My concern with the relationship between woman and representation bears directly on the critical controversies raised by Borges' work, specifically the relationship between his formalism/idealism and his textual politics. I will identify (1.) the strategies by which symbols or metaphors of the feminine—as idealized or poetic objects of desire—serve his mystical and metaphysical interests, and (2.) the ways in which the presence of an apparently more localized theme in Borges' work, the machismo cult (benignly understood as the over-determined Latin American male emphasis on courage, honor, and sexual prowess) operates as the inscription of women in a variation of the classic erotic triangle, even as Borges seems to want to move beyond it. By following the gallery of portraits of women throughout his career, one can trace a change in tendency or attitude away from ideality toward corporeality, especially in his later writings. My point will be precisely that for Borges a conceptual ideal always carries an erotic component. Thus I am arguing against the view that Borges' concept of the universal by definition both eludes and excludes the feminine (despite his sentimental idealizing of women), with the ultimate hope of demonstrating that reading Borges in light of gender consideration radically extends our view of his poetics. For, the issue of gender, although perhaps a variable, cannot be read as arbitrary in narratives so engaged in the interplay of metaphor and metonymy. Indeed, the notions of sexual and textual difference are crucially tied to any reading where the claims of power and language, however ungendered (that is, metaphysical) they may appear, are at stake.

To look at how the mystical and the metaphysical converge in a symbol of the feminine in Borges' literary enterprise, it is necessary to elaborate on a poetics that strives to create cultural analogues to sacred texts, but with a twist—for, in Borges' words, "the imminence of a revelation which does not occur is perhaps the aesthetic phenomenon" (Other Inquisitions). Itself the manifestation of certain aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, Borges' quest for the absolute in language at the same time represents the conceptual "impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe [and should not] dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware that they are provisional" (Other Inquisitions). In place of the multiplicity of philosophical and theological systems that express a yearning for an order unattainable to human intelligence, Borges substitutes others, all testifying with ironic and paradoxical precision, to their rigorous relativity. Thus constrained only by the limits of language, he creates a form of speculative thought as ambiguous and provisional as that which we call fiction but which is no more fictional than philosophy.

We recognize this tension between the absolute and the contingent, the universal and the perspectival, metaphor and metonymy to be oppositionally symbolized in the Zahir and the Aleph and crucially connected to two female figures, Clementina Villar and Beatriz Viterbo. As a check on the tendency toward a sacralization or teleology, the perspectival, provisional, successive configuration is necessary, but it carries its own mystique and is no less an hypostasized entity than the transcendent moment achieved, the Aleph. This is because the parabolic tactic of multiplying alternatives synoptically rather than serially does not overcome this tension but exploit it. In attempting to behold the inaccessible through language, the mode plays with the possibilities of difference (in the Derridean sense) through postponement, deferral, decentering, by forming and dissolving metaphors that hover around the absence where the unnamed, unnameable reality is inferred or intuited. It is only through the distortion of memory or supplementarity (a surplus of signification) that these metaphors are present all at once—forming the comprehensive, totalizing Aleph. In Borges' view these near-moments of self-understanding or revelation constitute the aesthetic event—its fluidity, ambiguity, heterogeneity, and open-endedness.

Haunted by "an ordinary coin worth twenty centavos" that possesses mystical attributes, the narrator of "The Zahir" begins his story by recounting his obsession with a model whose face had adorned posters and society magazine covers around 1930. Through a rhetorical sleight of hand whose psychoanalytical implications are not lost on the reader, the images of the coin and the face of Clementina Villar are indissoluably linked for "Borges," and threaten to drive to madness. What fascinates him about the woman is that "[s]he was in search of the Absolute, like Flaubert; only hers was an Absolute of a moment's duration" ("The Zahir," Labyrinths), because she adhered to the capricious and shallow creed of fashion. After a decline in both family fortune and career, she dies in a modest part of town, and "Borges" goes to her wake. Viewing her, he finds her face remarkably restored to its previous youth, unaffected by the ravages of experience: "Somehow, I thought, no version of that face which has disturbed me so will stay in my memory as long as this one; it is right that it should be the last, since it might have been the first." Associated in life with free will and continual self-transformation, indeed a strange combination of self-effacement and self-absorption ("as though trying to get away from herself"), Villar is perfected, forever fixed in death. Like the Zahir from whose hold the narrator cannot escape, her omnipresent image takes on the aspects of a hypostasized entity, but whatever the metaphorical resemblance between her face and the face of the coin, hers is eventually subsumed, and lingers only as a trace, a reminder of his former obsession. By the end of the story the world is slipping away and all distinctions between thought and reality elide: "Others will dream that I am mad; I shall dream of the Zahir." The narrator waits for the inevitable effacement when the image of the coin will replace the universe itself, perhaps revealing God behind it.

