How Borges Wrote by Daniel Balderston;

Author:Daniel Balderston;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

There are much longer sentences in the history of literature2—think of Joyce, García Márquez, Faulkner, Saramago—but this one has a wonderful complexity. It is remarkable for its compactness: in 430 words it goes off madly in all directions, at the same time working from a still center: “vi,” I saw. As the narrator (who is called “Borges” in the story) says a bit earlier, his problem is how to transmit the infinite Aleph in a finite number of symbols, through the “enumeración, siquiera parcial, de un conjunto infinito” (625; the enumeration, even impartial enumeration, of infinity [Collected Fictions 282]).3 His solution, a sentence that Fernando Vallejo has called “el punto culminante de uno de los relatos de Borges (¿o de su obra, acaso?)” (Logoi 203; the highpoint of one of Borges’s stories [and maybe of his whole work]), is what I will analyze here.

Perhaps the first thing to say about this sentence is that it is wonderfully strange. Unlike his host, Carlos Argentino Daneri, who has used this luminous object to survey the surface of the earth and write plodding quatrains about particular places seen, and who proposes to continue—in a remarkably tedious way—block by block, square kilometer by square kilometer, our narrator’s approach to geography is radically unsettling: he records big things, tiny things, some things that are shockingly private (his beloved Beatriz’s obscene letters to her first cousin, his host upstairs), others that are public. The “system” of enumeration here looks like an embrace of chaos, but it gets at a different, and perhaps better, way of expressing the totality than other, more methodical, approaches. Leo Spitzer used the term “chaotic enumerations” (in an essay published in Buenos Aires in 1945, the year of publication of the story) for lists that give a bewildering sense of a whole; Sylvia Molloy prefers the term “heteroclite” to “chaotic” (193–205), and for good reason: the radical otherness of this list constitutes a kind of order.

In terms of rhetorical structure, it is hard to say anything in general about this sentence since the different clauses of it have a great variety of syntactic structures and of rhetorical strategies, but one thing jumps right out: the sentence is organized around thirty-seven repetitions, at the heads of sequences, of the verb “vi,” I saw.4 (There is also a “vi” in the middle of a clause and, near the end, an “había visto,” which looks back on the whole sequence.)5 This is a radical use of anaphora, the structure of repetition that is so important in the Bible (and in some modern poetry, including that of Walt Whitman, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo Neruda, and for that matter in some of Borges’s later poems). But what comes after the repeated first-person-singular verb implies a lot more than thirty-seven visions: there are many more things, to recall Hamlet’s words to Horatio, than are accounted for at first.

As often happens with Borges, the references are mundane and erudite and precise and muddled, encompassing vastly different fields of knowledge, things both natural and artificial, simple and paradoxical.

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