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CR: The New Centennial Review 4.1 (2004) 169-187



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Rereading Borges's "The Aleph"

On the Name of a Place, a Word, and a Letter

Universidad de la República, Uruguay
Translated by William Egginton
State University of New York at Buffalo

To celebrate the centenary of borges's birth, in 1999, thebibliothèque Nationale de France dedicated, in his honor, a day of conferences, round tables, and film screenings. In that place I presented "Borges et la bibliothèque,"1 almost a common-place, one topic or two, as much because of the institution where it took place as because of the argumentation of recurrent reasoning it implies. I alluded to the excesses and redundancies of a theme that dealt with a very controversial, very quoted library, in the very library in which the quotation took place.

Despite the atemporal search that traverses all celebration, and the dislocation of an enclosure that seems to disappear before the universal condition that constitutes it, the specification of these circumstances, without constraining the theme, contributed to limiting it. The punctual restrictions of date, the rootedness in a given place favored the rhetorical figurations of an auspicious identification. The recurrent formula of "Borges and . . ." became "Borges in . . . ," slipping toward one of the predictable tautologies: [End Page 169] "Borges is the library," an adequation in which equivalence does not dissimulate one or more unknowns.

Although neither calendar nor locale now determine this writing, which prolongs the previous one, a similar relation is posited upon considering "the place of the word" in the place where the word happens. Less precise than in a concrete place, the word is inscribed in the space of an open discourse, risking even greater excesses. Nevertheless, despite the decades gone by, there in the twenties of the twentieth century Borges's texts already insinuated a similar growth, and no less of an outrage. Thanks to the consonances, on the basis of which the poet tends to discover unforeseeable harmonies, The Size of Space, the title of the small book by Leopoldo Lugones, has concealed itself since then in Borges's title, The Size of My Hope, or the other way around. Neither knowledge (mathematical in the first case, literary in the second) nor thematics facilitate the superimposition of both references, but despite an uncertain conceptual association, the titles appear too similar not to notice coincidences between terms that, from the beginning, are manifested as partially related. Borges's title reconciles both titles as if announcing a similar size, that of "space" and "hope," equally ungraspable—two notions mutually imbricated, essaying a "profession of literary faith,"2 a beginning that has no end.

The examples are many in which Borges trusts to that sort of "delicate verbal adjustment the 'sympathies and differences' of words" (Borges 1974 , 206), as well as to the variations of such delicacy as the expectancy of a probable felicity. It is not necessary to abound in explications that would simplify the splendid irradiation of voices that glimpse, beyond their phonetic and literal similarities, the harmonies of a universe articulated according to the reasons of a poetic logic more convincing than the alphabetical ordering of the dictionary. In the lecture "The Thousand and One Nights," Borges intuits that "we must not renounce the word Orient, such a beautiful word, since in it is, by happy coincidence, the word gold [oro]." In more than one passage, the poet calls attention to those incipient rhymes, to the importance of verbal accord—a species of musical accord—that marks the common beginning, the union between space [espacio] and hope [esperanza], or between the origin, the Orient, gold [oro], the starting point for a [End Page 170] logophany (Banon 1987, 33)3 that alliteration favors. Concerning forms that are incapable of retaining their content, Emmanuel Lévinas said that "Sound is, altogether, resonance, explosion, scandal" (Lévinas 1987, 219). The pure sounds of the fractured word resound according to other senses that...

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