Borges, Second Edition

Lisa Block De Behar, William Egginton

Description

Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life's work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness—through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences—of a certain index of universality. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation.
Author’s Introduction

Translator’s Introduction to the First Edition
William Egginton

1. First Words

2. Variations on a Letter avant-la-lettre

3. Paradoxa Ortodoxa

4.On “Ultrarealism”: Borges and Bioy Casares (The Interlacing of the Imagination and Memory on the Thresholds of Other Worlds)

5. Borges and García Márquez: On How to Put Life into Words, and How to Recount Them

6. A Complexly Woven Plot: Borges, Bioy Casares, Blanqui (Conjectures and Conjunctions at the Limits of Possible Worlds)

7. Theoretical Invention in Fiction: Marvels, Miracles, and the Gazes of Miranda

8. The Ironies of a Blind Seer

9. Symbols and the Search for Unity

10. The Paradoxes of Paradoxes

11. Vox in Deserto: Borges and the History of Sand

12. The Mystery of the Name

13. Repetitions Are No Surprise

14. The Imagination of Knowledge

15. The Place of the Library

16. The Fiction between Fraud and Farce: Parodies and Properties of the Name

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie du langage
• Philosophie de la langue
• Caribbean
• SS Central America
• Central America
• History of the Americas
• Latin America
• South America
• América del Sur
• Latin American

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 11 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438450322
• Langue: English

Extrait

BORGES,
SECOND EDITION
SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
—————
Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors
BORGES,
SECOND EDITION
The Passion of an Endless Quotation
LISA BLOCK DE BEHAR
Translated by
William Egginton
with
Christopher RayAlexander
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
Cover art: caricature of Borges by Uruguayan artist Jorge Satut (Montevideo, 1937). Photographed by Daniel Behar.
Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Block de Behar, Lisa. [Borges, la pasión de una cita sin fin. English] Borges, the passion of an endless quotation / Lisa Block de Behar ; translated by William Egginton with Christopher RayAlexander. — Second edition. pages cm. — (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture) Spine title: Borges Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5031-5 (Hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899–1986—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Quotation in literature. I. Egginton, William, 1969– II. Alexander, Christopher Ray, 1983– III. Title. IV. Title: Borges. PQ7797.B635Z6344213 2014 868'.6209—dc23
2013014428
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

Author’s Introduction
Translator’s Introduction to the First Edition
William Egginton
1. First Words
2. Variations on a Letter avant-la-lettre
3. Paradoxa Ortodoxa
4. On “Ultrarealism”: Borges and Bioy Casares (The Interlacing of the Imagination and Memory on the Thresholds of Other Worlds)
5. Borges and García Márquez: On How to Put Life into Words, and How to Recount Them
6. A Complexly Woven Plot: Borges, Bioy Casares, Blanqui (Conjectures and Conjunctions at the Limits of Possible Worlds)
7. Theoretical Invention in Fiction: Marvels, Miracles, and the Gazes of Miranda
8. The Ironies of a Blind Seer
gallery of photographs
9. Symbols and the Search for Unity
10. The Paradoxes of Paradoxes
11. Vox in Deserto : Borges and the History of Sand
12. The Mystery of the Name
13. Repetitions Are No Surprise
14. The Imagination of Knowledge
15. The Place of the Library
16. Fiction between Fraud and Farce: Parodies and Properties of the Name
Notes
Index
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

