Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art, A Revised Edition

9. El Aleph III: The Visionary Experience

9 El Aleph III the visionary experience T he volume El Aleph contains a handful of formidable, imposing and somewhat longer stories that depict holistic experiences and convey a vivid glimpse of grand totalities, be these the mystical , unitary revelations of ‘‘The God’s Script,’’ ‘‘The Zahir,’’ and ‘‘The Aleph’’ or the multitudinous adventures, attitudes, and personalities of a universal wanderer in ‘‘The Immortal.’’ The first three of these stories divide neatly into Hindu, Islamic, and Hebrew mysticisms, according to their choice of lexicon and imagery, while ‘‘The Immortal’’ complements these Eastern-tinged artifacts with its 3000-year patchwork of European authors from Homer to Shaw. This group of narratives has been accorded special attention by Borges scholars, whose expert exegeses are a virtual necessity in sorting out the vast array of formal intricacies and recondite learning. Without the guiding hand of a seasoned explorer, the uninitiated reader is apt to founder in Borges’s erudite tangle of metaphors, ellipses, obliquities, religious references , and obscure proper names. Mysticism, of course, is a notoriously difficult, perhaps impossible, subject to write about. The most celebrated mystics, without reservations or irony, have defended the substantiality of their visions yet have also insisted on the essential incommunicability of their experience. In his stories, by contrast, Borges sets forth cosmic seizures through a highly sophisticated and ironic objectivity. Whether this is done by means of the vagueness of setting and the narrator’s delusions in ‘‘The God’s Script,’’ the dense book-learning in ‘‘The Zahir,’’ or the counterweight of love and satire in ‘‘The Aleph,’’ Borges’s elaborate literary apparatus serves to keep his explosive subject matter at arm’s length, to give it outer density via his thick verbal-cognitive texture. The mystical tales appear to have an autobiographical basis. In 1928, Borges published in his collection El idioma de los argentinos a little five- page essay entitled ‘‘Sentirse en muerte’’ (literally, ‘‘Feeling Oneself in Death’’).1 Highly subjective and personal, with no bookish references, the piece tells of an uncanny sensation Borges experienced ‘‘a few nights ago’’ while strolling idly in Barracas, a poor neighborhood with which he is relatively unfamiliar. As he ambles about the muddy roads and craggy sidewalks, he approaches an alley bordering on the pampas and sees a rose-colored wall that seems to radiate its own ‘‘intimate light’’ rather than that of the moon. Staring amid the nocturnal silence, he feels transported twenty years into the past. ‘‘I felt dead, like an abstract perceiver of the world,’’ says the twenty-nine-year-old author. ‘‘Or rather, I suspected myself of possessing the meaning—reluctant or absent—of the word eternity’’ (IA, 149–150). Being on the edge of the city, facing a moonlit wall, hearing no sounds save perhaps a few crickets: the set of conditions is just right to prompt such a seizure in a young man then predisposed to transcendent sorts of knowledge. Nighttime, aloneness, minimal sensory stimuli—these in fact constitute the initial stages for such visions, as reported by the great mystic writers. Borges would later exclude this hauntingly beautiful piece from collections of his work. Still, he was not averse to discussing the topic. In a conversation with Willis Barnstone, he reminisces: In my life I had only two mystical experiences and I can’t tell them because what happened is not to be put into words, since words, after all, stand for shared experience. Twice in my life I had a feeling, a feeling rather agreeable than otherwise. It was astonishing, astounding, I was overwhelmed, taken aback. I had the feeling of living not in time but outside time. It may have been a minute or so, it may have been longer. But I know I had that feeling in Buenos Aires, twice in my life. Once I had it on the South side, near the railroad station Constitución. Somehow the feeling came over me that I was living beyond time. Putting that moment into perspective, Borges further elaborates: I felt very grateful for it. I know people who’ve never had it, and I know people who are having it all the time. My friend, a mystic, abounds in ecstasies. I don’t. I’ve only had two experiences of timeless time in eighty years.2 The involuntary rapture by which Borges was twice overcome—so powerful that it inspired in his younger self a desire to evoke it in a confes210 borges’s fictions [18.191.18...