I. BORGES IN HISTORY

Borges is less a case of history in literature than one of literature in history. It is true that Borges's family had a long story of involvement in some of the most stirring Latin American military events; and that Borges commemorated his family's military heroes in poetry. It is true also that Borges spoke publicly against the Perón regime, and was at first kept from working because of it, but later earned his position as Director of the Argentine National Library partly as a result of that opposition to Perón. In his statements in these regards, he has said that he kept literature and public life strictly separate. He also publicly celebrated being bourgeois and conservative.

My claim here, however, is that Borges's public life was not separate from literature but an extension of his literary work on the deepest level of deceptions wrought through the manipulation of words and images. Furthermore, his work, rather than upholding conservative bourgeois culture, is in all regards militantly, aggressively, subversive. Borges's work undermines the certainties of conventional culture, using culture's contradictions, imprecision, and unreality against itself. By subverting culture, he creates a new universe of perception as a basis for transformed cultural realities, thereby potentially transforming real-world history. I will discuss mostly one of the semantic means by which Borges worked his subversions in literature; and I will give some examples of how the same device of deception and subversion was employed in public statements.¹

Despite his towering influence on literature, and on the use of the Spanish language, Jorge Luis Borges never received a Nobel Prize for literature, quite possibly because he refused to identify with the Latin American left during a period when it was in the ascendant. Yet, as one examines Borges's work, as said above, it is not bourgeois conservatism that one sees, but rather a persistent delight in undermining and upsetting all manner of systematic ways of perceiving and valuing. In this, Borges exercises a constant dissidence, thwarting conventional certainties through subtle manipulations of language and image which at first draw one into accepting what he says, but then bring one into contradiction with oneself. He does this not only in literature but in his public life, where he confounds the meaning of the word conservative, while acting and speaking purposefully in ways that challenged and broke the leftist-affirming taboos which any respectable Latin American intellectual was supposed to observe. Borges did this by using the same manipulation of language and image upon which his literary work is based, thus turning his audience, and especially his detractors, into self-thwarting characters in a real-life narrative. In that manner, he cast his detractors in a role as seemingly conventional as that of the conservative bourgeoisie.

II. BORGES AS LITERARY DISSIDENT

A. DECEPTIVE SUBVERSIVE

That Borges as a writer is deceptive, subversive, elusive, dissident, is so much a part of literary criticism that it has almost become a cliché. Sylvia Molloy, in characterizing Borges's vision in terms of the duality of faces and masks, states an underlying duplicity that is a hallmark of Borges

Literature as conceived and put into practice by Borges, does not differ from that game of plural faces and plural masks. Superimposed texts taint the narratives in which they are inserted; simple words, revitalized in new sequences, seem to question each other. Like those faces and masks, they both harmonize and diverge, in a deliberate, fecund juxtaposition.²

And later in the same work, through which she has woven a view of Borges as fluid and unfixable, she states, “Borges's text is organized as a series of gradual deceptions …” (77)

It is impossible for me here to approach the kind of full appreciation of Borges's literary work that can be found in critical works such as those by Sylvia Molloy, Beatriz Sarlo, Daniel Balderston or Donald Shaw, among others.³ I intend instead to focus on one of the means by which Borges pulls off his deceptions, a linguistic sleight-of-hand, which I refer to as “the semantic trap.”

B. THE SEMANTIC TRAP

Borges creates a semantic trap by using a word in a way that radically alters its conventional meaning. He may set the trap by at first using the word in a manner that fits its immediate context and that agrees with an innocuous, common, conventional interpretation of its meaning, and then spring the trap by showing us an interpretation that is uncommon, marginal at best, and shocking or confusing at least. Or he may make the reader complicitous in setting the trap, by getting the reader to accept the uncommon use from the very onset.

1. CONVENTIONAL MEANING

A good example of the semantic trap being set by initially using a word in a conventional way can be found in the story titled “The End of the Duel”⁴ Borges introduces the military leader to brings about the central incident of the story as a practical joker:

Reyles said that probably I'd heard of Juan Patricio Nolan, who had won quite a reputation as a brave man, a practical joker, and a rogue.

