ya existe ... y tambi?n su refutaci?n" (B, 470). The "hr?nir" of

Tl?n, those "secondary" objects that multiply according to the expectations of the imagination, and which engender distorted versions of themselves until

they are unrecognizable, are analogous to the languages of the Library: "es verdad que unas millas a la derecha la lengua es dialectal y que noventa pisos m?s arriba es incomprensible" (B, 467). Ultimately, it is possible to under stand both Tl?n and the Library as "hr?nir," products of Borges's imagin ation - and of a multiplicity of readers' imaginations

- repeated in a number

of copies of themselves.

Tl?n is a human labyrinth (T, 443) that appears chaotic and disordered; the Library is a divinely created labyrinth with strict laws that humans spend their lives trying to decipher. This connection between the two stories, which allows us to read the Library-labyrinth as a mirror image of Tl?n-encyclo pedia, is found in Eco's study of the encyclopedia as labyrinth, written with "La biblioteca de Babel" in mind. Of the three types of labyrinths he describes, the third one - the net - corresponds to the encyclopedia:

The main feature of a net is that every point can be connected with every other point,

and, where the connections are not yet designed, they are, however, conceivable and

designable. A net is an unlimited territory ... the abstract model of a net has neither

a centre nor an outside ... A structure that cannot be described globally can only be



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described as a potential sum of local descriptions. In a structure without outside, the

describers can look at it only by the inside ... at every node of it no one can have the

global vision of all its possibilities but only the local vision of the closest ones: every local description of the net is a hypothesis, subject to falsification, about its further course ... blindness is the only way of seeing (locally), and thinking means to grope one*s way ... This represents a model for an encyclopedia as a regulative semiotic

hypothesis. (Eco 81-82)

"La biblioteca de Babel" can thus be considered an abstract way of describing a world through the encyclopedic method, not too different from the one

used in "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Goodman reminds us that "a world

may be unmanageably heterogeneous or unbearably monotonous according to how events are sorted into kinds" (9). Like the encyclopedia described by Eco, the Library's centre is any of its hexagons, and its description must be restricted to hexagons because they are the only thing that it is possible to know: "the library may be infinite, but it is an infinite repetition of hexagons, of something known" (Agheana 182). We will return later to a discussion of the hexagon as the only form which man can conceive, describe, and be sure

of, in a Library where men grope their way through, looking for books they have no chance of finding, finding books they have no chance of understand

ing. Like the mirror distortion that humans fabricate, hexagons provide the reassurance that there is some order in the universe.25

Both stories conceive of writing as a divine method of creation, which humans unsuccessfully, but insistently, attempt to imitate. In Tl?n, "la historia del universo -

y en ella nuestras vidas y el mas tenue detalle de nuestras vidas - es la escritura que produce un dios subalterno para entenderse con un demonio" (T, 437). The librarian describes the Library universe in similar terms:

... el universo, con su elegante dotation de anaqueles, de tomos enigm?ticos, de

infatigables escaleras para el viajero y de letrinas para el bibliotecario sentado, s?lo

puede ser obra de un dios. Para percibir la distancia que hay entre lo divino y lo

humano, basta comparar estos rudos simbolos tr?mulos que mi falible mano

garabatea en la tapa de un libro, con las letras org?nicas del interior: puntuales,

delicadas, negrisimas, inimitablemente sim?tricas. (B, 466)

Because symmetry is what we believe to be the rule of the mirror, the

symmetry that fails between our world and Borgess worlds points toward the fact that there is a world order, even if it is one governed by laws that humans are incapable of understanding:



166

In util responder que la realidad tambi?n est? ordenada. Quiz? lo est?, pero de acuerdo a leyes divinas - traduzco: a leyes inhumanas -

que no acabamos nunca de percibir. Tl?n ser? un laberinto, pero es un laberinto urdido por los hombres, un laberinto

destin ado a que lo descifren los hombres. (T, 443)

Therefore, the apparent chaos of the worlds of Tl?n and the Library is the

only way that humans can represent the "divine disorder." On the other

hand, a distorted reflection of our world is the only possible way of avoiding the "simetria con apariencia de orden - el materialismo dial?ctico, el

antisemitismo, el nazismo" (T, 442). Like Borges, the characters in these two stories engage in this activity of

writing, some to create, some to understand. Tl?n originates from Ezra

Buckley's attempt to invent a planet because "in America it is absurd to invent a country;" the Library is full of men attempting to reconstruct it

according to human laws. However, as in Borges's case, "la Obra Mayor de los Hombres" never turns out to be anything other than a book in the

