Traces, tracks, texts, tradition: Borges is no stranger to the metaphors. His way of following the traces left by other writers has been to engage in writing, that most intense form of rereading. Often, he has written about the spoor of the hunted criminal invisible on the paved streets of London or on the dusty sidewalks of the vast suburbs of Buenos Aires. But whereas the pursuers he has created—spies, detectives, browsers of library shelves—have not always known what the hunt would lead to, he himself has always acknowledged that the pursuit of other writers through the library of tradition is an essential part of the search for the writerly self, for style.

In a typically understated confession of sources, and without the least trace of any anxiety of influence, Borges told James Irby in 1962 that he wrote “La muerte y la brújula” “siguiendo un poco a Chesterton,” and he singled out as a source the Englishman's “The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” which Borges and Bioy Casares had translated into Spanish.¹ Like many of Borges' comments on his own work, this one is not inaccurate, but it is so incomplete as to be misleading. Borges' admission of his literary sources is nothing new, and he has sometimes gone as far as to explain how he has re-worked what others have already written.² Nor is it unlikely that, in referring to detective stories, Borges might have given a clue that both satisfies and misleads the reader seeking an easy answer. If “La muerte y la brújula” follows “The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse” at all, it does so only in borrowing the notion that Zeno's first paradox can be considered as the model of a straight-line labyrinth in which a murder can be committed; yet even that borrowed situation is barely adumbrated in “La muerte y la brújula.” For the full range of Chestertonian sources of this Borges story³ we must look beyond “The Three Horsemen,” and beyond Borges' seductive but partial elucidation.

In a brief, but well-researched discussion of Borges' use of Chesterton's literary devices and ideas—a discussion which is called “un mero fichero sin imaginación y sin estilo”⁴—Enrique Anderson Imbert devotes two paragraphs to “La muerte y la brújula.” As possible sources he mentions “The Dagger with Wings,” which includes false clues from the supernatural; the castle of “The Worst Crime in the World,” as possible inspiration for the symmetry of the quinta at Triste-le-Roy; and “The Mirror of the Magistrate,” in which the characters joke that, in detective stories, the professional detective is often proved wrong by a layman. Despite their schematic presentation, we may accept these tenuous connections. But Anderson surely errs when he proposes that the source of Lönnrot's first clue, the phrase found on the piece of paper still in Yarmolinsky's typewriter (“la primera letra del Nombre ha sido articulada” [“Brújula,” p. 146]) derives from Chesterton's poetic line “the words are many but the word is One,” in “The Loyal Traitors.” In fact, the whole device of the false clue provided by the discovery of a sentence fragment is developed in another story, “The Wrong Shape,” where the phrase “I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!” turns out to be part of a translation being done by the murder victim. Anderson's reference to a fifth Chesterton story, “The Blue Cross,” is limited to the detective Valentin's observation that “the criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic,”⁵ a notion patently substantiated in Borges' story. In their brevity, Anderson's remarks on “The Blue Cross” fail to explore the extent to which this story constitutes a model for Borges' tale. It will be the purpose of this paper to demonstrate some of the elements Borges borrows from “The Blue Cross,” to discuss the ways in which he uses and reshapes them, and to suggest that through this literary borrowing Borges comments on the earlier story and its underlying assumptions about the role of reason in creating temporal order and the necessary fictions of spiritual salvation.⁶

Chesterton's story is easily summarized. Father Brown, the seemingly hapless priest from Essex, travels by rail to London to attend a Eucharistic Congress. He carries with him a sapphire-studded cross from his parish church. The arch-criminal Flambeau, too, is traveling to London, hoping to take advantage of the bustle and confusion of the Congress to elude Valentin, “the most famous investigator of the world” (“Cross,” p. 7), who has pursued him through four countries. Flambeau, disguised as a priest, takes up with the apparently disoriented Brown, and plots to steal the curé's “blue cross.” Father Brown, recognizing the criminal's intentions, leads him across London while Valentin, following a trail of clues intentionally left by Brown, pursues them both. As evening falls, Flambeau, a physical giant, corners the minuscule and retiring Brown on a lonely section of Hampstead Heath, and demands the cross. Only then does Father Brown reveal (to Flambeau and to the reader) that he has taken the precaution of sending the cross to a friend on the other side of London and has been carrying a package that looks like the one which contains the cross. At this moment Valentin arrives with constables in tow, and recognizes that Father Brown—not he himself—is in fact the master detective, who has foreseen the crime, saved the cross, tricked the criminal, and directed the detective.

