Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438450315
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2014-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

THE PARADOXES OF PARADOXES

Now we do not define each deed that incites our sing; we cipher it in one sole word that is the Word.

—Jorge Luis Borges

In this case it would be valid to modify the formula of the Hebrew superlative, since it is not only a question of distinguishing a level of superiority that exalts a king of kings for being the greatest, or a song of songs that was the best and is his. Despite these grammaticized excellences, it is necessary to point out that the superlative used here is not applied in order to exalt in the same way. Similarly, Borges announces in his book Prologues1 the presentation of a “prologue of prologues.” I would be interested in anticipating by way of this double plural the apex of paradoxes that Borges’s oeuvre and its author multiply, those of a Borges, who writes, and the other, who also does.

I would not want to attribute solely to the Balkan hospitality of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, to his convocation to reflect, in Dubrovnik, in 1989, on “Collapses, paradoxes, cognitive dissonances,” the necessity to recur thematically to Borges’s paradoxical imagination with such naturalness. Above all because, attending to themes of this nature, naturalness could be alarming. It is true that if unforeseeability constitutes one of the conditions of the paradox, then dealing with paradoxes one need not speak of Borges nor, dealing with Borges, would it be necessary to speak of paradoxes: “in the Koran there are no camels; this absence of camels would be enough to prove that it is not Arabic.”2

For this reason, these reflections are initiated in the key of preterition, a figure that seems to me more paradoxical than paradoxes themselves, although, as it is limited to accessory metadiscursive rhetorical recourses, one does not always remember that in saying that one does not say what one says, the rhetorical figure reveals one of the complicated dualities that are a condition of the word. Between paradoxes and preteritions would be the sententious occurrence of the first and the perverse redundancy of the second, two of the scarce differences between figures that have in common an ambivalent auto-referential renvoi: without interrupting the consecutiveness of discourse, they are terms that remit it to itself, formulating a verbal auto-referentiality at the same time as they suspend it. The suspended reference, remains and does not, goes and comes, as much what one says as what one does not say is said, is negated and is maintained.3

Paradoxical literature has always existed, but there are works and moments in which this frequency explodes, and it is already difficult to pass them by, their lights and blinding flashes. Borges is a paradoxical event of such a kind that his analysis would overflow the specifics of whatever description, or the limits of inventory. Because of the logical vastness and variety of this recourse, one of the first problems would be to pose again the question, “where to begin?” But the beginning, in the same way as the end, once mentioned, moves away.

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