Film—an idea of film, really—recurs in Borges's writing linked to the practice of narration, even to the possibility of attempting narration. Films also appear as reading matter, one among the countless motives for reflection lavished on us by the universe. The examples offered to Borges by films illustrate widely disparate themes: the hilarious response of a Buenos Aires audience to some scenes from Hallelujah and Underworld provoked his bitter commentary on "Our Impossibilities" (an article dating from 1931 and included in Discusión the following year but eliminated from the 1957 edition) [it was translated as "Our Inadequacies" in Borges: A Reader]; von Sternberg gave him the chance to confirm a hypothesis about the workings of all story telling ("The Postulation of Reality" and "Narrative Art and Magic," both included in Discusión); Joan Crawford made an appearance in the second of these essays and Miriam Hopkins in "History of Eternity" from the volume of the same title, "the impetuous film Hallelujah" furnished one of the many results of bringing blacks to America that Borges enumerates in Universal History of Infamy; the modest translator Edward William Lane provided a basis for Borges's comparison with Hollywood's then rigid censorship code ("The Translators of the 1001 Nights," History of Eternity).

During the 1920s and '30s, Borges saw the mere diffusion of images by means of film as an incalculable enrichment of life, perhaps because he knew how to recognize in those images, even though they were fictitious—or, above all, because they were fictitious?—signs of a broader context. In a digression, subsequently deleted when he revised Discusión, Borges refers in his 1929 essay "The Other Whitman" to the lack of communication between inhabitants of "the diverse Americas," and he proceeds to venture an opinion: it is "a lack of communication that films, with their direct presentation of destinies and their no less direct presentation of wills, tend to overcome." This catalogue of references could be extended effortlessly, but its sole importance is to establish the degree to which films were a habit for the young Borges, an accessible repertoire of allusions, which he consulted as frequently as the Encyclopedia Britannica or unpublished reality.

At that time, film represented to Borges the image of literature (or history or philosophy) as a single text fragmented into countless, even contradictory passages, which neither individually represented that text nor in combination exhausted it. With even greater ease than in those prestigious disciplines, this notion could come to life in the films Borges frequented and quoted from, with diminishing regularity after 1940: a cinema that in spite of Eisenstein and Welles could still seem an art unfettered by too many big names, a cinema that was, above all else, free of bibliographies and academies. Allardyce Nicoll, whose Film and Theatre (1936) Borges dismissed as an exercise in pedantry, seemed "well versed in libraries, erudite in card catalogues, sovereign in files," but "nearly illiterate in box-offices…."

In this cinematic realm, many obscure narrators practiced the "differing intonation of a few metaphors" ("The Sphere of Pascal," Other Inquisitions) whose history may be the history of the universe. "I think nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns," Borges told Ronald Christ in an interview published in The Paris Review 40 (Winter/Spring 1967). "During this century," he said, "the epic tradition has been saved for the world by, of all places, Hollywood." If Hollywood really was able to compile a film-text, both craftsmanlike and collective, as well as bearing comparison to the ancient sagas, then Borges's predilection for that text is, horribile dictu, sophisticated. In order to belittle the films that von Sternberg composed around Marlene Dietrich, Borges repeatedly defends von Sternberg's earlier action films; and, in the interview with Christ, he recalls that "when I saw the first gangster films of von Sternberg I remember that when there was anything epic about them—I mean Chicago gangsters dying bravely—well, I felt that my eyes were full of tears." But von Sternberg was neither Wellman nor Hawks nor Walsh—figures who, with greater credibility, might embody a cinematic skald. Obviously, Borges felt attracted by the stylization that von Sternberg imposed on his gangland characters, settings, and conventions, whose usual violence is less elliptical, less ironic than in films like Underworld or The Docks of New York.

It is no accident that von Sternberg is the only film director whom Borges assiduously refers to or that those references appear in his early studies of narrative technique included in Discusión as well as in the 1935 prologue to the Universal History of Infamy, where the epic invocation turns into an exercise of verbal legerdemain. In the 1954 prologue to that book, Borges writes: "Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word infamy blares in the title; but, behind all the tumult, there is nothing. The book is nothing more than appearance, nothing more than a surface of images, and for that very reason it may prove pleasurable." Films, of course, are that surface of images, and nothing can be found behind the words of any literary work; but to admit and flaunt one's working against the referential function of language is as skeptical and cultivated an attitude as nostalgia for epic or disdain for romantic individualism.

