Borges, Poetry, and Meaning

The decision to award the 1961 Prix Formentor to Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) made clear to an international reading public what the Latin American literary community had long known, namely, that Borges was among the most original and creative writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the publication of The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Ficciones (1944), and The Aleph (1949) established the Argentine writer not only as a master of prose fiction, but also as a keenly discerning philosophical mind capable of treating perennial philosophical questions (time, space, knowledge, personal identity, and so forth) within the context of imaginative narrative.¹ Yet the extraordinary success and diffusion of Borges’s fiction has had the effect not only of obscuring the significance of his other work, but also of concealing the extent to which that work, especially his poetry, might likewise be brought to bear on philosophical concerns.

Of special interest in this connection is the manner in which Borges’s poetry raises less narrowly philosophical issues that nevertheless have substantial philosophical import. One such issue arises in “1964,” the first of a series of sonnets published in The Other, The Same (1964):

The world is no longer magical. They have left you. You will no longer share the clear moon Nor the slow gardens. There is no longer Any moon that isn’t a reflection of the past, A mirror of solitude, a sun of agonies. Gone are the hands and the hearts That brought love close. Today you have only Faithful memory and empty days. No one loses (you repeat vainly) Except what he doesn’t have and never had. But it is not enough to be strong To learn the art of oblivion. A symbol, a rose, tears you apart And the strum of a guitar could kill you.

(2: 298)²

This sonnet answers to what Max Weber long ago called “the disenchantment of the world,” a phrase that has come to denote the series of religious, philosophical, and social transformations—the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the rise of positivism, industrialization, and modern technology, among others—which together conspired to dilute, in Charles Taylor’s words, “our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order” (Sources 17). That the question of meaning is at the heart of disenchantment suggests that the problem is not only philosophical but also poetic. The latter component emerges more clearly if we attend to the connotations of Weber’s German phrase, die Entzauberung der Welt, which, unlike its English analogue, refers less to the subjective experience of meaninglessness and more to what might be termed, somewhat awkwardly, the “dis-charming” or “un-magicking” of reality itself. As we shall see, the tradition of modern poetry concerned itself almost obsessively both with the meaningfulness of poetic language and with its “magical” potential. Indeed, it is precisely the sense that the world has grown “unmagical” that Borges underscores in the opening line of the poem cited above.

Some twenty years later, Borges would return to the theme of magic. “To write a poem,” he noted in the “Inscription” to The Conspirators (1985), “is to attempt a minor magic” (3: 541). The conjunction of the first line of “Inscription” and the first line of “1964” yields a condensed version of a narrative at least as old as the biblical triptych of Paradise, Fall, and Redemption: the world was once magical, no longer is, but might be again someday. As M. H. Abrams has convincingly argued, this three-part religious drama served the Romantics and their progeny as fodder for a variety of secularized narratives of redemption. Although the details vary, nearly all such narratives begin in primal unity, pass through a fall into division and fragmentation, and end with a return to the unity and happiness of the origin. On Borges’s retelling, the language of “magical” replaces the Romantic terminology of “unity,” but the plot’s general contours are the same—as, most importantly, is the mechanism of restoration: if the world no longer is (but once was) magical, and if poetry itself is a form of “magic,” then...