In "The Aleph," an ironic and poignant commentary on the nature of visionary experience, the sublime and the pathetic are fused in a mystical object that is the sum of all the possible visual representations of the universe. This cosmic sphere serves as the poetic inspiration of Carlos Argentino Daneri, in whose cellar it can apparently be found. His opus is purportedly the poem of all poems, a total representation of the known world, appropriately entitled "La Tierra." It is not irrelevant that the poem is immensely dull; its epic proportions and geographic trivia, far from exhausting reality, indicate the absurdity of trying to enumerate it. Inflationary, obsessively particular, and random, the pointless variety of the poem's contents only emphasizes the poverty of the mind and method that created it.

In one of the permutations of male bonding prevalent in Borges' fiction, animosity thrives between the poet-librarian and the narrator (who calls himself "Borges"), centering around professional rivalry and a woman named Beatriz: Daneri's cousin, the narrator's love object, and dead since 1929 (it is now 1941). Her "haunting" presence is pervasive: she frames the narrative, provides the sub-text. She is the unsuppressed term of the erotic triangle. Every year on her birthday the narrator pays homage "without hope but without humiliation" to her memory by visiting her house and family. She is introduced to the reader, on one of "these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries," by way of photographic description, in serial perspective:

Beatriz Viterbo in profile and in full color; Beatriz wearing a mask, during the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz at her First Communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz soon after her divorce, at a luncheon at the Turf Club; Beatriz at a seaside resort in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekinese lapdog given her by Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, front and three-quarter views, smiling, on her hand chin…. ("The Aleph" and Other Stories)

There is a second "communion" with Beatriz, this time with a large, single "gaudy" portrait which provokes an intimate declaration from the narrator: "Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, darling Beatriz, Beatriz now gone forever, it's me, it's Borges." It is this ideal that "Borges" loves, the summation of her image, even though he knows that each particular photograph is a vapid fiction, representing an ideal never attained. Against the passage of time and the "inexorable process of endless change," idealized Beatriz both haunts and mocks him. Clearly, her name is designed to invoke Dante's beloved, Beatrice Portinari: indeed, critics have read "The Aleph" as a parody of Dante's masterpieces, both in the universal aspirations of the texts associated ("Borges'" narrative and Argentino's epic poem) as well as their romantic pretexts. The comparison between these elegies to lost love, however, is ironized by their divergent conclusions. Dante's quest for Beatrice ultimately leads to ascension and spiritual consummation, whereas "Borges'" underworld odyssey takes place in a rat-infested cellar in the house where Beatriz lived but which is about to be demolished to make room for an expanding bar.

And the vision of the Aleph itself, an exquisitely rendered, awesome inventory of physical, concrete, organic, sensual, immediate, simultaneous and infinite life, includes more than the narrator probably cared to see, for this point in space contains not only "the multitudes of America … all the mirrors on earth … convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand … tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies … the Aleph from every point and angle … the circulation of [the narrator's] own dark blood … the coupling of love and the modification of death, the reader's face," but also "the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo," as well as "unbelievable, obscene … letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino."

The impossibility of putting forth in language "the ineffable core" of his story is of course part of the narrative's thematic structure, the very "despair" of the writer, the problem of representation itself:

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How then can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols…. Perhaps the gods might grant me a simple metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction…. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal…. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive….