Library - or an encyclopedia, in the case of "Tl?n." Imitating a god only

makes the world more imperfect. The "hr?nir" are Borges's figure for the

way in which human representation and creation enhance imperfection and end up in decadence:

los hr?nir de segundo y tercer grado - los hr?nir, d?riva dos de otros hr?n, los hr?nir

derivados del hr?n de un hr?n - exageran las aberraciones del inicial; los de quinto

son casi uniformes; los de noveno se confunden con los de segundo; en los de

und?cimo hay una pureza de lineas que los originales no tienen. El proceso es

peri?dico: el hr?n de duod?cimo grado ya empieza a decaer. (T, 440)26

This suggests that for Borges the principle of mirror reflection complements that of language representation, like two sides of a coin. As I discussed above,

Borges's mirrors lead us to believe we are contemplating a distorted image of the world when we are in fact creating the distortion ourselves. His

concept of language reverses this effect, showing that what we thought was a relationship of identity between an object and the word that represents it is in fact a disfiguring one caused by the medium itself:

La reproduction r?sulta intolerable porque de ella se esperaba inocentemente - y

acaso con fe orgullosa - un reflejo id?ntico o, por lo menos, aproximativo. En cambio

nos enfrenta con la ineficacia de lo que procur?bamos convocar id?ntico, con la

torpeza de "un ojald no fuera" (Molloy 1979: 151)

With this statement, Sylvia Molloy draws attention, among other things, to

Borges's reservations toward "naming," which he considers always a



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tautology. Language does not function like mirrors insofar as they throw back exact reproductions, but, as Jaime Rest has pointed out, it does produce mirages "que se imponen por la eficacia de una simetria o proportion intrinseca, de un equilibrio primordialmente nominal" (90). According to

him, Borges questions the human ability to understand reality through language. Although this is the only instrument we possess for that purpose, everything we express through it inevitably becomes a fiction. Rest thus relates Borges's concept of language to that of the German philosopher

Mauthner; for both, "el lenguaje es solo un juego, dotado de singular eficacia como tal pero exento de cualquier aptitud para representar, conocer y entender adecuadamente la realidad" (84). Much like the mirror, language is a game that we are forced to play without knowing how: "cuando denunciamos las limitaciones del lenguaje lo que estamos reconociendo no es su impotencia sino la nuestra" (94).

On the other side of the doorway mirror of the Library, words do not mean anymore what we think they mean. The Saussurean slash that separates the signifier from the signified changes the relationship between reality and its representation in a way that suggests that for Borges all language is

metaphorical. In Tl?n "todo sustantivo ... s?lo tiene un valor metaf?rico" (T, 438); in the Library, the word "biblioteca" is a metaphor for "universo," and

Borges employs the two words as if they were interchangeable by exaggerat

ing the contrast that is produced when a word appears in the context that

would normally belong to another. The two words have different external forms and produce different effects - the literal and the metaphorical meanings

- yet they refer to the same thing. In the end, the slash disappears,

and all we have is a signifier - "biblioteca" - that reflects another signifier

-

"universo" - and viceversa:

El universo (que otros llaman la Biblioteca) se compone de un num?ro indefinido,

y tal vez infinito, de galenas hexagonales ... Como todos los nombres de la Biblioteca,

he viajado en mi juventud ... (B, 465)

As readers, we attempt to provide an interpretation by attaching these two

signifiers to signifieds that reflect our world in some form. By means of the

unequivocal interchangeability between a universe composed of hexagonal

galleries full of books and a library in which men live their lives and travel,

Borges exposes the process of metaphorical signification that Ricoeur calls "a

semantic clash leading to logical absurdity:"

A word receives a metaphorical meaning in specific contexts, within which it is

opposed to other words taken literally. The shift in meaning results primarily from

a clash between literal meanings, which excludes the literal use of the word in



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question and provides clues for finding a new meaning capable of according with the context of the sentence and rendering the sentence meaningful therein. (170)

This kind of metaphorical play with incongruous images is a sign of the

provisional and tentative character of language when it attempts to represent reality.27

