Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation

10. Vox in Deserto: Borges and the Story of Sand

CHAPTER TEN Vox in Deserto: Borges and the Story of Sand He told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand have either beginning or end. —Borges, Libro de Arena We would again have to allude to the writing of Borges, considering it a writing avant la lettre, insofar as it anticipates and prescribes the imagination and thought determining the historical, political, theoretical, and aesthetic tendencies that define ambivalently the culture of the second half of the last century, finalizing that century, that millennium, and other times. The revelations of his paradoxical vision, the aporias of his incertitudes , the disconcerts of suspended oppositions, the perfection of representations so precise that they obliterate what they represent, copies that surpass their originals, the vanishing of categories and genres, the undrawing of disciplinary limits, the fatality of a writing that does not distinguish although it is sustained by distinction, the progressive introduction of fiction into history, the omission that is another recourse of fiction, the totalitarian absurdity of inventories that impugn invention, the arbitrary enumerations, the incidences of possible worlds that displace known ones, the discontinuous parallelism of the encyclopedias that record or interpret them, the theoretical crises and the hermeneutic rescues of a truth, fragile and in flight, constitute some of the forms of those disparate definitions. Observing these broken down gnosiological series, the meticulous clarity of rigorous cartographic registers, the iconic solidity of diagrams as valid as they are debatable, the measurable distances according to exact standards, the terminating borders between jurisdictions that tend to confront one another, the orientation of cardinal points as symmetrical as 123 they are arbitrary, the eventualities of a utopic geography could not cease to be one of the favorite targets at which Borges would aim his negative poetics. “What are the Orient and the Occident? If they ask me, I do not know. Let us look for an approximation,”1 Borges replies, but in regional terms, diffusely spatial, to the same question that Augustine formulated about time, and, like the old professor of rhetoric who was a monk before converting, responds by affirming that he knows space and does not know it at the same time. Anterior and similar to the coincidences of the globalized present, Borges’s epistemological fiction takes note of this planetary reduction in which the confines, being conventional, do not count; where distances, because of the immediacy of contexts and accelerated imagination , count less; where accidents are no more than accidental; where exotic places appear juxtaposed—because they are neighbors or mythical—to familiar im-mediations where Orient and Occident contract in a common decline that brings them closer to one another. Preceded by the redundancies of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), a title in which time and space are confounded in one and the same fall,2 that approximation constitutes a decline in two parts for two reasons: because geographical reason declines (barely a primary topography); because conceptual reason declines (barely a discrete logic). And how to define the Orient, not the real Orient, which does not exist? I would say that the notions of Orient and Occident are generalizations but that no individual feels Oriental. I suppose that a man feels Persian, feels Hindu, feels Malay, but not Oriental. In the same way, no one feels Latin American: we feel Argentine, Chilean, Orientals (Uruguayans). It does not matter, the concept does not exist.3 Between prophecy or provocation, Borges’s previsions were those of an epoch in which countries vanish, regionalized into markets; in which deterritorialization turns inside out the definitions of national statutes submitted to the fluctuations of a conceptual stock market in which notions of nation and narration are confounded, and not only because of homophonic occurrences. Borges’s imagination mocks borders because, uncertain, they indistinctly unite or separate jurisdictions. They degrade them, running through them by means of personal topology that explodes into contiguities only conceived of in dreams, making of the whole world a common place, topoi koinoi. More than sites, indisputable arguments, they get by without fortuitous particularities, without the eventualities of history, procuring to discover, beyond idiomatic, idiosyncratic contingen124 Borges cies and the myths of identity that sustain them, the models of a knowledge capable of abstracting them. There the variants of being and knowing stand as instances of a movement, of a voyage that is directed beyond, toward...