Even from this brief résumé it can be seen that certain details of the two stories correspond. The Eucharistic Congress which attracts Brown, Flambeau, and Valentin (each for his own reason) and provides the occasion for the attempted theft has its parallel in the Talmudic Congress to which Marcelo Yarmolinsky, the first murder victim, and the Tetrarch of Galilee, the potential robbery victim, are delegates. The axes of Brown's journey—east to west, and south to north, Liverpool Street Station to Scotland Yard and on to Victoria Station, then north to Camden Town and Hampstead Heath—correspond to those of the cross, the story's principal symbol, just as the sites of the crimes in Borges' imaginary city are symbolized by the cardinal points of the compass of the story's title. Perhaps the most obvious resemblance between the two stories is the confusion and mutability of the traditional roles of detective fiction: criminal, victim, investigator.⁷ Neither story follows the basic formula of the classic tale of detection, in which the criminal is caught by a pursuing detective who uncovers blunders that only he and the most alert reader can discern. In “The Blue Cross,” Valentin, seeking Flambeau, must follow Father Brown, who has already outwitted the criminal and changed his own role from that of victim to manipulator. In “La muerte y la brújula,” Lönnrot's role changes from detective to victim, while Treviranus, the true detective who formulates correct hypotheses, remains in the background. Scharlach, the criminal, is both the pursued and the director of that pursuit.⁸

These are similarities of elements, patterns, devices. More important to our comparison are the differences in the ways Chesterton and Borges use these components. The two stories differ not so much in the solutions or resolutions of the crimes—one violent, the other pacific, almost amicable—as in the methodology, the systems of thought which are used by the detectors from whose viewpoints these stories are told. Valentin, the French skeptic, understands that reason, his most powerful tool, is useless “without strong, undisputed first principles” (“Cross,” p. 11), and many of his investigative successes have come from the application of “plodding logic” (“Cross,” p. 11). Father Brown, too, assumes the necessity of strong first principles behind any reasoning. He, like Valentin, couples reason with an empiricism which derives from personal experience. Brown fathoms Flambeau's intentions in time to foil them because the priest knows more about Flambeau's profession than the thief himself does. The priest alludes to criminals' methods like “the Donkey's Whistle” and “the Spots” (“Cross,” p. 28), which mystify even Flambeau, and then explains that such knowledge is all part of his job: “we have to know twenty such things when we work among the criminal classes!” (“Cross,” p. 28).

Initially, Lönnrot, too, insists on the importance of reason; in fact, he believes himself to be “un puro razonador” (“Brújula,” p. 143), and in his preference for purity insists on discovering “una explicación puramente rabínica” (“Brújula,” p. 145) for Yarmolinsky's murder. Holding to this a priori decision, he rejects Treviranus' more reasonable explanation, namely, that the first murder was an error. Consequently, Lönnrot rejects a genuinely methodical procedure such as Valentin's in “The Blue Cross”: “He reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases, when he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable” (“Cross,” p. 12, our emphasis). Lönnrot's chosen method is, in fact, a most unreasonable one, predicated upon a spurious clue (the discovered sentence) and built up with tidbits of information found at random in Hebraic and Hassidic texts. The very few books he finds, however, cannot include the thousands of textual commentaries and works of Hebrew theology and Jewish history of which Lönnrot has no knowledge and which he will never see.⁹ His investigation—which becomes more a search for the Secret Name of God than a search for Yarmolinsky's murderer—is fated to failure just like that of Borges' librarians of Babel who seek, among innumerable volumes, the Book of Books. Methodologies clash. Father Brown, whose doctrinal background helps him reject Flambeau's priestly disguise (“you attacked reason,” he tells the Frenchman, “it's bad theology” [“Cross,” p. 29]), relies on his professional experience as a priest and confessor of thieves to foresee and evade the crime. Lönnrot lacks a background in Hebrew theology, but nonetheless pursues a “rabbinical” investigation while disregarding his professional experience as a detective.