Then proceeding to articulate this parabolic event, "Borges" recollects the inviolate splendor of the Aleph—"all space was there, actual and undiminished." But by the end of the inventory, the reader realizes that whereas what has aroused the narrator's "infinite wonder" is the synchronic totalization of space, what has aroused his "infinite pity" is purely temporal: death, progressive decomposition, and irrevocable loss, all linked to Beatriz, whose image even the Aleph cannot preserve. Thus, however fragmented, partial, and idealized a representation, his memory of her and the multiple photographs to which he is metonymically attached serve to freeze a moment, to stop the passing of time, symbolized in a woman never won in life, now even subject to change in death. After his transcendent experience the narrator claims that he believes the Aleph to have been a false one and provides "objective" documentation to underwrite his assertion. Yet the duplicity and disappointment of which he speaks have another basis, lying in the implicit analogy between his desire for the woman never possessed and the absolute vision of the Aleph.

In both narratives, "The Zahir" and "The Aleph," intellectual abstraction, esoteric knowledge, and the substance of material objects compete with desire—by nature elusive and ever-changing—for the imagination of a narrator who has "only" language at his disposal. That these women characters seem to lack the kind of depth that would make them worthy of such intense desire provides Borges with the opportunity to comment ironically on the fact that desire always exceeds the value of the object of desire, that the "meaning" of the beloved herself, while subject to the limits of linguistic and visual representation, is always overdetermined and that the lover is often blind to this inherent paradox. What both complicates and simplifies Borges' use of feminine figuration to articulate the theme of longing for the Absolute is that it requires that the woman be dead as pretext. In the case of several of the poems, the death or ultimate loss of a woman serves as the occasion for writing; that the poem is actually dedicated to a particular woman or that she provides its theme is almost derivative of this first point. The issue is not that the poet or narrator only desires her now that she is dead; rather that in death she is infinitely desirable and infinitely open to interpretation. What remains of the face of Beatriz, the more idealized of the two women, no less appropriable than the elusive memory of a revelation whose center is absence—is the language that struggles to retrieve what visual memory cannot preserve.

Metaphysical or intellectual obsession as both theme and strategy pervades much of Borges' fiction and poetry, especially in his first-person narratives. "The Intruder" is yet another tale of (meta)physical obsession; it also belongs to that group of stories whose protagonists are gauchos, urban tough guys, detectives, and expresses Borges' captivation with action, physical violence, honor, treachery, and male bravado—his distinctive version of the machismo cult. This story is particularly disturbing because whereas in most of the other narratives that treat this theme women characters are "merely" absent or virtual nonentities, here a woman occupies the pivotal but silent point of an untenable erotic triangle and must serve as scapegoat in order for the primary male relationship to survive, prevail. One critic finds it "inconceivable that the same man who created 'Emma Zunz' could also have written 'The Intruder,'" because the former seems to affirm female empowerment and self-representation and in the latter an innocent woman is sacrificed to the frontier brutality of a fraternal bond. However, to read this story only as a celebration or glorification of misogyny is possibly to miss Borges' critical commentary and to understand its context (and content) only on the level of "naturalistic" transcription of a cultural reality.

The two almost inseparable originless brothers are described as "drovers, teamsters, horse thieves, and … professional gamblers … who have a reputation for stinginess, except when drink and cardplaying turned them into spenders" and who like "carousing with women," but whose "amorous escapades had always been carried out in darkened passageways or in whorehouses." Thus when one of the brothers, Cristián, brings Juliana Burgos to live with him as servant and concubine, a distinct departure from his previous sexual behavior is signalled. Soon after, the other brother, Eduardo, has fallen in love with her as well, and "the whole neighborhood, which may have realized it before he did, maliciously and cheerfully looked forward to the enmity about to break out between [them]." When Cristián offers Juliana to his brother in his absence ("if you want her, use her") and before departing says goodbye to him but not to her "who was no more than an object," the reader begins to sense the intimate exclusivity of the brothers' relationship and the specific na-ture of their rivalry. As they begin to share her body as well as benefit from her domestic service, their mutual suspicion grows, for "[i]n tough neighborhoods a man never admits to anyone—not even to himself—that a woman matters beyond lust and possession, but the two brothers were in love. This, in some way, made them feel ashamed." Soon the woman, presented as having no power and no voice, is sold to a brothel so that the brothers can rid themselves of her disruptive presence and restore their life to its previous symmetry. Yet unable to live without her conveniently near, they eventually buy her back, and the rest of the dramatic conflict is condensed into one paragraph. Cristián solves their problem by murdering her ("she won't cause us any more harm"), and the story ends with a cathartic embrace and the narrator's final comment: "One more link bound them now—the woman they had cruelly sacrificed and their common need to forget her."