When speaking of Borges, neither does passion fade nor are quotes diminished, and an ambivalent affection both animates and afflicts readers as they, excited by a laborious fervor, are drawn toward the same pages already run over a thousand and one times before. Incited, they attempt to turn their readings into writing, as he does. Given the excess of references that multiply his quotations throughout all domains and the devout amazement that consecrates his poetry or that pillages it through imitation, it has seemed necessary to me that this work lay fallow for some time, in accordance with the millenarian biblical exhortation that the fecundity of the land be preserved so that it may be cultivated anew after a prudent period of repose.
Nevertheless, that very same vibrant validity is enough to justify a new edition, a revision of what has already been published along with the incorporation of recent approaches. Moreover, the conviction that the enthusiasm has been maintained, as inexhaustible as the surprises held by his texts, as inalterable as the written letter despite the constant and multiple changes of a present that makes a moveable age out of those changes. More than in previous eras, these changes have no time for time itself and, in supporting them, the work remains, as if this perseverance were its mission. Its permanence initiates a posterity confirmed by interminable quotes that, like an unending string, continue and circulate, spinning around the work, simulating the movement of the Wheel that provides the narrator with the good fortune of “understanding it all, without end.” 1
Introductions, and particularly the “Author’s Introduction,” neither can nor ought to escape those transformations. Even more if, as in this case, the introduction intends to present a second edition, one determined by events since the publication of the first edition and, in some way, bound up with them. Because of this I limit myself to alluding to the books of a French theoretician that speaks of foreseen forgeries, of commentaries on books never read, of the future that is already written in the pages of the literary past, of paradoxes irresolvable to logic or digressions that, while accessories in the first instance, come to be fundamental. Although sometimes Borges will be rigorously mentioned, other times he won’t enter in; the omission is natural since his traces and traits are to be seen when held up to the light, like a watermark that appears on each of the pages.
The scope of his work is boundless, in such a way that it was foreseeable that within it, among its most emblematic characters, the hero of one of the most quoted stories (and here precisely the event of the quote is crucial for that narration) might reappear as the protagonist of a novel and, through eponymy, vindicate his prestigious and many times literary origin. The epigonic experience is legitimate and its antecedents are ancestral and abundant, even if the transformations in recent works, for reasons both many and clear, are rather sporadic. Nevertheless, the variations not only radiate out from the archetypes imposed by antiquity—epic poetry and its versions, tragedies and their versions—but rather explain the cultural event in general. Among more venerable models, it might be said that the emblematic ghost of Hamlet, of more than one Hamlet, haunts his work, convoking other ghosts, propitiating future avatars that cross through epochs, regions, dramas, or parodies, and, in part, its fortune lies in this spectral condition.
It’s curious. In a few decades the work of Borges has extended throughout the world and, as if this expansion weren’t sufficient, there is no lack of those who come along to amplify it through different kinds of intrusions. Additionally, as a guarantee of such proceedings, that literary and artistic inflation faithfully accompanies the aesthetics of an actuality that, as in previous decades, illuminates the theories in vogue, justified by various practices (intertextual, transtextual, polyphonic, heteroglossic, carnivalesque, anthropophagic or palimpsestic, rewritings generated by a proliferating imagination but one considered second rate or secondhand). Frequently, they lean upon Borges’s own reflections, the sage predictions of his fantasy that grow with the excesses of an always impatient future.
It is certain then that, in instances of an infinite reality or in the fugues of fiction, it might already not be necessary to name him. It is well known that he is in both and, as has been said of beauty, his proper name is common, perhaps because the good already belongs to no one but language and tradition. These are his words. It might also be necessary to remember that the prophetic style permits the employment of neither quotation marks nor the erudite exposition of books and authors … the saying is known to be its own, and it need not be announced as a Borges quote. Being themselves obvious, notes overflow (when they do not vex) and typographical signs, scarce and weak, might be insufficient.
Books, articles, speeches, interviews, films, whether they dispense with the name or not, evoke his poetics between the lines. A director of cinema alternates the ingenuousness of his character, another American in Paris, with the consecrated idols of the Lost Generation, with the habitual and ambivalent intellectual hospitality of Gertrude Stein. Among other anachronisms, lapses, and the usual visits to museums, the picture-postcard stereotypes of a touristic itinerary abound. Machines that facilitate voyages in space “make place” for trips through time, and machines of fantasy wander the whole of la place du temps . As in the great novel that, upon consecrating recovered time in space, suspends it, in the film are heard, ringing out from some antiquated steeple close at hand, the “chimes at midnight,” so that literary and artistic wonders might occupy the screen, and dreams, and readings realized by its intercession.
And Borges? Is it Borges, or Henry James, or James as read by Borges, who develops a fantastic Sense of the Past in the protagonist? The surname of the film’s young American is a paronym of the surname of the young character from James’s novel, and similarly, both names begin with a symbolically named pen (Ralph Pendrel in James’s novel, Gil Pender in Woody Allen’s film), because it is writers that are at issue in both fictions. The characters, artists and writers, interchange speeches that quote their own works intercalated with incidental dialogues. Games of coincidence abolish time, while literary illusions, being more durable, displace elusive reality. Which of Borges’s fictions or reflections are welcomed into the twists of that spiral? A sort of vortex where differences between epochs don’t count, revoked as they are through a familiarity with the most admired works belonging to the “imaginary museum,” intimate and shared, that legitimates a contemporaneity capable of making a mockery of history and drawing from memory a vivid actuality richer, more worthy than quoti