(15)

2. MEANING SHIFT AND “GOTCHA”: SUBTLE EPIPHANY OF CONFUSION

But as the story unfolds, we are told that the “practical joke” that Nolan, a commander of the “Colorados,” was to play on two men who hated each other and were in constant competition with each other (Silveira and Cardoso, soldiers of the “Blancos,” recently taken prisoner to be executed along with their other comrades) was that they were to run a foot race against each other for the entertainment of their comrades, after having their throats slit while standing up. In Borges' words:

Their torsos bent forward, the two eager men did not look at each other. Nolan gave the signal. … Spurts of blood gushed from the men's throats. They dashed forward a number of steps before tumbling face down. Cardoso, as he fell, stretched out his arms. Perhaps never aware of it, he had won.

(21)

In this story, Borges has exceeded the semantic limits not just of the expression practical joker, but also of hate, competition, race, and won. We are left with breathtaking shock at having been brought by this manipulation of words to contemplate a pitilessly barbarous execution as if it were a public foot race, and in the presence of the other prisoners, a pageant preceding their own executions.

The attendant confusion causes us to look for meaning at a deeper level, where we may come to see that this end of the story ties together various sub-texts: a) the mystery of the origin of hate between men; b) the war between the Blancos and the Colorados, which in this context is seen as incomprehensible as the feud between Cardoso and Silveira; c) the paradox of Cardoso and Silveira enthusiastically competing in a race the result of which they cannot know; d) the equally paradoxical enthusiasm of their condemned comrades watching and betting on the race, the knowledge of which is soon afterward to be ended with their own deaths (Cardoso and Silveira's race is thus the historical event, the significance of which is unknown to its participants; and the close-up observation by their comrades is the fragility and immediate loss of the historical record, which is then passed down anecdotally by those less involved in the event). The approximate theme communicated is the absurdity, waste and impossible-to-establish truth or value of the historically-glorified war between the Blancos and the Colorados.

But with Borges one must always be careful about trying to tie down a theme, which will most often lead to a premature, reductive understanding at a level too superficial to handle Borges's real richness of subtle deception. In this regard, it must be noted that in the same way that Nolan disposes of the lives of his captives with a signal, Borges disposes of the reader's relation to the text and to the interpretation of the situation with his words. Borges, the author, is not only leading us into confusion and reflection, he is also laughing metatextually at his management of our perceptions.

3. “THE CIRCULAR RUINS”: A MONKEY TRAP

In “The Circular Ruins,”⁵ Borges draws the reader into complicity with him in creating a semantic trap which depends centrally upon a reinterpretation of the word dream to mean not just the passive reception of an imagined experience while sleeping, or the projection of imagined experience, but the active creation of the experience and the elements of which it is made. What is more, this is a kind of “monkey trap,”⁶ from which the reader, as long as he holds onto the object of fantasy, cannot be freed.

From the very beginning, Borges causes us to go along with him as he develops the fiction of a newcomer at a circular temple in the jungle, whose purpose was to “dream” a man:

The purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked him his name or to relate some event of his former life, he would not have been able to give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple suited him, for it contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity of the workmen also suited him, for they took it upon themselves to provide for his frugal needs. The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

(124-25)

Why do we do this? How does Borges persuade us to go along with him? How does he persuade us to become complicitous in this rending of the meanings of words and of the real fabric of the things we know? The answer is simple, we want to see where it leads. And we see no harm in it. After all, this is just an imagined and charming story about an unreal man, who cannot be hurt, no matter how bizarre or violent the story may become. What is more, since it is about an imagined protagonist in an unlikely world, it cannot in any way affect or harm us. So we follow where Borges leads.

What we discover is that the stranger finally did manage to dream a man, who he considered his son, but that the son did not awake, and thus remained always asleep. In his despair at not being able to do more, the dreamer made a special supplication to the statue of the deity seen in effigy in the circular ruins (which looked like possibly a tiger, or possibly a colt). That evening in a dream, the deity revealed itself to him as at the same time a tiger, a colt, a bull, a rose, and a storm:

This multiple god revealed to him that his earthly name was Fire, and that in this circular temple (and in others like it) people had once made sacrifices to him and worshiped him, and that he would magically animate the dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself and the dreamer, would believe it to be a man of flesh and blood. He commanded that once this man had been instructed in all the rites, he should be sent to the other ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream, so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted edifice. In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.

