Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco by Jorge Gracia

Author:Jorge Gracia [Gracia, Jorge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-01-26T12:04:00+00:00

Among the most powerful accounts of the mimetic origins of fiction in Borges is the dream-like mode of creation imagined in "The Circular Ruins." In this text, Borges imagines that a dreamer sets out to fashion a person, a purpose characterized as "not impossible, though supernatural." His hope is for creation by means of a complete and total mimesis. He proposes to create a set of correspondences that would be full and exact, "to dream a man ... in minute entirety and impose him on reality."30 But here the labor of making real involves arduous work: "This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul; if someone had asked him his own name, or inquired into any feature of his life till then, he would not have been able to answer." "He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake, even if he fathom all the enigmas of the higher and lower spheres-much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind.' 31

Borges's fable of creation proceeds in detail, and the contours of narrative itself mime the meticulous labor required for it. The dream is nonplatonic in some crucial ways. Borges tells of the fabrication not just of a structure that would serve as a template for further production or repetition, but of the creation of the specific, differentiated, irreducibly particular being-the creation not just of "Being" as such, but of this being, of a being whose concrete particularities and points of difference from Being as such attest to the authenticity of its creator's powers:

He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret-about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless; he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater certainty. He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and then the entire heart, inside and out. And his inspection made him proud. He deliberately did not sleep the next night; then he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set about dreaming another of the major organs. Before the year was out he had reached the skeleton, the eyelids. The countless hairs of the body were perhaps the most difficult task. The man had dreamed a fully fleshed man-a stripling-but this youth did not stand up or speak, nor could it open its eyes. Night after night, the man dreamed the youth asleep. (CF, p. 98)

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