The "otros" in the above quotation from "La biblioteca" suggests the

impossibility of communication that results from the knowledge that

language is private, that each person may have a different name for each

thing. This use of metaphor is reinforced at the end of the story with a

theory that illustrates the arbitrariness of language. According to this theory, a word has an unlimited number of meanings in an unlimited number of

languages, which makes communication impossible.28 The word "biblioteca" means "universo" in this story because it is a world with its own linguistic code, which reflects the reader's only in appearance:

Un num?ro n de lenguajes posibles usa el mismo vocabulario; en algunos, el simbolo

biblioteca admite la correcta definition ubicuo y perdurable sistema de galer?as hexagonales, pero biblioteca es pan o pir?mide o cualquier otra cosa, y las siete

palabras que la definen tienen otro valor. Tu, que me lees, ^est?s seguro de entender

mi lenguaje? (B, 470)

The "correct definition" of "biblioteca" does not correspond to the meaning we usually give it, but exclusively to the one it has in this story. In compli ance with this theory, Borges reverses the metaphorical process by writing of "frutas ... que llevan el nombre de l?mparas" (B, 465). They are lamps in our

language, where "l?mpara" is understood as "an artifact that gives light," yet the name "l?mpara" is only accessory, because in the language of "La biblioteca de Babel" they are fruits, and the word "l?mpara," which should be understood literally, is used metaphorically while the metaphorical name "frutas" is used literally. The relationship of identity between word and object that we often take for granted in our everyday lives is thus subverted, and confronts us with the impossibility of complete understanding, or even of

knowing whether we understand. As Eco puts it, "in order to use a mirror

correctly, we should first know that we are facing a mirror*' (207), and with

Borges there is no way of knowing at all times on which side of the mirror one stands. That is what makes language, like the mirror, unnerving and monstrous. The fact that both words in each pair

- "biblioteca" and "universo," "frutas" and "l?mparas"

- are metaphorical, though interchange able, illustrates the notion of the signifier that has lost touch with any signifier, and also Katherine Hayles's concept of the metaphor that has lost touch with its primary referent:



169

A metaphor that self-reflexively mirrors itself in another metaphor threatens to lose

the grounding that reassures us the comparison is not entirely free-floating. It could

be imagined as a compass with one leg moving freely and the other resting not on

ground but on the leg of another compass. Postmodern writers have exploited this lack of round to reveal the intrinsic reflexivity of all language. (Hayles 33)29

Another series of fictional and textual mises en abyme point out the fact that mirrors and language stand in a reciprocal relationship: the worlds

through the looking glass are worlds of language on the level of storytelling as well as on the symbolic level, and they are at the same time mirrored by the language that constitutes them. As Ricoeur put it, "If it is true that the

[work] creates a world, then it requires a language which preserves and

expresses its creative power in specific contexts" (180). Thus the illusion of order perpetuated in Tl?n is achieved through a perfect correspondence between its language and the principles that constitute Tl?n as a world. It is this correspondence, along with the fact that the written work is being duplicated in a series of written works, that ensures the functioning of the reflection.30 In the fashion of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes - what Carlos Fuentes likes to call "cebolla narrativa" (123)

- Tl?n, a world found in a

book, is the literary world of another literary world (Uqbar) of another

literary world (the encyclopedia) of yet another literary world (Borges's story). Only an encyclopedia written in one of the languages of Tl?n would

represent it more adequately, though this is beyond the limits of communica tion between Borges and his readers.31 Tl?n also has a literature that reflects

it, for it consists of ideal, poetic objects. Furthermore, the language of Tl?n contributes to making this ideal world idealist: "Las naciones de ese planeta son -

cong?nitamente - idealistas. Su lenguaje y las derivaciones de su

lenguaje - la religi?n, las letras, la metafisica -

presuponen el idealismo" (T, 435). Because there are no material objects in this planet, there is no need to name them with words that might suggest their material existence. Adjec tives and verbs are used instead of substantives, because adjectives sacrifice the material quality of substance to the idealism of attributes, and verbs denote acts rather than objects, reflecting the fact that "el mundo para ellos no es un concurso de objetos en el espacio; es una s?rie heterog?nea de actos

independientes" (T, 435). In Tl?n, only what is in the minds of its inhabit ants exists, but Tl?n itself is only a product of the mind. It is not surprising, either, that psychology is the basis of its culture.