(126)

And the dreamer of course did as he was commanded, and his dreamed son departed to carry out the deity's rites in another similar temple downstream. The dreamer missed his son, but heard stories of him from others who had rowed up the river, as a charmed man capable of walking on fire without burning himself. The dreamer worried that this detail of immunity to fire might show his son that he was not real but dreamed. As he was engrossed in this preoccupation, a forest fire approached his temple and burned it:

For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

(127)

At this point the story ends, but Borges has not really let it end. The last clause is a lure held out to the reader. Still holding onto the new meaning of dream, the reader sees the implication of the last clause: that Borges is in fact, in reality, dreaming the dreamer. And the same kind of fascinated terror as that which affected the dreamer inspires the reader's thoughts, who sees reality merging into unreality. And the question arises, who is dreaming Borges? But then, a permutation, who else is Borges dreaming? As Borges dreams the dreamer through the reader, through us, is Borges dreaming us?

In this way, by means of the semantic distortion of the word dream, clutched complicitously by the reader as part of a semantic “monkey trap,” Borges shows us the falsity of our first assumptions that the story is about an imagined protagonist, and that it cannot affect or harm us, because it is not real and is not about us. We are revealed as the protagonist, and we become involved, via one of Borges's favorite philosophical conceits, in a Berkeleyan universe, wondering about the certainty and definiteness of our origins and reality. And again, the author, as he manages our perceptions, is laughing.

4. “THE ALEPH”: NAMING AS PRETEXT

In “The Aleph” (Borges, A Reader 154-63), a very dense satire that interweaves implied social observations with various kinds of mordant literary comment, Borges deceives the reader into complicity by making the focus of the story the naming and description of the Aleph, a small orb which is “the only place on earth where all places are seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending” (159). As our attention is distracted by being fixed on this phenomenon, Borges knits together with apparent casualness a parody of the Divina Comedia, and a series of biting criticisms of tedious poets and prizes given to them, showing just below the surface of polite bourgeois social ritual the flow of boredom, detestation, malice, and spite, made especially sharp by competition among writers.

The idealism of love is not spared. Borges's deceased beloved Beatriz Viterbo (not the real name of the woman that jilted Borges, who is skewered in this cameo portrait) is revealed in life as somewhat awkward, forgetful, distracted, contemptuous, with a streak of cruelty. Through what he sees in the Aleph, Borges further discovers “unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters which Beatriz had written to [her first cousin] Carlos Argentino” (161); and he saw “the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo” (Ibid.). During a moment in which he conjectures that Carlos Argentino must be mad, he muses “Carlos Argentino's madness filled me with spiteful elation. Deep down, we had always detested each other” (159).

And finally, Borges shows us the Aleph's expendability. Once it has served its purpose as catalyst for the interwoven themes in his story, he disposes of it as “a false Aleph,” which must give way to another that lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring the central court of the mosque of Amr, in Cairo (163).

III. PUBLIC DISSIDENCE

In public, Borges used the same manipulation of words and images as that which characterizes his literary works, whether speaking about writing or making statements of general social and political impact. And, as in his literature, there is always the sense of Borges deceiving, hiding, laughing behind a mask of words. The effect in public is, if anything, even more subtle than in the literary works, since face-to-face with his interlocutors he took pains to maintain decorum and avoid insult, conveying his ironies at times by way of perceived praise.

A. IN SPEAKING OF LITERATURE

Borges tells the story about himself that after publishing his literary “hoax,” “Pierre Menard, the author of the Quixote,” it happened that:

Many people in Buenos Aires and two literary men of my acquaintance took the whole thing seriously. One of them said to me, “Of course, I know all about Pierre Menard. I suppose he was out of his mind.” And I said, “Yes, I suppose so, but it was an interesting kind of madness, wasn't it?”

(Borges on Writing 54)

The same style of arch irony, now mixed with seeming praise, is found in the following exchange between Borges and a questioner, which, if one looks behind the ruse, amounts to a crushing putdown:

Borges [in answer to a question about the essay “New Refutation of Time”]:

… the title is meant as an irony. If time doesn't exist, you can't make a new refutation of it.

Question: I think of these stories about duels as being stylized forms of encounters between two people, and this entails that they be contemporaneous. Yet in your “New Refutation of Time” you say there are no contemporaneous moments. I don't see how you reconcile this.

Borges: I don't see it either, sir. I agree with you.

Question: If they can't be contemporaneous, they'd have to be immortal.

Borges: In that case, you have to write that story because it is your invention, not mine. I think it would be a quite different one, and quite fine.