René Girard's study of erotic rivalry in the novel and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's revision of his model of triangular desire, which elaborates a notion of the "homosocial continuum" in literature, can help us first to identify the structure of such a relationship and then analyze its sexual political implications in "The Intruder." Sedgwick begins with the Girardian premise that "in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: the bonds of 'rivalry' and 'love,' differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent." In "The Intruder," of course, as the title stresses, the fraternal bond both predates and intensifies the rivalry and is not produced by it; indeed it is the bond itself which makes the triangle possible and impossible. The woman is perceived by the men to be "other," to be an outsider who has driven a wedge between them or violated the integrity of their bond; and the narrator's words assert that the bond is strengthened by and maintained at the expense of a woman "cruelly sacrificed." Feminist extensions of this model situate such triangles within a larger symbolic and economic system, a patriarchal network that thrives on the traffic in women: that is, on the use of women as exchangeable property for the primary purpose and with the ultimate result of cementing the bonds between men. The story replicates the larger sexual organization in which woman figures as "conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it."

The epigraph to the narrative is taken from the Biblical passage in which David laments over the dead body of his friend Jonathan: "your love to me was wonderful / passing the love of women." As a commentary on the story, it suggests the holding up of an exemplar of male bonding, one that transcends heterosexual love, one whose loss can never be superceded. But the story is framed somewhat differently, stressing the perversion of an ideal. Indeed, the narrator justifies telling the legendary story by presenting it as a kind of cultural document, a slice of less-than-desirable life: "I set down the story now because I see in it … a brief and tragic mirror of the character of those hard-bitten men living on the edge of Buenos Aires before the turn of the century." Had Borges, however, endowed Juliana Burgos with language to tell her side of this "monstrous love affair," to inscribe her own subjectivity rather than be inscribed and subsequently effaced, the narrative would gain texture and complexity, although it might lose some of its enigmatic quality. By reducing her to a mediating object within a quasi-mythic structure, Borges maintains a formal dependence on necessity, and not on contingency; yet it is precisely those aspects of contingency, differentiation, and the unexpected (Juliana was not expected to exceed her function as object of "lust and possession"), that suggest the story's real potential as "mirror" of a particular historical condition, as the narrator claims was his intention.

One could say that Borges is still too intrigued by formalism and susceptible to false nostalgia and sentimentality to develop the textual implications of sexual dehumanization for both male and female characters. Certainly this is one possible formulation for the disjunction between the narrator's rhetoric and the text's contradictory "message." But then what about "Emma Zunz" (Labyrinths)? In that narrative Borges uses a female subject, whose name serves as the title of her own story, to signify the suspension, if not the disruption, of a certain formal logic based on the politics of sexual difference, a logic that in "The Intruder" he certainly seems loathe to forsake. However, any attempt to compare the signifying possibilities of Emma Zunz and Juliana Burgos, respectively, must first address the difference in narrative contexts: both characters function in a linguistic and economic system where women's value is defined only through "mediation, transaction, transition, and transference" between men. And both stories are about using (carnally) violent means to achieve "pure" and abstract ends, in one case justice, in the other symmetry. But Emma Zunz is the protagonist in a clear field; the narrative begins crucially with the death of her father and then enacts through its language of figuration precisely the ways in which her subjective agency makes her unique in the Borgesian corpus while still reinscribing her in a patriarchal system she cannot transcend. The interplay of the forces of identity and sexual difference, language and power, intentionality and indeterminacy, and the critical strategies that trace them, come together in a performative moment of suspended revelation: Emma's sex/speech act. Her body/text becomes the very locus of interpretation, of self-interpretation, as Emma learns of the relationship between sex as behavior and sex as identity. The identity of Juliana Burgos is woman, "the intruder"; Borges situates her among men, and then proceeds to foreclose, indeed erase, whatever textual possibilities she ever presented in the narrative. Borges is willing and exquisitely able to make a woman the actor in her own drama; more difficult is conceiving of a female character on the level of, equal to male characters in the same dramatic field, a heroine whose destiny would rewrite the old script. Instead the story particularizes male violence and female victimization: one could almost imagine the savage ending giving way to the opening of a new story, one in which of course, the memory of a dead woman haunts the consciousness of two brothers locked in symbiotic conflict over her.