Less ascetic than Valéry, Borges put his distrust of the novel into practice. His impatience with mere length is well known: "It is an impoverishing and laborious extravagance to create long books, to extend into 500 pages an idea whose perfect oral expression takes a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that these books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary" (Prologue to The Garden of the Forking Paths). Such boldness destroys the very possibility of even approaching a genre that, in order to develop a character and to proportion its episodes, requires a necessarily unhurried orchestration of specific circumstances and trivial information. Borges has also explained that Hawthorne's talent lent itself more to the short story than to the novel because he preferred to start from situations rather than from characters: "Hawthorne first imagined a situation, perhaps involuntarily, and afterward looked for characters to embody it. I am not a novelist, but I suspect that no novelist has proceeded in that way…. That method may produce, or permit, admirable short stories in which, because of their brevity, the plot is more visible than the characters; but it cannot produce admirable novels, in which the overall form (if there is any) is only visible at the end and in which a single poorly imagined character may contaminate with unreality all those characters who surround him" ("Nathaniel Hawthorne," Other Inquisitions).

So, then: distrust of the scale demanded by the novel and esteem for a format ("summary," "commentary") that makes "overall form" visible. As an expression of flexible disdain, of willingness to allow for occasional greatness in the practice of what he considers an erroneous genre, that phrase "if there is any" belongs to the same family as Valéry's most categorical observations. But the interesting thing about this apathy is that it does not suppose a rejection of narrative. In fact, a summary analysis of the most distinguishing characteristics in Borges's "fiction" reveals its undisguised narrative quality. The text may be a review of nonexistent literary works ("The Approach to Almotasim," "An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain"), the exposition of apocryphal theories ("Three Versions of Judas," "The Theologians"), a report about an invented reality ("The Babylonian Lottery," "The Library of Babel"), even the connecting of probable episodes by means of a fictitious link ("History of the Warrior and the Captive," "Averroes's Search"). No matter. The less those texts respond to the accepted statutes of fiction, the more strongly they display the narrative process, which directs a mise-en-scène whose purpose is neither mimetic nor representational but intellectual: to arouse pleasure in the recognition of that "overall form," a recognition customarily postponed by the novel.

"The Wall and the Books," "Coleridge's Dream," "The Meeting in a Dream," and "The Modesty of History" are usually read as essays because they are included in a volume that announces itself as a collection of essays: Other Inquisitions. The book's real nature is a series of narrative exercises, operations that renew the workings of narrative on philosophical ideas, historical documents, and literary figures. Similarly, "History of the Warrior and the Captive" or "Averroes's Search" appear in The Aleph and therefore are read as "fictions." Borges's categories of narrative do not discriminate between fiction and nonfiction. The only purpose of these categories is to exhibit the inherent qualities of narrative and essayistic discourse: to unearth a design that rescues the mere telling from chaos and makes an illusion of the cosmos possible. Fiction triumphs. Tlön captures and supplants the real universe with the illusion of order: "How can one not submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also ordered. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: with inhuman laws—that we never really perceive. Tlön will be a labyrinth, but a labyrinth planned by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men" ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," The Garden of the Forking Paths).

Looking back after twenty years, Borges pronounced judgment on his first stories: "They are the irresponsible game of a timid man who did not dare to write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and betraying (sometimes without esthetic justification) other writers' stories" (Prologue to the 1954 edition of the Universal History of Infamy). To falsify, to betray—those verbs shock with their criminal connotations. Yet they apply to the transmission of every story, from the traditional tale and gossip to any projected novel being transformed into a written text. All narrative proceeds by repetitions and modifications of a pre-text, which it nullifies. Those "ambiguous games" that Borges mentions in his prologue quoted above are especially revealing because they reject the invention of anecdote, choosing to explore, instead, the various possibilities of narrative, even the mutually exclusive possibilities. In order to overcome his declared timidity, Borges both disguises and exhibits his own devices.

How did Borges view those games at the time he wrote them? In his prologue to the first edition, Borges says: "They derived, I believe, from my re-reading of Stevenson and Chesterton, and even from the first films of von Sternberg, and perhaps from a certain biography of Evaristo Carriego. They abuse some procedures: random enumeration, abrupt shifts in continuity, reduction of a man's entire life to two or three scenes." This enumeration of sources and methods, by contrast, is not random. In fact, examining his examples enables us to define the context Borges discovered for his idea of film.

In Stevenson, even in Chesterton, Borges admires a capacity for verbal mise-en-scène:

The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye forever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment although perhaps it was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.

         (Stevenson, "A Gossip on Romance," Memories and Portraits, 1887).

