«Everything transcends everything and is more or less real than what it is»

Fernando Pessoa, Faust

Literature now seems unruly toward classifications, toward any structuring that would encompass it and justify it within a total vision both of the world and of the meaning of human doing, and of artistic production in general. And beyond technical analyses, beyond stylistic or socio-political reviews, a reflection on the reach of the literary adventure seems today almost untraceable, a reflection on this unfolding of the soul of the world referred, as explanatory systems often require, to a point other than the discourse and the practice that encompass them. Narrow aesthetic reflections, or more broadly philosophical ones, have for decades traveled the road of analysis, of the parceling out or the deconstruction of any set of notions that carried a value of Truth, both in content and in substance, but the practice of literary writing goes on, along other traces.
Borges wrote: «the universal history goes on:/the minute ways of death in tooth decay,/the circulation of my blood and of the planets». Borges’s writing: we may speak of it not as of a system, of a Truth, but as of a library science, a fictional repertory that measures itself ceaselessly against the reality of the world and the possibility of stating it, against the wavering question of Truth, against the voices of this Truth. Percy B. Shelley declared that «poets are the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present […] a power which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world». Schopenhauer, in the preface to the more than 1,500 pages of The World as Will and Representation, writes that his whole work consists in nothing but the elaboration of a single thought, yet that he found no shorter way than that entire book to lay it bare. Borges will never compile a great volume, yet in his work he seems to attempt the same path. The body of his works may rightfully be counted among those that Franco Moretti calls “world texts”: the idea may be that of a literary world-economy – the concept is taken from Braudel – of a set of texts whose reach may be similar to that of a sacred text and whose exegesis gives us a probable axiological and constitutive order of the world in which it comes to light. This function is usually exercised by the great religious texts, or the great philosophical works. With respect to the master Schopenhauer, from whom he borrows with gratitude the phantasmal consistency of the phenomena we commonly call World, he travels similar routes but with another gait – one that recalls so much that of the Blind Pew («The dogs barked at him from the houses, / the boys mocked him, / he slept a sickly, broken sleep / in the black dust of the ditches. / But he knew that on remote golden shores / a hidden treasure was his […]») of his beloved Stevenson, with whom he shares in literature the intolerability of the inflation of the optic nerve – and he arrives at different outcomes: writing of the world and about the world becomes a continual sliding that grazes the latter, supposes it, but never renders it, never justifies it, never reaches a single, ultimate clot; never gives it a clarity of sense, save an intuitive one, or else, and this may be the truth, represents it as everything just written: no clarity, undecidability of the reference, impossibility of stating this well-beloved truth of the world.
Borges makes of exegesis a literary word, raising the essay to the status of a fictional work, and poetry to that of philosophical meditation. In a Paris of more than forty years ago, tinged with a red that was also the blood of the wounds of the old systems, Michel Foucault chisels a volume upon The Order of Things, whose first words say that «this book was born from a text by Borges: from the laughter that his literature provokes, unsettling all the familiarities of thought – our own, that is: the thought that belongs to our age and our geography – overturning all the ordered surfaces and all the planes that, before our eyes, appease the exuberance of beings, making our millennia-old practice of the Same and the Other waver and rendering it long uneasy». When Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter arranged their anthology on the substantial and epistemic question of the I, they thought of Borges as a starting point for their volume and used his passages as cues and interludes among the various contributions. As to how these and other progenies have come about in recent universal history, we believe it is owing to the fact that the Argentine writer, in his writing, does not cease to inquire, by means of proliferations and of subtractions – the idea is Maurice Blanchot’s – how poetic art, or literary art tout court, comes to relate itself to that key of the so-called real, to which it itself belongs, at least as an artifact, which is commonly called truth. Blanchot writes:

«Literature is not a simple deception, it is the dangerous power to go, through the infinite multiplicity of the imaginary, toward that which is. The difference between the real and the unreal, the inestimable privilege of the real, is that reality is less real, being nothing but negated unreality, dissolved by the energetic labor of negation and by that other negation which is labor itself. Precisely this less, a kind of stripping away and thinning of space, allows us to go, with the felicity of the straight line, from one point to another […]»

Before art began to come to blows with aesthetics, the poetic, or literary, word was inserted into the truth-schemas that totalize the world, man, the All: writing as the proud voice of Absolute Truth. To posit that Truth is a One, a Same, remains problematic. The maker of the literary word is caught in the same game: the problem doubles. He creates, or extracts, the symbol, but loses himself in the symbol, or in the metaphor. The poetic fact vanishes and is always given in an instant in which the written compound is either in fieri or by now turned to something else, something that drags away the capital of the true without fixing any full reference but only a phantasmal one. The coordinates of the world become imprecise: either an implacable temporal succession that oblivion helps us to bear and to deform, or a consoling but fictional Eternity; a gaze upon the topographies of the world in whose instability the eye cannot identify anything real, not even the eye itself that looks.
This is how, in the Borges-work, literature, the word and its voice function with regard to the world: to illustrate by hints the «I can’t make sense of it, but it may well be beautiful this way» could be the aim of these lines.