Because Borges notoriously privileges form over content, structure over essence, and event over character, how gender figures in his narratives is always fascinating. "The Duel," a story whose title echoes other narratives about the macho code of honor, is actually, according to the narrator, about two women characters who could easily populate one of Henry James's ironic, discursive, ambiguous narratives. He alerts the reader that events are subordinate to the characters, Clara Glencairn de Figueroa and Marta Pizarro, and the relationship between them. A complex and dissimulated rivalry exists between two women active in the art world of Argentine society, whose lives draw their meaning from their all-consuming interest in each other's work "each of them was her rival's judge and only public" ("The Duel," Doctor Brodie's Report). The intrigues of their careers are traced through a series of plot reversals and parodies of art criticism; the narrator even detects "a mutual influence" in their pictures: "Clara's sunset glows found their ways into Marta Pizarro's patios, and Marta's fondness for straight lines simplified the ornateness of Clara's final stage …" As he approaches the end of the story, the narrator highlights the gender-marked differences between their "intimate … delicate duel," in which "there were neither defeats nor victories nor even an open encounter," and those male rivalries to which Borges has devoted so much of his attention. Despite the dispassionate, ironic tone, the narrator seems genuinely to regret a cultural condition "where a woman is regarded as a member of a species, not an individual…." One is nonetheless tempted to note that his own conclusion provides the best critical commentary upon the imminence of an illumination that does not occur: "The story that made its way in darkness ends in darkness."

Two stories from the collection The Book of Sand are significant departures from Borges' other writings in which women figure as idealized or poetic objects of desire or represent a threat or danger to men. "Ulrike" is a memoir of a brief love affair between a South American professor and a Norwegian woman he meets while touring England. In the longer, more diffuse narrative about a secret intellectual organization, "The Congress," an amorous episode forms the centerpiece. Both, although somewhat sentimental, are positive representations of erotic fulfillment. In the story "Ulrike" the narrator knows almost immediately after meeting the calm, mysterious woman that he is in love: "I could never have wanted any other person by my side." She, too, seems interested in him, and because "to a bachelor getting along in years, the offer of love is a gift no longer expected," and, remembering other missed opportunities, he is willing to accept whatever conditions this ominous "miracle" imposes upon him. Abounding with references to Ibsen, Norse sagas, old conquests, and national enmities, they call each other Sigurd and Brunhilde as a sign of faith in their capacity to transcend difference. "The sword Gram" lying "naked between them," provocatively referred to in the story's epigraph, no longer separates them during their night together when "[i]n the darkness, centuries old, love flowed, and for the first and last time I possessed Ulrike's image."

Only a writer like Borges could speak of "possessing Ulrike's image" when describing a sexual union. Certainly the consummation represents the transcendence of temporal and spatial limits, but this event is not unique even if unrepeatable; indeed its universal structure poses for Borges the same problems of representation as all other absolute moments. The question is whether his use of "image" here is a metaphor for the totalized experience achieved or for what always eludes a speaking subject—that is, the difference between the moment experienced and the words to translate it. To put it otherwise, which aspect or aspects of Ulrike did the narrator "possess" that night, and which eluded him? Does "image" signify for Borges the totality of the experience or the gap between the experience and its representation? Or perhaps is he alluding to a difference intrinsic to experience itself, inclusive of language, and not separable from it?