This detective who becomes an interpreter of texts has his literary ancestor in “The Blue Cross”: Valentin equates the criminal with the artist and the detective with the critic. Yet this remains an isolated epigram in Chesterton's story, whereas in Borges' tale a similar equation provides skeletal structure and metaphysical resonance. Lönnrot fails in a far more complex way than either Valentin or Flambeau. He misreads both the Hebrew texts and the “clues” planted by Scharlach, while this latter plays a role similar to Father Brown's: both are “artists”—one righteous, the other criminal—who create events and manipulate others. Both do so by organizing events into apparent progressions linked by causality—in short, both create plots, in the two senses of the word.

Of the two roles, Father Brown's is the more mechanical. He allows Flambeau to play the part of the cunning criminal while he himself plays the “celibate simpleton” (“Cross,” p. 26) which Flambeau accuses him of being. In other words, Brown uses Flambeau's wishful thinking, his desire to believe that he has discovered a victim, in order to entrap him. But whereas Flambeau's participation in this entrapment provides only an initial impulse to Father Brown's plans, Lönnrot is far more intricately involved in weaving his own shroud. Scharlach reads in the Yidische Zeitung (appropriately, a “contemporary” Jewish publication) that the detective is seeking clues to Yarmolinsky's murder in his writings and those of other Jewish theologians. Perceiving that Lönnrot's fantasy of a secret order can be used to advantage, Scharlach creates the plot Lönnrot desires, designing it to be as irresistible to Lönnrot as the Duke's and Duchess' charades are to Don Quijote and Sancho. In this sense, Lönnrot is co-author as well as critic, and Borges underscores the unconscious cooperation of victim with killer (see note 8).

This unconscious cooperation is manifested in the way in which Lönnrot tacitly accepts the notion that his life, after the third of December, is a man-made construct, a fabrication; he reads this fiction according to a system of knowledge which he finds fascinating, but which is alien to the problem. He insists, right to the end of his life and against all the evidence, that his literary and criminal investigations are one. Looking down the barrel of his adversary's pistol, he can still ask: “Scharlach, ¿usted busca el Nombre Secreto?” (“Brújula,” p. 154). It is this confusion of quests, and the resulting interpenetration of art and life, which allow a central figure in each story to manipulate others. The plot-creators, that is, Scharlach and Father Brown, have two very different types of readers. Lönnrot and Flambeau project intense, explicit desires which others—supposedly their prey—shape to their own advantage. Yet each imagines himself one step ahead of his victim—Flambeau thinks he has already switched the parcels, and Lönnrot believes he is checking on the next murder site at Triste-le-Roy a day before the crime is to be committed. Neither dreams he could be surprised from behind.¹⁰ Valentin and Treviranus are the empirically efficient critical readers who try to understand the cases according to established and authenticated principles of investigation within the genre. Both exhibit the cautious spirit associated with their profession. Unlike Lönnrot, who thinks himself a pure reasoner but is really an adventurer and a bit of a gambler, both Valentin and Treviranus prefer to observe Valentin's dictum: “If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him” (“Cross,” p. 17). Treviranus rejects Lönnrot's preference for interesting hypotheses, and insists on tying his theories of crime to quotidian reality, “que no tiene la menor obligación de ser interesante” (“Brújula,” p. 144). Both Treviranus and Valentin lack that blindness about their own motives and that reckless confidence in their own perspicacity which tricks Lönnrot and Flambeau. They participate only tangentially in the plots, but they avoid becoming victims.

Although he does not fully understand his situation, Valentin is safe because he follows the system he believes in, because he does not take his mind off the investigation even when it seems to lack rationality, and most of all because he is in the hands of Father Brown, a man as rational and benevolent as the God he, and Chesterton, believe in. Lönnrot is in danger precisely because his personal goal—to make an accident part of a hidden order, or to discover the Secret Name of God—obstructs and overrides the criminal investigation he is supposed to conduct.