The world of the Library is also determined by products of the mind.

Borges writes that the hexagon, the shape of all its rooms, is a necessary form because humans cannot perceive space in any other way:

For the idealists, the universe is a geometric duplication of an archetype. The

asymmetry of a triangle or a pentagon is unacceptable because, seen from inside, one



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facet would not be mirrored by another one. If man were to inhabit a pentagon, one

aspect of his existence would be left without the reassuring reflection of symmetry. The sphere may be a perfect geometrical form, but the difficulty in determining points of reference reduces considerably its appeal. The mystics prefer it as a form of

perfection, but their evidence, couched in ambiguous terms, is not trustworthy.

(Agheana 18)

This implies that the hexagon, as well as the encyclopedic construction of

Tl?n, is a human construction based on the self-centred ways in which humans - and Borges among them - see and classify their knowledge of the world. The hexagon is not only something known, but stands for something that can be reduced to a limit in a limitless universe. The Library, like Tl?n, is a world of language not just because it is a story made out of Borges's

words, but because its "raison d'?tre" is books, which are also made of written words. Since the Library is language, its laws are also those of

language: it exists "ab aeterno," there are no two identical books, the same

thing cannot be said twice, and it is infinite and periodical, like the combina tions of the twenty-five symbols that Borges takes into account (B, 466). This number is in fact finite, but so is the Library. What matters is that its

finiteness, in either case, cannot be apprehended by the human mind:

Acabo de escribir infinita. No he interpolado ese adjetivo por una costumbre ret?rica;

digo que no es il?gico pensar que el mundo es infinito. Quienes lo juzgan limitado,

postulan que en lugares remotos los corredores y escaleras y hex?gonos pueden inconcebiblemente cesar - lo cual es absurdo. Quienes lo imaginan sin limites, olvidan

que los tiene el num?ro posible de libros. (B, 471)

Because the worlds of Uqbar, Tl?n, and the Library, as we have seen, are

language, their existence can only be believable - and the mise en abyme can

only work - by finding them written (or reflected) in books. Borges's concept of language refers exclusively to writing, not speech, and, like the mirror, is therefore two-dimensional, with an appearance of depth constituted by the fictional worlds it creates. The narrator of "Tl?n" seeks confirmation of the existence of Uqbar in several encyclopedias, not believing it until he sees the article before his eyes: "Conjetur? que ese pais indocumentado y ese heresiarca anonimo eran una fiction improvisada por la modestia de Bioy para justificar una frase" (T, 431). The universe of the Library, as well as the lives of its inhabitants, is also justified by the fact that all about them has been written:

Cuando se proclam? que la Biblioteca abarcaba todos los libros, la primera impresion fue de extravagante felicidad ... El universo estaba justificado ... No me parece inverosimil que en alg?n anaquel del universo haya un libro total; ruego a los dioses



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ignorados que un nombre ... lo haya examinado y leido ... Que yo sea ultrajado y

aniquilado, pero que en un instante, en un ser, tu enorme Biblioteca se justifique. (B,

468-70)

If creation is performed by means of language - i.e., writing

- then

nothing can exist if it cannot be expressed through it. This idea is reflected in the notion that materialism is impossible in Tl?n because it only has ideal

languages, and since the origin of the Library cannot be expressed in the

existing languages, another one must be invented. Yet this is also contradic

tory, according to the principles of Tl?n, because what is undocumented is fictional and therefore unbelievable, but if, as we have seen, what is written - literature - is by definition also fiction because language falsifies, then our

world is as ideal as Tl?n. Thus Borges deconstructs the authority of the written word.

Many of Borges's stories and theoretical writings could, in fact, be considered from the perspective that I have outlined here. I have tried to

throw some light on two stories which seem to contain both theoretical and fictional assumptions and statements about reality and the representation of that reality applicable to much of the rest of his work. The figure of the

mirror not only encompasses the pessimism that is entailed by the belief in

the impossibility of knowledge, but is also a vehicle for the search for

meaning in which Borges, through his writing, was always engaged.