How to contend with the problem of rendering such moments is crucial to Borges' enterprise, although sometimes one wonders if the problem is merely a rhetorical one: as linguistic act it calls attention to itself but its representational status is never seriously or profoundly threatened, nor is the thematic pattern of intentionality disrupted. In "The Congress" the heart of the amorous episode between the narrator, Alejandro Ferri, and his new lover, Beatrice, is her response to his proposal of marriage; as "a follower of the faith" of free love, "she did not want to tie herself down to anyone." She utters the word he "never dared speak" (conspicuously absent in the text), and his words immediately follow in a torrent of poetic bliss:

O nights, O darkness warm and shared, O love that flows in shadows like some secret river, O that instant of ecstasy when each is both, O that ecstasy's purity and innocence, O the coupling in which we became lost so as then to lose ourselves in sleep, O the first light of dawn, and I watching her.

Some time after, they part in the British Museum where they had met the winter before, and, "to avoid the anguish of waiting for letters," he does not leave her his address. Although extended over time, their erotic connection is symbolized as one ecstatic moment, one night, one dawn, a singular vision.

In the final section of "The Congress" we find a passage that is strikingly similar to the one earlier quoted from "El Aleph" when "Borges" struggles to describe his vision of the Aleph:

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past…. How then can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that is somehow all birds … Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor…. (The "Aleph" and Other Stories)

Its analogue in "The Congress" comes after the episode with Beatrice and attempts to inscribe the memory of the experience Ferri had shared with the other members of the secret Congress, who have since died:

Words are symbols that assume a shared memory…. The mystics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird that is all birds, a sun that is all the stars and the sun, a jug of wine, a garden, or the sexual act. Of these metaphors none will serve me for that long, joyous night, which left us, tired out and happy, at the borders of dawn…. Down through the years, without much hope, I have sought the taste of that night; a few times I thought I had recaptured it in music, in love, in untrustworthy memories, but it has never come back to me except once in a dream. (The Book of Sand)

Despite the literal similarity in presentation as well as the symbolic overlay of the two quintessential experiences—the problem of rendering in language that which exceeds the power of representation—there is a radical difference between the nature and content of these experiences. What marks the mystical vision of the Aleph as different from the other experiences of the infinite is that it is solitary, cerebral, and irreducible. Hence the overwhelming difficulty of recollecting and formulating a moment of pure self-containment in universal, communicable terms, that is, into language. Of course, such an understanding of language is predicated on the notion that there is potential for such communication, however ineffable the experience or imperfect the vehicle. But because the uniqueness of the thing itself cannot be grasped or articulated, to be accessible to others it must become part of a network of already constituted meanings, that is, join the cast of other already metaphorized epiphanic experiences. It is Borges' premise that these "experiences" come mediated to us by way of literature, from which we derive our "shared memory." Whether through such indirection language ever brings us any closer to the experience or whether it in fact subsumes it remains ambiguous.

In the case of the joyous nights described in "The Congress," the one experience that Ferri has sought desperately to recapture in music and love, and which seems to have been retrievable only once in dream, is not mystical in the usual sense, nor sexual in any sense. His ultimate experience, identified as "the single event of [his] whole life," was the enactment of an abstract philosophical ideal, a secret organization that sought to embrace everything in "the whole world." Understood finally to be an impossibility, the Congress of the World is dissolved and "the true Congress" realized the same night: a spontaneous, organic community, without agenda, without purpose. As "the only keeper of that secret event," Ferri justifies "committing perjury" and assumes the task of narrating their story, because with the death of the only other remaining member, the community no longer exists—and will not exist in memory either when Ferri dies. The recounting of that ideal night even includes an attempt to "bring [back] Beatrice's image," but it seems to be a perfunctory gesture. What Beatrice had rejected—the notion of an exclusive human connection—Ferri ironically learns to surpass through the experience of community. Yet an irony whose effects reverberate throughout the narrative is that one of the meanings of the word "congress" is sexual union.