It is here, in creating Lönnrot's inability to separate two kinds of “reading,” that Borges' genius goes beyond the more prosaic complexities of Chesterton's tale. For in the latter there is one and only one correct, empirically valid mode of creating a plot (Father Brown's) and of deciphering it (Valentin's); the confusion is merely a confusion of roles, the hunted Flambeau thinking he is the hunter. To ascribe the same confusion of roles to Lönnrot is correct; to stop there evinces a gross underestimation of the richness of Borges' text. Valentin prefers to be safe and right, and achieves both goals by embracing the system created by the godlike “Father” Brown; it is a system in which chance exists, yet can be dealt with by the routines of rational method. In “La muerte y la brújula,” there are two more fully-developed alternatives. One can accept, as Valentin's avatar, Treviranus, does, a system which concedes its origins to chance—to a murder by accident which engenders the text, as a murder-by-design will symmetrically close it. But a system which concedes the possibility that chance and error can be originative events is intolerable to Lönnrot, as it has been to mythographers since time immemorial, and to many contemporary readers. Chesterton's critic-characters are empirically minded, and are adequate readers only of detective stories. Borges' Lönnrot, fatally misguided as a detective within the structure of a peculiar detective story, embodies the critical impulse represented in figures as diverse as Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Macherey or Freud himself: all believe that the errors, the slips, the haphazard gaps and lacunae of a text must be read as evidence of a deeper order or, failing that, as evidence for the existence of an underlying system which has rules for producing error and uncertainty, and thus negates attribution to pure, random chance. In this context—the one in which Lönnrot belongs—his search is not pointless. His pursuit of the 100th name of God is a search for that last missing percentile of certainty and symmetry which would grant his imagined system the perfection that belongs only to ideas of God. Given the impossibility of this occurrence in a secular world, his pursuit must and does discover the system which transformed original error into design; the failed detective is not a failure as an interpreter and dies passively because he dies fulfilled as a critic.

That fulfillment is all the more remarkable because of the extent to which Lönnrot succumbs to deception. He dies without having been right about any major step of the action that entraps him. At first glance, the plot seems at the very least to satisfy his Platonic desire to dream, like God, in geometric shapes, to transform the accidental triangle into a carefully designed rhomb, a tetrahedron. But the rhomb is a hoax within a hoax. Whereas the first murder was an accidental crime, the third was no crime at all, but rather a scene staged by Scharlach. Lönnrot is duped, denied even the pathos of a victim sacrificed to a noble order grounded in mystery. He is the victim of his desire, which lures him to pursue his fate to the four points of the compass.

The compass is a travesty of the cross of Chesterton's story. The cross symbolizes death transformed into eternal life; the compass, at least in Borges' story, a betrayal of orientation resulting in murder. Whereas the cross is an intersection of vertical and horizontal axes, of the celestial and the terrestrial, of the divine as well as the human, the cardinal points of the compass lie on a plane which is merely horizontal and earthly, representing a projection of the four points of the cross upon a flattened surface. Unlike the cross, whose meaning is the same anywhere, the compass has a message which differs at every point on earth, and refers only to that point, by helping to determine its location. This is appropriately worked out in the two stories. Chesterton, believing in the ever-more-absent God of the early twentieth century, also believes in a rationality that he sees as both a guide to God and to the making of fictions. He, like the priest he created, understands desire as an absence that by its very nature leaves tracks as revelations of its passages. If the priest chooses also to be a detective, it is because criminals are less elusive than God: in his capacity to be tempted by a cross which is the concrete representation of the absent God, the faithless criminal shows a fatal vulnerability to rational detection, and by that vulnerability provides a vehicle for the metaphors of presence and captivity in which Chesterton labors to entrap the Divinity. His tale demonstrates the triumph of order, and is an affirmation that “all's well that ends well.” At its conclusion Father Brown's genius is acknowledged by the other characters, as well as by the reader. All have been manipulated by this benevolent intelligence which supports right and good. Father Brown, hinting that his own actions are simply part of a greater network of benign order, says to Flambeau, “I saved the cross, as the cross will always be saved” (“Cross,” p. 28). Justice triumphs so completely that Flambeau turns moral in his old age, and becomes a fast friend of the little priest from Essex, playing a sort of Watson to Brown's Holmes.¹¹

Borges, of course, is the more complex and pessimistic writer, though at times no less playful and humorous. He sees in the traces left by any former presence a maze in which it is hard to tell who is lost and who is found, who the hunter and who the hunted, a place in which the wage of revelation is death. The compass is a necessary travesty of the cross because God, or a wholly external creator, is no longer a possible answer to any question in Borges' world. The subject is always at the center, always implicated in whatever order is made and whatever crime is committed against him. It is in this context that Lönnrot's last request is significant as an acknowledgement of what he has understood. He asks that in another avatar Scharlach hunt him down once again, this time along a labyrinth made of one line. But Zeno's first paradox which, as Borges points out, denies time and motion,¹² can no more protect the investigator in the next avatar than his rabbinical explanation did in this one. The next labyrinth, “una sola línea recta … que es invisible, incesante” (“Brújula,” p. 158), will lead to a death just as sure, just as futile, as the death in the labryinth of the rhomb.

