Borges, the passion of an endless quotation

223 Pages·2003·0.612 MB·English, Spanish

by  Borges, Jorge Luis, Block de Behar, Lisa, Borges, Jorge Luis

BORGES
SUNY series in Latin American
and Iberian Thought and Culture
Jorge J. E. Gracia
and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, Editors
BORGES
The Passion of an Endless Quotation
Lisa Block de Behar
Translated
and with an introduction by
William Egginton
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2003 State University of New York
All rights reserved
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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
and with an introduction by William Egginton.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5555-6 (hb.: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5556-4 (pbk.: alk
paper)
1. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899—Criticism and Interpretation. 2. Quotation in
literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ7797.B635 Z6344213 2002
868'.6209—dc21 2002017575
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
The Interpretive Fix and the Fixations of Fiction:
TheArs Interpretansof Lisa Block de Behar,
by William Egginton ix
1. First Words 1
2. Variations on a Letter Avant-la-lettre 5
3. Paradoxa Ortodoxa 15
4. On “Ultrarealism”: Borges and Bioy Casares (The Interlacing
of the Imagination and Memory on the Thresholds of
Other Worlds) 31
5. A Complexly Woven Plot: Borges, Bioy Casares, Blanqui
(Conjectures and Conjunctions at the Limits of Possible
Worlds) 43
6. Theoretical Invention in Fiction: Marvels, Miracles,
and the Gazes of Miranda 55
7. The Ironies of a Blind Seer 71
8. Symbols and the Search for Unity 93
9. The Paradoxes of Paradoxes 107
10. Vox in Deserto: Borges and the Story of Sand 123
v
vi Contents
11. The Mystery of the Name 133
12. The Imagination of Knowledge 141
13. The Place of the Library 149
Notes 165
Index 201
Acknowledgments
Iwould like to thank the following people for the time and expertise they
generously provided: Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, Jorge Gracia, Michael
Rinella, and Diane Ganeles for their enthusiastic response to my proposal;
David Johnson for his invaluable criticism of earlier drafts; Bernadette
Wegenstein for her comments on the introductory essay; Miguel Fernán-
dez Garrido for his input in the translation; Sepp Gumbrecht for having
the idea of this collaboration; and above all Lisa Block de Behar, for her
beautiful book and for her patient help and support at all stages of work
on the translation.
vii

The Interpretive Fix
and the Fixations of Fiction
The Ars Interpretans of Lisa Block de Behar
William Egginton
Barthes once wrote that the only way to read a work of passion is with
another work of passion. What was true for Barthes is equally true for
Lisa Block de Behar, whose three or more decades of scholarly activity
have produced an imposing body of scholarship on the work of Jorge
Luis Borges, but more important and more urgently have resulted in the
invention of a new way of thinking about the activity of reading, and the
nature of meaning itself. If I may recur to a historical analogy, and one
that is not without heuristic value for the case at hand, Block de Behar’s
relation to the texts of Borges is redolent of that of Heidegger to the
poetry of Hölderlin. Having practiced fundamental ontology from the
perspective of and in the language of philosophical discourse, albeit in a
way that overturned the most basic presuppositions of that discourse, the
Heidegger of the late thirties began to produce a kind of writing that
refused to speak about Being, from the outside—as if one could have a
vantage from which to see and speak that was itself not already inandof
Being. Such a writing—one that would take seriously Heidegger’s discov-
ery that language does not report on beings but is rather the house of
Being1—is exemplified not by philosophers and the history of their craft,
but by the poets, and it was in the words of Hölderlin that Heidegger
believed he could best listen to Being as it uttered the meanings of our
most basic words.
ix