Borges, Buddhism and World Literature by Dominique Jullien

Author:Dominique Jullien
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030047177
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.1 Libraries on Fire: Flaubert, Borges, Foucault and the Triangle of Interpretation

Reflecting on Borges’s reading of Flaubert’s Saint Anthony, we run into an unexpectedly Borgesian state of affairs: today, the relation between the two is mediated by a third reader-writer, Michel Foucault. Foucault’s reading of Flaubert , in particular of the Temptation, has achieved canonical status, to the point where the recent English language edition of the book includes Foucault’s essay as its introduction. For better or for worse, we now see Flaubert’s Temptation through a Foucauldian lens: we read Anthony’s visions as a series of book-induced hallucinations, and the book itself as a book about books.46

Departing radically from the historical, illiterate Anthony, Flaubert’s ascetic, rather like saint Jerome, another desert hermit, is a saint of the book. As the ascetic withdraws into the book, Flaubert’s text creates a new kind of fantastic, which does not refer to the outside world or even an inner world of the mind, but “is a phenomenon of the library” (xxvi). Foucault underlines the continuity between The Temptation and Bouvard and Pécuchet, whose protagonists withdraw from the world in order unquestioningly and disastrously to put into practice their gargantuan reading (xli).47 For Foucault the new dawn at the end of the Temptation points not to the saint’s victory but to the cyclical routine of temptation and prayer, anticipating the repetitive predicament of the hapless bonshommes, but also the Borgesian universe-as-library.

Saint Anthony, Foucault argues, paved the way for much of contemporary literature. “Flaubert produced the first literary work whose exclusive domain is that of books: following Flaubert , Mallarmé is able to write Le Livre and modern literature is activated—Joyce , Kafka , Pound, Borges. The library is on fire” (xxvii).48 Here the Borgesian reading comes full circle, as Foucault includes Borges in the list of modernist writers for whom Flaubert was a key precursor: Foucault’s reading of the Temptation as a proto-Borgesian text affects our reading of both Flaubert and Borges.49 Foucault’s Borgesian Flaubert exemplifies the reverse influence described in Borges’s iconic essay “Kafka and his Precursors” (SNF 363–365). Onto Flaubert’s Temptation, Foucault projected the Borgesian nightmare of an endless and chaotic library, as well as the notorious “Chinese encyclopedia” dreamed up in the 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”, which became a seminal inspiration for his ground-breaking Order of Things.50 The intersecting and bifurcating paths of cross-readings lead unexpectedly back to Pierre Menard’s invisible work: in this chamber of Foucauldian echoes, Borges becomes the author of The Temptation of Saint Anthony .

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