Notes

1. James E. Irby, “Encuentro con Borges,” Appendix to Irby's “The Structure of the Stories of Jorge Luis Borges,” Diss. Michigan 1962, p. 309.

2. See Borges' Introduction to Historia universal de la infamia (1935; Buenos Aires, 1954), pp. 7–8, and Borges on Writing, ed. Norman Thomas de Giovanni, et al. (New York, 1973), p. 56. Borges' skeletal listing of his sources is greatly elaborated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, “Borges' Infamy: A Chronology and a Guide,” Review 73 (1973), pp. 6–12.

3. First published in Sur 92 (May, 1942), and collected in Ficciones, 1945. All citations in this paper will be from Ficciones (Buenos Aires, 1956), and will be indicated in the text as “Brújula.”

4. Enrique Anderson Imbert, “Chesterton en Borges,” Anales de literatura hispanoamericana (Madrid), Nos. 2–3 (1973–1974), pp. 469–94.

5. Anderson Imbert, “Chesterton en Borges,” p. 487. The observation is made by the chief of the Paris police. The story appears in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911; Harmondsworth, 1950). All quotations will be from this edition, which will be cited in the text as “Cross.”

6. The idea that a later story comments on its “precursors” is developed in Borges' essay, “Kafka y sus precursores,” originally published in 1951, and collected in Otras inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1952).

7. In “La muerte y la brújula,” this confusion of roles is paralleled and reinforced by the confusion of identities of the locations of the crimes. The Hotel du Nord displays aspects of a sanatorium, a jail, and a house of prostitution. The Rue de Toulon, site of Liverpool House, is shared by the cosmorama, the milk-bar, the bordello, and the bible vendors. The amorphous area where Daniel Azevedo is killed is the very point of transition from suburb to countryside. The quinta of Triste-le-Roy is both sumptuous mansion and criminals' hideout, and its two-faced statuary symbolizes its dual nature.

8. Much ink has been spilled in discussing the fusion and confusion of identities suggested by the similarities of characters' names. Borges himself has pointed out that the criminal and the detective in his story share an identification with the color red: Scharlach (Scarlet), and Lönnrot; Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories (New York, 1970), p. 194. This idea is developed by David Gallagher, “Jorge Luis Borges,” in his Modern Latin American Literature (New York, 1973), pp. 105–10; by D. L. Shaw, Borges' “Ficciones” (London, 1976), pp. 55–56; and by many others. More interesting to our project is to note that the name of Chesterton's criminal, with its obvious roots in the French words for “torch” and “flame,” is linked to the name of Lönnrot, Borges' detective. Both become victims. Roslyn Frank, in “Lo profano y lo sagrado en ‘La muerte y la brújula’” (Nueva Narrativa Hispanoamericana 5 [1975], 127–36), points out that, in Old High German (about which Borges has written in his Las antiguas literaturas germánicas [México, 1951]), Lönnrot means “flaming red.” Given the coincidence of their functions, the similarity of their names seems to be more than happenstance.

9. One result of Lönnrot's haphazard approach and inadequate background can be seen in his theory on the dates of the commission of the crimes. Lönnrot counts it as a breakthrough when he discovers in an eighteenth-century text (planted by Scharlach), that the Hebrew day begins at sunset and ends at sunset of the following day. Using this idea, he reckons that the three murders were committed on the third day of each month. But he is still two steps away from the truth of the matter. He is counting on the third of each solar, or Julian month, not the lunar, Hebrew month; and he does not realize that each crime is committed after midnight on the night of the third, that is, early on the morning of the fourth of each month.

10. Both Flambeau and Lönnrot are, quite literally, surprised by hidden agents who seem to appear out of nowhere, but who are also manipulated by the two creators, Brown and Scharlach. Valentin and his constables appear from behind a clump of trees on Father Brown's command, and Lönnrot is subdued without a struggle by Scharlach's “hombres de pequeña estatura, feroces y fornidos” (“Brújula,” p. 154).

11. Yet another role-change hinted at early in “The Blue Cross” and confirmed in “The Wrong Shape,” “The Sins of Prince Saradine,” and other stories in The Innocence of Father Brown.

12. Irby, “Encuentro …”, p. 309.