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TWELVE THE MYSTERY OF THE NAME Perhaps there was an error in the writing Or in the articulation of the Sacred Name; Despite such high sorcery The apprentice of man did not learn to speak. —Jorge Luis Borges In one of Borges’s best-known stories, the one that continues to be—with reason—his most-quoted story, resigning himself to the uselessness of all intellectual exercise, or demanding it, the narrator affirms: “A philosophical doctrine is at first a verisimilar description of the universe; the years go by and it is a mere chapter—when not a paragraph and a name—of the history of philosophy. In literature, that final caducity is even more notorious.”1 Thus, in trying to apply this prediction to the oeuvre of Borges himself, in foreseeing, hypothetically and not without a certain irony, the reductions of a decadent epistemology or of a poetics on the path to extinction, it would not be unusual if we were to record the permanence, barely, of only one poem. In such case, if it had been left to him to decide, it would have mattered to him—Borges dixit—that “The Golem” remain; but even the entire poem seemed to him an excessive pretension and that one stanza would be enough; in that case, he preferred that it be the first: If (as the Greek affirmed in the Cratylus) The name is the archetype of the thing, In the letters of rose is the rose And all of the Nile in the word Nile.2 If it were a name, it was not pronounced. But I didn’t ask. One would have to assume, because of it, the responsibility of maintaining that relic. If 139 140 BORGES it were thus so, perhaps he would have conserved “the Name which is the Key,”3 and in such case, that name would be the name. Or a word, at the end, of negative resonances, almost nihilistic, a voice in the desert. The apparent circular tautology of this presumption would not be more than apparent. Without revelations or occultations, far from any apocalyptic intonations, Borges’s oeuvre abounds in diverse figurations of a paradoxical aesthetic insofar as it would consolidate an aesthetics of disappearance. If it were thus, the strange productions of this contradictory aesthetic would have vanished, like poetry, knowledge, and the disciplines that limit it: “. . . there are no sciences in Tlön.”4 Silent, literature would have been diffused in quotes; history, in eternity . Omitted or reiterated, the suppression of its monuments that that counterproductive creation propitiates is not distinguished from the disappearance of empires, of their extensions, or of their borders in space or in other dimensions: “One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time.”5 In Borges’s literary imagination, even negation illuminates; progressive disappearance provoked and confirmed the history of the century. There is no despair or lamenting before collapse and harassment. Woven among his vast and various texts, it is not unusual that the forms of disappearance have found the most diverse figures in a poetics of silence, of nothingness, of annihilation. Because of that secret capacity that distinguishes literature, another poet would have already announced that the fatal vocation of the world would make him disappear in a book, like a book, in the same way that the novel about nothing to which another author aspired, would succumb to the same fate. Neither words nor things, articulated in one and the same davar, in Hebrew, word, action, thing, suppressed at the same time. Among his first writings, Borges had recognized in literature the debatable privilege of announcing its end and celebrating it. To invoke and revoke at the same time would be the double and ambiguous property of the name. If the world was created by the word, it should not surprise us if it were destroyed via the same expression. The variants of literary, literal, or graphic obliteration is a constant referential figure: the empire threatened by the minuteness of cartographic description, the palace of the emperor threatened by the perfection of the poem, the poet by the emperor, the world degraded, obliterated, to the letter. The allusions to that minimal nominality are numerous: “There are famous poems composed of one, sole, enormous word.”6 The certitude of such an assertion could be as excessive as the word itself; nevertheless, the disconcerting reduction that his fiction proposes has not sufficiently caught the attention of the specialists. That...

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