Ars Poetica
Borges declares in more than one page a certain distance between the artifact of scriptural production and any aesthetic question whatsoever: «I do not possess an aesthetics – he writes in In Praise of Darkness – such devices or habits do not amount to an aesthetics. Besides, I do not believe in aesthetics. In general they are nothing but useless abstractions; they change for each writer and even for each text and can be nothing but occasional stimuli or instruments» and that «a volume in itself is not an aesthetic fact, it is a physical object among others; the aesthetic fact can occur when it is written or read». A possible theory becomes a metaphorical object that serves as the narrative thread of a literary composition: the reflection on the art of writing and on the relation between the literary word and Truth is no longer a theory that justifies a text but is taken as the object of the writing itself. An example of this is these verses, found in the collection The Maker, titled “Ars Poetica”:

To gaze upon the river that is of time and water
and to remember that time too is a river.
To know that we are lost like the river
and that faces pass like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
that dreams it is awake, and that the death
our flesh fears is that death
of every night, which is called sleep.

To decipher in the day or in the year a symbol
of the days of man and of his years,
to turn the outrage of the years
into a music, a noise, a symbol.

To call death sleep, in the sunset
to see a sad gold, is poetry,
which is immortal and poor. Poetry
returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the evenings a face
looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
art must be that mirror
that reveals to us our own face.

They tell that Ulysses, weary of wonders,
wept with love on glimpsing his Ithaca
green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
of green eternity, not of wonders.

It is also like the interminable river
that passes and remains and is the crystal of one same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and is another, like the interminable river.

Here are all the topoi of the Borgesian tension: the first effect of literary composition is the eternalizing of the everyday into metaphor. The ungraspable reality, glimpsed – and already symbolized by means of a more or less Heraclitean vision – begins to escape from the very first line: nothing can remain equal to itself, in the sense that no identity is recognizable in the course of time, and even of some concrete time I may lose the trace at the very moment in which I raise it into a schema of reference in order to catalog and identify anything at all. A vicious circle seems to form, in which what can be universal, and therefore True, becomes in turn an object and sets off a terrible game to infinity. There is a flight, a cognitive slippage, object and name double and proliferate: «To feel that waking is another dream that dreams of not dreaming»: there is at once a symbolization, and, next, the reduction to symbol of something that is already a symbol. Symbols are time, the face, water; and then the dream, death and dream in a reciprocal annihilation in perpetual motion. All at once it seems that art finds its instant of truth, but at once it passes and refracts itself as in a mirror that cannot hold still an image in movement. There is a continual dialectic, with a continual negative movement of identification through differentiation that never arrives at a finding, at a further truth that at the same time recapitulates the whole: instead of clarifying and vivifying, the word here works, to put it again with Blanchot, by subtraction.

Pessoa opens his Faust by positing that «Everything is symbol and analogy / the wind that passes, the night that grows cool […]». The same procedure is set in motion here. The master Schopenhauer branded the vulgarity of the phenomenal world, and J. L. B. accepts in part this restatement, but unlike the former he never arrives at a substratum that, however terrible, might justify or describe the world. The only thing that remains is a succession of metaphors: could the truth of the world consist eminently in this?

On History and Science
Borges alternates in his usage the term metaphor with the term symbol, and uses the latter with the explicit intention of inserting metaphorical productions within a so-called tradition that becomes the notional and relational schema whereby a recognizable meaning can be attributed to metaphorical discourse. Then, framed in this way, the literary word seems in any case to tell us something, at least in relation to the schema of reference, to the semantic tradition of which it is part, leaving aside a possible truth other than the word. This whole discourse we might then read as a schema that perhaps does not give us the reality of anything simple, individual, irreducible, but that gives us the True, a total reality in its possibilities of articulation, in the possibility that a voice may at least speak, yet with the specter that it may remain only a voice. The representative schema carries itself of itself. And so I may try to create a truth, or to recognize or accept a truth as created, without making of it a question of ontological levels by analogy.
Borges, with respect to all this, finds another complication: he inserts also the question of what the origin, or origins, of such a schema might be, and of the tradition that legitimizes it, at least as regards literature: it becomes the problem of the right to be able to speak of an “author”, or creator. The eventual eye that sees the world, or the voice that speaks of it, or the pen that shapes it, become in his work nothing but elements of the schema. The problem is complex, and with this hint we leave it.
In The Sphere of Pascal it is written that «perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors». How an idea may subsume the truth of the whole is explored through a single image, or metaphor, or symbol, which is the metaphor itself. From Xenophanes, passing through Giordano Bruno, and arriving at Pascal, in this inquisitorial passage on the real Borges tries to reconstruct a stretch of universal history. Already there is the form of an analogical predication, which might be one of the mechanisms of metaphor, and in the end the consideration will be that “perhaps universal history is the history of the intonation of a few metaphors” (we are in 1951; the histoire evenementielle has not yet taken hold). There is also the hypothesis that scientific discourse itself is a single, interminable and unsatisfying metaphor, nothing more than literature. At least that it risks being subject to this same mechanism. Scientific systems themselves are guilty of incompleteness – Borges studies Russell – and risk always having their reason outside themselves, in a sliding, a progressive deferral in which one can no longer make sense of anything. This, On Exactitude in Science, is another page of literature, but not only that:

«[…] In that Empire, the art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province took up an entire City, and the map of the empire, an entire Province. In time, these Boundless Maps did not satisfy, and the Colleges of Cartographers erected a Map of the Empire that equaled in size the Empire and coincided point for point with it. Less Devoted to the Study of Cartography, the Succeeding Generations understood that this vast Map was Useless and not without Impiety abandoned it to the inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West there remain tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Country there is no other Relic of the Geographical Disciplines.»

The scientific word itself becomes unusable. The continual referral to a broader explanatory schema becomes a slippage, a deferral, one does not know whether infinite, but surely indefinite, a recapitulation that never arrives at truth.
Moreover, science fails to state the world, becomes fiction, a literature, and so we may return to the pages mentioned above, or to others, and the vicious game is set off anew. Borges makes irony of his own scriptural procedure: «As long as a writer limits himself to narrating events – he writes in The First Welles – or to tracing the slight oscillations of a consciousness, we may suppose him omniscient, we may confuse him with the universe or with God; as soon as he descends to reasoning we know him to be fallible».
Borges tries continually to inquire into and describe the possibility of getting out beyond metaphor, of obviating the tending toward the universal that seems one of the elements of the Proper of literature, a condition for making and making oneself world and for circulating in the world. He attempts it from his first writings. He had already tried it indirectly, with stylistic strategies: introducing Man on Pink Corner, a tale of gauchesque setting included in A Universal History of Infamy, he writes that «in the text, which is of a popular intonation, one will notice that I have interpolated some learned words: viscera, conversions, etc. I did so because the tough aspires to refinement, or else (this excludes the other, but perhaps it is the truth) because toughs are individuals and do not always speak like the Tough, who is a Platonic figure». A snag within the snag, a dialectic that tends toward the true and that once again does not conclude: the stylistic mark attempts to prize the text loose from a possible universal truth, trying to describe a character not reducible to a topos, but, lacking reference, the chosen individual becomes a topos in turn, and the possible single real is lost again. The attempt to seize the real again was always at an impasse.

At this point let us imagine that Borges makes one last attempt: he tries to concentrate on the possibility that his thought focus on an object, not in general, but a precise individual, of which all possible descriptive traits might be given. Shut in his study, he thinks of a tiger.

The Other Tiger
The beast most beloved by our author, the vital force bearing the shifting colors that his partial blindness alone allowed him to see clearly. It is the trace of another poem. It is verses that tell us that in a library Borges thinks of a tiger, not of the Tiger in general, but of a specific individual: he describes it in the details of its movements, in the particulars of its bearing and its actions, in its unawareness of memory and of time, in its lack of a consciousness that develops as a dynamic and synthetic set of chronologies and geographies, which makes it all the more a single one and not a specification of a genus: «its world has no names, nor past / nor future, only a certain instant». But at once a distance sets itself against this: the consciousness of the author, who thinks and writes a tiger of the banks of the Ganges from a remote port of South America on the evening of the 3rd of August of ’59. A distance interposes itself: it is again that of the word from the real, from a single tiger in this case, and he thinks that «the tiger of my verses / is a tiger of symbols and literary tropes / and of encyclopedia memories, / not the fatal tiger, baleful diamond / that, under the sun or the changing moon, goes fulfilling in Sumatra or in Bengal / its rite of love, of idleness and of death». He tries again to set the true tiger against the one of his verses, against that tiger’s being nothing but an object of his thought, a set of words; «except that this naming of her / and imagining all that surrounds her / makes her a fiction of art and not a living / creature that walks upon the earth».
One might make here a remark on the framing of the question: Borges starts from a tiger that he does not perceive directly, but that is in some way content and form of his thought, a mental object, we might say, referred by words, by a structured set of words, evocative from the standpoint of poetic emotion but that cannot give the present reality of a single individual. He does not start from the direct vision of the tiger, of that tiger. But even if he did, his referring it to us would once again set off this terrible skeptical snag.
He might even smell it, but when he names it the tiger disappears, and at this point one might no longer make sense of anything. With all due respect to Shelley and other Romantics, at least in the work of Borges the literary word no longer gives form to reality, does not legislate over reality, but does nothing other than restate the positing of a distance that reproduces an insurmountable skeptical point between the word and a reality that is never reachable nor recapitulable, undecidably supposed to be elsewhere. And yet this infinite game goes on. «I know it, but something / imposes on me this imprecise adventure, / ancient and senseless, and I persist / in seeking in the time of evening / the other tiger, the one that is not in the verse».
One even risks no longer being able to write, even in avowedly fictional form, of the world. The work of Borges is the work of the unsayability of the world. Yet he keeps playing to infinity with the illusion of this senseless possibility.