Borges the Golem-Maker: Intimations of "Presence" in "The Circular Ruins"

The book spoke to me as had my dream, only clearer and more coherently. . . . From an invisible mouth words were streaming forth, turning into living entities, and winging straight towards me.

—Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

Perhaps the most vexed question in literary studies today involves the fundamental meaning of the literary work: is literature simply one more form of ideological state apparatus (Althusser) or method of surveillance (Foucault)? is the concept of unity possible in the absence of the transcendental signified (Derrida)? can we view literature as having meaning in a post-Nietzschean world? It is, finally, a question of metaphysics. As George Steiner argues in his book Real Presences, “any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.” ¹ To position Steiner’s comment in a larger critical dialogue, let me cite Harold Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criticism as a foil: “There is the religious illusion, that a poem possesses or creates a real presence. . . . [P]oems don’t have presence, unity, form, or meaning. Presence is a faith, unity is a mistake or even a lie, form is a metaphor, and meaning is an arbitrary and now repetitious metaphysics.”² As these two arguments illustrate, at stake in recent poststructuralist debate is the metaphysics of poetic presence—even of poetic unity and meaning—in the literary text. Despite apparent theological differences, however, one of the common points which emerges in the exchange I have represented through Bloom and Steiner is a shared sense of the relevance of kabbalistic interpretation. Bloom’s penchant for kabbalah is well known (he has frequently been charged by his critics with writing “psycho-kabbalism”), but Steiner brings up the issue as well: “deconstruction echoes . . . certain Kabbalistic meditations according to which all speech and writing after the initial Logos-act, after the first and all-creating Word, are more or less superfluous reiteration or epilogue” (Steiner 118–19).

It is against this backdrop, the apparent (perhaps unlikely) confluence of kabbalistic and poststructuralist thought, that I would like to consider the problem of presence in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Circular Ruins” (“Las Ruinas Circulares”). There is a rich tradition of Borges criticism focusing on manifestations of kabbalistic thought in his work; most recently, Edna Aizenberg has examined aspects of this confluence in her essay “Borges and the Hebraism of Contemporary Literary Theory.” ³ But Aizenberg’s work (including The Aleph Weaver), like most of its counterparts, does not elaborate upon the crucial metaphysical dimension of Borges’ use of the golem legend. For Aizenberg (and others), Borges exemplifies the metaphysically post-Nietzschean writer for whom “presence is a sham” (Aizenberg 252). ⁴ What I will argue instead is that through his use of the legend of the golem in “The Circular Ruins,” Borges explores means of sacralizing the text, of establishing authorial presence in his work.

Deconstruction and “The Circular Ruins”

Borges’ ficciones have been seized upon as the archetype—or precursor, if you will—of the deconstructed text: stories such as “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” offer an agreeably comfortable fit with the deconstructed worldview of textual play enabled by the death of the Author. It is not difficult to imagine how “The Circular Ruins” would be taught in the postmodernist’s classroom: the magician-priest’s recognition that “someone else was dreaming him,” that he is only one in a long chain of dreamers, captures the principles of indeterminacy and infinite deferral in a nutshell. “At this juncture,” one critic writes, referring to the story’s conclusion, “the author vanishes like the disintegrating dreamer dispersed into the increasing materiality of his own phantasm,” leaving only the “infinity of words” and infinite interpretation in his wake. ⁵ More politically-minded critics take the opportunity to expose the “social construction of the self,” arguing that “The Circular Ruins” is really an allegory of the constructed (and ultimately ineffable) subject’s impotence in the face of the material forces of society. Such a reading has proven especially useful...