(Borges on Writing 63-64)

When Borges is speaking of his intentions and of himself especially, his deceptions become rich with irony and humor, as in the following exchange:

Question: I'd like to know why you've left the world of the fantastic and of the encyclopedia and come closer to a real world.

Borges: I've done that because there are quite a few literary hands in Buenos Aires who are writing Borges's stories for me. They are going in for mazes and mirrors, for tigers and so on, and of course they do it far better than I can. They are younger men, whereas I'm rather old and tired.

(ibid.)

B. IN POLITICAL STATEMENTS

At one time, in an exchange with questioners, Borges eludes a query loaded with political significance. He holds off his questioners with the slippery deceptions and evasions of expert verbal swordsmanship:

Question: What do you think about the idea that fiction must be engaged in the political and social issues of the times?

Borges: I think it is engaged all the time. We don't have to worry about that. Being contemporaries, we have to write in the style and mode of our times. Let's take Flaubert's novel Salammbô as an example. He called it a Carthaginian novel, but anyone can see that it was written by a nineteenth-century French realist. I don't suppose a real Carthaginian would make anything out of it; for all I know, he might consider it a bad joke. So why bother to be modern or contemporary, since you can't be anything else?

(51)

Later, he answers the question of involvement directly, but notice that in doing so he deploys a semantic trap by reinterpreting the meaning of the word conservative:

I am a conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on.

(59)

He further states the author's need to be free:

I am an antagonist of littérature engagée because I think it stands on the hypothesis that a writer can't write what he wants to. To illustrate, let me say—if I may be autobiographical—I don't choose my own subjects, they choose me. I do my best to oppose them, but they keep on worrying me and nagging me, and so I finally have to sit down and write them and then publish them to get rid of them.

(ibid.)

This is perhaps Borges's most direct and least deceptive moment. As part of the same exchanges he speaks in similar terms regarding his opposition to the Perón regime and to the Nazis during World War II. I say least deceptive, but also subtly so, since he has hereby tarred his detractors with the label of fascism, and sprung his trap.

IV. BORGES, CREATOR OF EXQUISITE TRAPS

In Borges's universe of words and images, truth, though seriously said, is not what it seems; lies, though stated as such, are not always false. We are challenged to ask, what is then real, and what unreal? And we are answered with hidden laughter.

Borges deceives us and laughs, not cruelly, but with delight. He tears away the veil of culture for a moment, letting us see the terrors from which culture shields us, while also returning to us the delights of knowing and seeing from which culture distances us. Culture, with its bland appropriateness, its predictable forms and outcomes, its idolization of conformity and security, the frustrator and enemy of human knowledge and delight, he controverts at every moment by using its own narrow definitions to lure us into ways of seeing that denude it of its capability to hide what is real behind a conventional surface. Thus he leads us to contemplate in a protagonist's experience what it must be like to have one's throat cut and life stopped in the midst of what one was doing, indeed an experience known by real individuals every day. He causes us to drop for a moment the welter of words and symbols by which we give ourselves identity, and grapple with the uncertainty and indefinability of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what significance, if any, all of this has. He fascinates us with an exotically named Aleph while showing us the falsities and nastiness of bourgeois and literary culture. Thus acting within culture to affect perception and history, to those who would impose their own narrow culture by goading others to see in only one way, he extends his deceits which lead them to be tarred by their own contradictions.

Notes

1. Many authors have spoken of Borges's subversive, deceptive use of words and images (see my mention of Sylvia Molloy, below). What is original in my contribution is the assertion of the “semantic trap,” as a central feature of Borges's deceptions.

2. Sylvia Molloy, Signs of Borges (Durham, NC: Duke UP 1994) 6.

3. Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge (New York: Verso, 1993); Daniel Balderston, Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993); Donald Shaw, Borges' Narrative Strategy (Leeds, England: Francis Cairns, 1992).

4. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane, eds., Borges on Writing (Hopewell, NJ 1994) 15-65.

5. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, eds., Borges, A Reader: A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Dutton, 1981) 124-27.

6. A monkey trap is fashioned from a firmly tethered, very strong wicker basket, which contains fruits, nuts, foods, and objects liked by monkeys, with an opening in it barely large enough to allow a monkey to squeeze his hand through it. When the monkey grasps an object inside the basket and holds onto it, he cannot free his hand, and can then be caught.