Many of the variations on the theme of intellectual obsession and strategies of female figuration I have attempted to trace in this essay converge in one of Borges' last poems, "The Threatened One." As I hope to have shown, his use of a feminine ideal to explore metaphysical possibilities often requires the death or ultimate loss of a woman, and this absence serves as the very pretext for writing. The inevitable temporal and spatial distance between an idealized object of desire and the invoked image provides him with the symbolic means to pursue the implications of some of his favorite philosophical problems: infinite interpretation as a form of immortality, the deceptive truth of memory, life as the construction of paradoxes. I hope to have also identified some tendencies, especially in his later writings, toward a less abstract conception of woman and an attendant openness toward erotic experience, an important aspect of this process. Yet if what constitutes now the ideal seems to be as much an embodiment as an image, his quest for the Absolute has not attenuated; and in this perceptible movement from ideality toward corporeality, woman remains the figure of choice.

What singularly distinguishes "The Threatened One" from other poems and narratives in which women figure prominently is that it is situated absolutely in the present and that it is addressed to a living beloved. As in many of his other poems, Borges uses the rhetorical device of enumeration as a way to summarize his major motifs and mythologies, as a metonymy of his main subjects, a microcosm of his entire work. But here the self-contained, intimate world composed of the poet's "talismans [and] touchstones—the practice of literature, vague learning, an apprenticeship to the language used by the flinty Northland to sing of its seas and its swords, the serenity of friendship, the galleries of the Library, ordinary things, habits, the young love of my mother, the soldierly shadow cast by my dead ancestors, the timeless night, the flavor of sleep and dream" (The Gold of the Tigers) are cited as useless in the face of an all-consuming, threatening love. None of the familiar points of reference pertain when "[b]eing with you or without you is how I measure my time" or when a "room is unreal" because "[you] ha[ve] not seen it"; this "is love with its own mythology."

Yet images of anguish and terror of self-extinction abound: "prison walls grow larger, as in a fearful dream," and "the darkness has not brought peace" for the man who has to "hide or flee" from this love. These lines manifest a remarkable dependence upon voice or enunciation, upon the poet's own convincing unmediated confessional utterance as well as upon his beloved's voice, her sensual presence: "It is love, I know it: the anxiety and relief at hearing / your voice … A woman's name has me in thrall / A woman's being afflicts my whole body." What is most fascinating, perhaps, about this evocation of obsessive love is the absence of the ethereal, the abstract, the transcendent, indeed those very characteristics of romantic longing which mirror Borges' pervasive quest for the Absolute. That this movement from ideality to corporeality still revolves around woman as figure, of course, raises some new issues while masking others. The poet's dependence in "The Threatened One" upon the beloved's voice and physical presence is an even stronger declaration of the consumptive power of erotic desire and an admission that poesis may have its limitations. In this poetic self-portrait the repetitious effects of the conclusive words "It is love" are immediate, enduring, and absolutely corporeal—coexistent it would seem with his own being, his life. And even as this poem is addressed to, written for a specific woman, it has no meaning or value apart from her, cannot compare with her. Here there is no symbolic or metaphorical inscription of the feminine as an aspect of the quest for the Absolute, no projection backward or forward toward mystical union with a lost or deferred object, no recognition of the pleasure derived from the exercise of cerebral prowess as a means of constituting subjectivity in the world.

If the poet fears the condition of immanence in which he finds himself, it may be due precisely to love's capacity to eclipse all other things, put all else into question. If writing is predicated on loss or exile, then the entire enterprise of writing represented in the poem might now be threatened by this passion for the present, for what is none other than a competing metaphysics. To accept the performative terms of this poem, however, is not to read its ontology of female voice and body uncritically. It is to be aware that there are always at least two readers, one of whom is Borges, occupying space on both sides of the text's divide. For the "Borges" who said "I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature justifies my existence" ("Borges and I," Dreamtigers), losing one's self in love may pose an ominous threat indeed. But only if "the other one"—the "other reader," that is—does not live to write about it. Borges' "idea of woman" ensures the vitality of each.

Bella Brodzki, "Borges and the Idea of Woman," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 149-66.