Borges's writings represent the appropriation of many cultures.32 Yet, upon the occasion of his death, Sylvia Molloy expressed how even his voracious

reading prefigured the reappropriation of his work by Western culture as a

point of departure for the construction of theoretical systems: "Cre? a sus

precursores y se dej? crear por ellos" (1986: 804). His fictional texts propose new ways of thinking about the production and transformation of meaning, and they are the kernel from which much that comprises todays apparatus of postmodernism, deconstruction, and semiotics emerges, leaving behind

forms of textual construction linked exclusively to other theories. Borges's legacy in contemporary theory then reverts to his own work by providing new perspectives for mutual illumination and understanding of different

conceptual systems with different objectives.

University of Michigan

NOTES

I would like to thank Walter Mignolo, Frances Aparicio, and Eric Rabkin for their

valuable comments and suggestions on this paper.



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1 The relationships of influence between Borges and current literary theory have inspired much critical work. For instance, see Lindstrom's discussion of

some specific examples of the interaction between Borges's works and French

literary theory (833-84), and Rodriguez-Monegals observations about

Borges s writing as a source of Derrida's deconstructionist thought. He traces

two epigraphs by Borges quoted in Derrida's "La Pharmacie de Platon," one of them from "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." For Rodriguez-Monegal, Borges is "the representative of a recent, marginal literature ... within the central

tradition, corroding it yet making it possible" (1986: 232). 2 D?llenbach quotes Borges extensively in The Mirror in the Text (1989:

171-72).

3 What is meant here by "our world" is no more than a "version" that has

become our accustomed way of referring to the world we inhabit: "We

might, though, take the real world to be that of some one of the alternative

right versions (or groups of them bound together by some principle of

reductibility or translatability) and regard all others as versions of that same world differing from the standard version in accountable ways ... This world

[of the man-in-the-street], indeed, is one of the most often taken as real; for , reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit"

(Goodman 20). 4 For Hayles's more detailed discussion of Borges, see 260-61.

5 A different aspect of Borges s use of mirrors in this story is developed in

Nancy Kasons "The Mirror of Utopia," where she explores how "Tl?n,

Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" reverses the Lacanian stages. 6 All quotations from "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" will subsequently be desig

nated "T," and those from "La biblioteca de Babel," "B."

7 Because, as I mentioned earlier, the different types of mise en ahyme rarely occur in a pure, isolated form, and because the transcendental mise en ahyme is also a form of the textual, there is no contradiction in the statement that the figure of the mirror functions as both types at the same time.

8 Other readings of the mirror image as an inversion or distortion of the

original can be found in Rodriguez-Monegal 1973: 338, Irby 413, Barrenechea 175, Bell-Villada 130, and De Man 23.

9 This statement is consequent with the influence of Berkeley's idealist

philosophy on Borges: "Las imaginaciones derivadas de esta idea pueden

adoptar dos formas: o hacen resaltar que la realidad es un simple sueno y lo que creemos sustancial y concreto no es m?s que una apariencia, o producen un objeto sonado que adquiere tal vida y solidez que de rechazo disuelve el

orden terrestre" (Barrenechea 170).

10 I am referring, for example, to the impossibility of making sense out of the verbs "to lose" and "to find" "porque presuponen la identidad de las nueve

primeras monedas y de las ultimas" (T, 417). 11 Perception, though not reduced to sight, is overwhelmingly represented in

these stories through visual analogies and metaphors. 12 Rodriguez-Monegal writes that Borges, "as a child ... had a terror of mirrors,

and he refused to sleep in a room which contained one ... One is never



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alone in a room if there is a mirror" (1973: 338). This feeling that the man in the mirror is someone else reflects the insecurity about one's self-identity illustrated through the Herbert Ashe example.

13 I use the word "reflection" here noting that "speculum," the Latin word for "mirror," was also a medieval Latin term for "encyclopedia"

- another one

was "orbis," which explains part of the title and links the book, the reflection

phenomenon, and the universe into an intricate web (Echavarria 168n).

14 This is what John Barth calls "literature of exhaustion" in his essay of the same name (Alazraki 1976: 170-82). By anticipating that he will be buried in the Library, the anonymous narrator of "La biblioteca de Babel" makes it

include the afterlife as well, there being no other possible worid. The framing of the infinite also suggests the effect of two opposed mirrors, which has

already been developed by Barrenechea (36). 15 Yet this organizing principle, as we will see later, is itself doomed to failure:

"... the reality of Tl?n, though presented by Borges as that of 'un planeta ordenado' with its own 'intimas leyes,' is actually no less chaotic than that of

our own world. Its appearance of order is created by the fact that we know it

only through a man-made encyclopedia which, like the human mind,

imposes an artificial order on the real which it purports to catalogue" (Shaw 13).

