Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation

2. Variations on a Letter Avant-la-lettre

CHAPTER TWO Variations on a Letter Avant-la-Lettre Seul le chapitre des bifurcations reste ouvert à l’espérance . N’oublions pas que tout ce qu’on aurait pu être icibas , on l’est quelque part ailleurs. (Only the chapter of bifurcations remains open to hope. Let us not forget that all that we could have been down here, we are somewhere else.) Louis-Auguste Blanqui1 I If the aesthetic, theoretical, and hermeneutic present is debated in the face of the indeterminacy of works that slip between the expansive spaces of a disputable disciplinary topography; if epistemological definitions question its limits and its doctrinal and methodological foundations; if questions of taxonomy challenge the rigidity of inventories that fail to encompass the inventions they seek to classify; nor oppositions justify series because they interlace them, accelerating their differences; if other uncertainties are not exclusive of the scientific present; perhaps it is not necessary to remind ourselves that, since more than a half a century ago, numerous thinkers, philosophers, and writers have been reading Borges. They hesitated at first, interpreting as metaphors the aporias of his rhetoric of indecision, as allegories the paradoxical variations of a poetics of preterition that grasps the imagination of possibilities and their opposites, convinced, like some of the characters of his fiction, that historical times interlace their differences, multiplying uncertainties, planting suspicions, filtered through an unpredictable network that intercepts them as much as it lets them pass through. 5 Just as after Borges2 it is no longer disputed that each author creates his or her own precursors,3 it is even less disputed that Borges creates other authors who follow him, read him, who write and therefore exist. So many poets and narrators, so many theoreticians and critics are occupied with the imagination of Borges, that the imagination of Borges has occupied the world. Understandably, a long time after Emir Rodríguez Monegal4 wrote down the illustrious terms of that “greatest common denominator” that is his name, a North American critic proposed to nominate Borges as the emblem of this era.5 There is no question about it: In such a case, I would carve in that emblematic image the inscription ante litteram. It is not unusual to approach the variations of his literature’s reasoned aesthetics, the diverse modulations of his intellectual poetry, which anticipated and concentrated the thought, knowledge, and imagination of the century, attending to the reticencies contained in a transgressive writing that has been alluded to more than once, but whose excesses would recuperate the original meaning of “to transgress”: to pass to the other side, traverse margins, cross borders, go beyond—also in capitals, transitions that cede way to the transcendence that is, properly speaking, an ascension to universal terms, by which it overcomes categories, oppositions , the eventuality of differences. A contradictory transgression overcomes limits or suspends them through a bringing into relief (relevamiento) that, like the well-known Aufhebung—that Hegelian form of “to bring into relief” (relevar)—is overcoming and suppression, both actions at once. It is important to bring into relief that first meaning of to transgress because, among other reasons, that is how to understand, in a contradictory way, that his writings “read with a previous fervor and a mysterious loyalty”; those conditions of reading that define, according to Borges,6 the classical writers. An in-fraction restitutes the fracture, reunites the fragments, animates the vigor and validity of his writings. It is precisely in that essay, “On the Classics,” where he concludes by formulating an assertion that I would introduce here as an exhortation, with the purpose of controverting a permanence that neither endorses nor invalidates transgression: The emotions that literature evokes are perhaps eternal, but the means must constantly change, even if only in the slightest way, in order not to lose their virtue. They expend themselves as they are recognized by the reader. Thus the danger of affirming that there exist classical works and that they will be so for ever.7 6 Borges II Beyond the functions of reader and critic, of author and critic, or of author and reader, Borges’s writing melds attributions that are presumed to be external to the textual universe, interlacing them in a threshold that extends and disappears. Neither inside nor outside, neither before nor after. A diegesis in crisis alters the spaces and times of a textuality that does not distinguish between them. Beyond oppositions...