Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation

3. Paradoxa Ortodoxa

CHAPTER THREE Paradoxa Ortodoxa Coincidences are inevitable since we are reading Derrida and Plato on the basis of Borges. —Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Borges and Derrida: Boticarios” It is said that the pelican so loves her young that she puts them to death with her claws. —Honorius de Autun, Speculum de mysteris ecclesiae Let us adore without understanding, said the priest. So be it, said Bouvard. —Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet In “Vindication of Bouvard and Pécuchet”1 Borges considered Flaubert’s work to be a “deceptively simple story”; we could apply a similar consideration to his story “The Gospel According to Mark.”2 But the coincidences between Flaubert’s work—an aberration, according to some, “the greatest work of French literature and perhaps of all literature ,”3 according to others—and Borges’s story are recognizable as something more than an appearance of shared simplicity. According to Borges, Flaubert makes his characters read a library “so that they don’t understand it,”4 they (cornu)copy5 it; also in “The Gospel according to Mark,” Borges imagines the problems of a reading that is too loyal and, for this reason, here too the risks of incomprehension should not be discarded. The story begins by describing the primary narrative circumstances of every introduction (“The deed occurred in the hacienda Los Álamos, in the district of Junín, toward the south, in the last days of the month of March of 1928”6), but this observation of conventional “beginnings” constitutes a realist option in two ways: a beginning that adjusts itself to 15 the most conservative realism, which according to Roman Jakobson is the one on which he models his observations concerning the old canons;7 and a minute and chronologically punctual geographic orientation. As far as Borges is concerned, the exaggeration of realist precision can only be a cause for suspicion. Perhaps it is more prudent to define this narration as realist à outrance, of an outré realism, better yet, an ultrarealism. (We will return to this definition.) The character, Baltasar Espinosa, a student from Buenos Aires, is found summering at his cousin’s hacienda when the storm crashes down, and the estuaries of an unforeseeable river-swell oblige him to remain in the heart of the hacienda, to share it with the foreman and his family—the Gutres—and to turn to the reading of the Gospel in order to attenuate the hostility of a forced conviviality, sidestepping by way of the (re)cited word as much the dubious proximity of dialogue as the discomforts of an inevitable circumspection. Basically, the narrative situation ends up being quite similar to that of another story: “The Shape of the Sword.”8 In this piece as well the story transpired in a hacienda, La Colorada, it was called (although, as we may read in the previous quote from the edition of the complete works, the hacienda from “The Gospel According to Mark” is called “Los Álamos,” in the first version it appears as “la Colorada”; the coincidence of the proper name cannot be ignored). But other, less striking similarities may be registered as well: the city/country opposition; inundation and isolation; involuntary closeness; the precarious Spanish of those living in the hacienda; the resistance to dialogue; the change and accumulation of narrative functions brought about by the participation of a character who takes on another narration and introduces in this way a second, distant—biblical or historical—diegesis. That introduction is crucial in that it unleashes an exchange of fundamental narrative functions : narrator for narratee; reader for characters, slippages that stratify the narration in chiasmas, weaving it into two crossed planes: in superposition and opposition, because the structure of “the circular ruins” is not only the fundamental literary articulation of the imaginative archeology of Borges but also the evidencing—by its narrative, by its poetics— of the referential fracture, the inevitability of breakdown through the phenomenon of signification. Representation as the point where the abyss opens: the sign is the origin of other signs, said Peirce, recognizing the il-limitation of semiosis as the path that, by way of the breakdown, precipitates the infinite: One—which?—looked at the other Like he who dreams he is dreaming.9 16 Borges More than the common place of the Borgesian imaginary, these interlaced slippages reveal duality as a necessary condition of any literary text that, according to Derrida, prefigures its own deconstruction...