16 This image of the cyclical book is repeated almost identically in "El jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan" (Borges 1974: 477). This book has also inspired a deconstructionist reading, its middle page without a reverse being the

equivalent of zero, of the void, that "is at once no-thing and ... Contains' the

possibility of every-thing* (Merrell 33). 17 In fact, the precursor of this story was called "La biblioteca total" (Borges

1939). 18 Borges uses "los nombres" throughout; the fictional worlds of these two

stories are significantly devoid of women.

19 Yet, as discussed above, the similarity is not complete, and the inhuman element of mirrors is also precisely what makes them unnerving.

20 See De Man (24) for a more detailed analysis of this point. 21 The "Posdata de 1947" actually appeared with the story in its present form

in 1940. Irby sees in it a mirroring of the revision of the First Encyclopaedia of Tl?n (417). For a deeper analysis of Borgess concept of literature as reformulation and rereading of previous literature see Alazraki (1977: 16,

23-24).

22 This reinforces the idea that the same thing cannot be said twice. Both stories are falsely presented as reprints of an earlier edition, which destroys, as Derrida would later propose, the possibility of existence of an original.

23 Arturo Echavarria has studied the ways in which the language of "Tl?n,

Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" follows this same pattern, in what he calls "a ciphered

language" (169). See also Irby (417). 24 This is an example of what D?llenbach calls resemblance, or simple

duplication, in which mise en abyme is a reflection of a similar work. In

Borges's stories, this function complements the other types of mise en abyme



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discussed above, which represent the same work - mimetism - or the work

itself - infinite duplication (110). 25 However, according to Lindstrom, "The perspective of the story's readers is

unlike that of the librarians, in that the former have no vested interest in the

proposition that the library makes sense" (33). 26 Friedman explains this lack of identity in repetition through the functioning

of memory: "La desconcertante falta de correspondencia entre una cosa y el

informe de ella surge en el texto en un contexto que recalca el equivoco de

la memoria" (222). What is remembered is not the thing itself, but the image that was kept in our memory: "El peri?dico deterioro y reparo que los 'hr?nir,' en sus diferentes grados de derivation, experimentan, nos puede recordar la suerte de las memorias que alternativamente aten?an la imagen de algo experimentado en el pasado y rectifican las distorsiones que las

primeras memorias han introducido" (224). De Man's comments on "Pierre

Menard, autor del Quijote" indicate the opposite result: "For each mirrored

image is stylistically superior to the preceding one, as the dyed cloth is more beautiful than the plain, the distorted translation richer than the original, Menard's Quixote aesthetically more complex than Cervantes'. By carrying this process to its limits, the poet can achieve ultimate success - an ordered

picture of reality that contains the totality of all things, subtly transformed and enriched by the imaginative process that engendered them" (25).

27 See Gertel (319) for a further development of this point. 28 See also Ricoeur (169, 176). 29 Echavarria corroborates this point when he talks about language that has no

referent but itself: "Sacamos ideas de los libros, nutrimos nuestra

imagination y nuestra memoria de esos extranos signos que son letra de

imprenta y que constituyen un aspecto del lenguaje. Pero el lenguaje, sin m?s

referente que ?l mismo, no nos puede permitir distinguir entre lo falso y lo verdadero. Nos servimos del lenguaje para comunicar sabiduria; nos

podemos servir del lenguaje, tambi?n, para enganar y enganarnos, para traicionar y traicionarnos" (186-87).

30 "... reflection, in order to 'take off,' has to work in alliance with a reality similar to that which it is reflecting: a work of art" (D?llenbach 71).

31 Echavarria has analyzed "Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in detail as this type of structure in the fashion of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes (163).

32 Traditionally, this has led to a critical view of Borges as a universalist writer. In recent years, this has sparked a debate about Borges's own status as a

Latin American. Fern?ndez Retamar labels him "a typical colonial writer ...

for whom the act of writing ... is more like the act of reading" (47). In the same vein, Alazraki quotes Ernesto S?bato describing Borges as an Argentine

writer: "He is a typical national by-product. Even his Europeanism is

national. A European is not a Europeanist but simply a European" (1988:

149).



175

WORKS CITED

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