Appreciation of verbal mise-en-scène, which Stevenson calls "the plastic part of literature," appears at a particular point in the evolution of narrative during the second half of the nineteenth century: after the inauguration of rigorous discipline by Flaubert; coincident with Henry James's early mastery in controlling points of view and alternating between "panorama" and "scene"; immediately before the consecration of these devices as technique in James's subsequent work as well as in the works of Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, and the Joyce of "The Dead." Once systematized by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction and before languishing in the universities until it died out, this tradition provided the basis for the New Critics' best work in the study of fiction.

In "The Postulation of Reality," which appears in Discusión Borges refers to these verbal, defining, and definitive images as "circumstantial invention," the third and most difficult as well as most efficient among the methods by which novelists can impose their subtle authority on the reader. He illustrates the method, magnanimously, with an example from La gloria de Don Ramiro [in a footnote, the translator explains that this is a "novel by the Argentine writer Enrique Larreta (1875–1961). Published in 1908, the book reflects the influence of both literary realism and naturalism, especially in its extravagant devotion to historical detail. Cozarinsky says that Borges chose his example 'magnanimously' since Borges did not ordinarily value Larreta's work] and adds:

I have quoted a short, linear example, but I know of expanded works—Wells's rigorously imaginative novels, Defoe's exasperatingly true-to-life ones—that use no other technique than incorporating or serializing those laconic details into a lengthy development. I assert the same thing about Josef von Sternberg's cinematographic novels, which are also made up of significant moments. It is an admirable and difficult method, but its general application makes it less strictly literary than the two previous ones. (This quotation comes from the 1957 edition of Discussion; the original 1932 edition reads: "cinematic, ocular novels.")

What can a writer do with the novelist's tools if his own intellectual habits and work with language predispose him to writing short stories and brief, intense texts? If he is also intolerant of the novel's unavoidable long stretches? Instead of finding privileged moments in the course of narrating, is it possible for him to depart from an ordering of those "significant moments" and to omit the connective tissue that should bind them together? Or, going even further, will he be able with those isolated images—so memorable within a narrative of a certain length—to conjure up phantasmagorically the absent narration that is their "lengthy development"? Evaristo Carriego proposes an answer.

Comparable only to Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol as an example of the absorption of one literary figure by another (even though the minor stature of Carriego makes the process more obvious), Borges's 1930 book on Carriego—with its discreet "betraying" and "falsifying" of another's story that scarcely serves as a pretext—is also his first approach toward that "fiction" from which a particular timidity had held him back. At several points, Borges declares his hesitations, the obstacles he encounters in writing the book. In the first chapter—"The Palermo Section of Buenos Aires"—one reads: "The jumbled, incessant style of reality, with its punctuation of ironies, surprises, and intimations as strange as surprises, could only be recaptured by a novel, which would be out of place here." And how can he represent Palermo as it was before he knew it?

To recapture that almost static prehistory would be to foolishly weave a chronicle of infinitesimal processes…. The most direct means, according to cinematographic procedure, would be to propose a continuity of discontinuous images: a yoke of wine-bearing mules, the wild ones with their eyes blindfolded; a long, still expanse of water with willow leaves floating on the surface; a vertiginous will-o'-the-wisp wading through the flooding streams on stilts; the open country-side, with nothing to do there; the tracks of a hacienda's stubbornly trampled cattle path, the route to corrals in the north; a peasant (against the dawn sky) who dismounts and slits his jaded horse's wide throat; a wisp of smoke wafting through the air.

A relationship is established among these images. In "A Gossip on Romance" Stevenson had expounded his observations as a reader and sought support from them for his method as a writer. Borges, who agrees with those observations, sees them as applicable to the films of von Sternberg; and in his early Evaristo Carriego, where he doubts the very fiction whose elements he invokes, he attempts the magic of conjuring up a more abundant, unlimited reality by naming some notable moments that may postulate it. Film suggests to him the possibility of connecting those moments by means of a less discursive syntax than the verbal. Here a notion that might be termed montage appears, operating in texts made from words. That "cinematographic procedure," that "continuity of discontinuous images" will be the stated method in the stories of Universal History of Infamy. One of the chapters that divide—and integrate—"The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan" opens: "History (which like a certain director, proceeds by discontinuous images) now proposes the image of a…."

The stories in Universal History of Infamy illustrate, point by point, Chesterton's observations in his study of Stevenson: "Those flat figures could only be seen from one side. They are aspects or attitudes of men rather than men" (R. L. Stevenson, London, 1928). The stories also illustrate what Chesterton noted about "our modern attraction to short stories" and the "short story today" in his study of Dickens: "We get a glimpse of grey streets of London, or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people, arresting people with fiery and appealing faces. But when the story is ended, the people are ended" (Charles Dickens, London, 1906). To the degree that they ignore what Chesterton in his book on Stevenson calls "huge hospitality for their own characters" and, like Stevenson, prefer a certain thinness in characterization, a simplification appropriate to marionette theater, the two-dimensionality of colored illustrations, Borges's early fictional essays stage a narrative mechanism more than any particular narrative itself. And they do so with the clear awareness that the mechanism is identical in written and cinematographic fiction. (A connection can be seen between this procedure and Nabokov's Dozen, in which the destinies of various Russian adventurers, exiled in Berlin during the 1920s and linked occasionally to movies as extras, are recapitulated in takes, sequences, lighting effects, and montage in order to establish a parodic intent.)

There was a moment, which might be situated between Evaristo Carriego and the writing of his first story, "Man on the Pink Corner," when Stevenson and von Sternberg equally aroused Borges's attention, a moment when it seemed possible to submit Palermo's turn-of-the-century toughs as well as the neighborhood itself to a verbal treatment, the equivalent of von Sternberg's treatment of Chicago and its gangsters in Underworld. Impatient with the restraints that the novel seemed to impose on the exercise of fiction, Borges attempted fiction by cultivating a lucid magic. It matters little whether he was guided by the possibilities revealed to him in narratives by his favorite writers or if their writings permitted him to observe these possibilities in films.

Continuity and discontinuity: cinematographic language provided the point of departure for Borges's play with these concepts in his first attempts at fiction.

All narrative traditionally works by successive effects of continuity, with suspense deriving from an apparently defective continuity later restored by a postponed connection. Poetry, on the other hand, traditionally orders its emphases spatially, ignoring all requirements for connective relation other than the formal. Enumeration is one such relation, and Borges had cultivated it in his early fiction, obviously pleased with organizing his prose in a form unprecedented by the nineteenth-century novel. Every rhetorical work in the enumerative form invokes the supposed "endless variety of creation" by alluding to that creation with incongruous signs—a procedure whose illustrious, theological, and pantheistic genealogy cannot be reduced to Spitzer's "chaotic enumeration," which is linked to one notion of modernity. Nevertheless, a single characteristic is invariable: enumeration is always the double operation of naming in order to indicate the unnamed, of making the spaces between signs as denotative as the markers measuring their extension. Enumeration proposes to express the inexpressible; and, although it relies on only one scheme—enumeration—it is, like storytelling itself, syntactic by nature.

In enumeration, the discontinuity of the actual text seems to be endowed with the prestige of representing an absent, still greater text. Similarly, in Discusión and Other Inquisitions, Borges suggests that, far from denying the figure of Whitman, all the information about the poet's persona scattered throughout Whitman's work confirms his mythic stature. A comparable mechanism controls the lists of irreconcilable or merely dissimilar unities that dizzyingly sketch the infinite in such stories as "The Aleph," "The Zahir," "The God's Script," and even in the comparatively brief list of incarnations in "The Immortal."

By 1935, Borges's enumerations in Universal History of Infamy reveal how they function as concealed illusionism: they display properties of narrative usually disguised in the very act of being employed. The most famous example is the list of effects brought about by the fickle piety of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in "The Terrible Redeemer Lazarus Morell." The terms in these enumerations—or the arguments united in a discourse—appear separated by what really connects them, as if by an electrical current: incongruity, paradox, simple otherness. At the same time, the enumerative combination as a whole registers the ironic richness of these minor clashes. Outside the circuit of conflict and ellipsis, these separate elements would lapse into the inertia of a historic or fictitious report uncharged by narrative.

It is no accident that, beginning with its title, an early Borges essay joins "narrative art" and "magic." His first fictions perform a kind of illusion: that post hoc, ergo propter hoc, an error in logic whose systematic cultivation, for Barthes, is the narrative operation par excellence, "the language of Fate." (Valéry also considered that associating the novelistic or even the fantastic world with reality was of the same order as associating trompe l'oeil with the tangible objects among which the viewer moves.) And what is that language of Fate if not an idea of montage? Cinematographic or verbal montage, which, in the chaotic archive of mankind's acts, proposes or discovers a meaning by ordering those "culminating moments" and "major scenes" in which Stevenson saw the proof and effect of the highest fiction? Stevensonsaw it as operating on different levels of fiction and nonfiction, of history and fantasy. Its name, quite simply, is narrative.

Edgardo Cozarinsky, in his Borges In/and/on Film, translated by Gloria Waldman and Ronald Christ, Lumen Books, 1988, 117 p.