I would like to place Borges in the context of contemporary experimentalism, which, according to many people, is defined as a literature that interrogates itself about its own language, or about the language we use, and puts it on trial by deconstructing it down to its original roots. That is why when we think about experimentalism we think about Joyce, and the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, where not only English but the languages of all peoples, ground down to a vortex of free-floating fragments, are put together again and then deconstructed once more in a whirlwind of new lexical monstrosities, which coagulate for a second only to dissolve once more, as in a cosmic dance of atoms, in which writing is shattered down to its etyms—and it is no accident that it was the phonic analogy between etym and atom that induced Joyce to speak of his work as “the abnihilation of the ethym.”
Obviously, Borges did not put language into crisis. You just have to read the smooth prose of his essays, the traditional grammatical structure of his stories, the plain, conversational comprehensibility of his poems. In this respect Borges is as far as it is possible to be from Joyce. Of course, like every good writer, Borges reinvigorates the language he writes in, but he does not make a display of the way he tears it apart. If Joyce’s linguistic experimentalism is to be considered revolutionary, Borges must be regarded as a conservative, the delirious archivist of a culture whose respectful custodian he claims to be. Delirious, I say, but also a conservative archivist. And yet it is this very oxymoron (“delirious archivist”) which gives us the key to discussing Borges’s experimentalism.
Joyce’s project was to make universal culture his field of play. Well, this was also Borges’s project. If in 1925 Borges exhibited some difficulty in reading Ulysses (see Inquisiciones) and in 1939 (in the November issue of Sur) looked with cautious curiosity at Joyce’s calembours— though according to Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Borges himself invented an exquisitely Joycean pun word “whateverano” (meaning “what a summer” and “whatever is summer”)—in at least two later poems (in the collection Elogio de la sombra) he declares his admiration for Joyce and his debt to him:
Que importa mi perdida generación,
Ese vago espejo,
Si tus libros la justifican.
Yo soy los otros. Yo soy de todos aquellos Que ha rescatado tu obstinado rigor.
Soy los que no conoces y los que salvas.
What does my lost generation matter,
That lovely mirror,
If it was justified by your books. I am the others. I am all those
That your obstinate rigor rescues.
I am those you do not know and those you save.
What, then, links these two authors who both chose universal culture as their playing field, for their salvation or damnation?
I believe that literary experimentalism works on a space we might call the world of languages. But a language, as linguists know, has two sides. On one side the signifier, on the other the signified. The signifier organizes sounds, while the signified arranges ideas. And it is not that this organization of ideas, which constitutes the form of a particular culture, is independent from language, because we know a culture only through the way in which language has organized the still-unformed data about our contact with the continuum of the world. Without language there would be no ideas, but a mere stream of experience that has not been processed or thought about.
Working experimentally on language and the culture it conveys means therefore working on two fronts: on the signifier front, playing with words (and through the destruction and reorganization of words ideas are reorganized); and playing with ideas, and therefore pushing words to touch on new and undreamed-of horizons.
Joyce played with words, Borges with ideas. And at this point we discern the different ideas the two writers held about what they played with and its infinite capacity for being segmented. The atomic particles of words are their stems, syllables, and phonemes. One can, at the extreme limit, recombine sounds and produce a neologism or pun, or recombine letters and produce an anagram, a kabbalistic procedure whose magic Borges knew well.
The atomic element of ideas, or signifieds, is instead always an idea or another signified. One can break down the word “man” into “male human animal” and “rose” into “flower with fleshy petals,” one can yoke together ideas to interpret other ideas, but one cannot go beneath that.
We could say that working on the signifier acts at a subatomic level, whereas working on the signifieds acts on atoms, which cannot be broken down further, in order to reorganize them later into new molecules.
Borges took this second option, which was not the route Joyce took but is just as rigorous and absolute and leads toward the limits of what is possible and thinkable. Borges had models for doing this, of course, whom he openly cites (and so you see that the apparently rather irrelevant quotations I produced a moment ago were not unjustified). One of these was Raymond Lull with his Ars Magna, in whom Borges rightly foresaw the forerunner of modern computer science. The other, less well known, is John Wilkins, who (in his Essay Towards a Real Character, 1688) tried to achieve that perfect language sought after by Mersenne, Guldin, and the other authors of his century—except that Wilkins did not wish to combine letters devoid of sense to assign a name to every single person or thing, but wanted to combine what he and others called “real characters,” which were inspired by Chinese ideograms, in which an idea corresponds to every basic sign, so that by combining these signs in order to name things, the nature of the thing itself was to be made manifest through its name.
His project could not succeed, and I have tried to explain this in my book The Search for a Perfect Language.* But the extraordinary fact is that Borges had not read Wilkins: he had merely secondhand information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a few other books, as he confesses in his essay “The analytical language of John Wilkins” (Otras inquisiciones). And yet Borges was able to condense the essence of his thought and to identify the weaknesses of his project better than many other scholars who have spent their lives reading the enormous folio volume of 1688. Not only this, but in discussing his ideas he noticed that Wilkins’s discourse had something in common with other seventeenth-century figures who had wrestled with the problem of alphabetic combinations.
Borges, who delighted in other universal and secret languages, knew well that Wilkins’s project was impossible, because it presupposed taking into account all the objects in the world, the ideas to which they referred, and a unitary criterion for ordering our atomized ideas. And it is this hurdle that defeats all Utopians who aspire to a universal language. But let us examine the conclusion Borges drew from this consideration.
Once he had understood and declared that one cannot arrive at a unitary classification of the universe, Borges became fascinated by the opposite project: that of overthrowing and multiplying all classifications. It is in this very essay on Wilkins that we find the mention of that improbable Chinese encyclopedia (The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), where we find in turn the most amazing model of uncategorized and incongruous classification (which would later inspire Michel Foucault in the opening passage of The Order of Things.)
The conclusion Borges draws from the failure of classifications is that we cannot know what the universe is. Furthermore, he says that “one can entertain the idea that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense that this ambitious word possesses.” But immediately afterward he points out that “the impossibility of penetrating the divine design of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us from trying to trace human designs.”
Borges knew that some patterns, like that of Wilkins and many in science, try to reach a provisional and partial order. But he chose the opposite path: if the atoms of knowledge are many, the poet’s game consists in making them rotate and recombine ad infinitum, in the endless combinations not only of linguistic etyms but also of ideas themselves. In fact, the Library of Babel is made up of millions of new Chinese encyclopedias of Benevolent Knowledge whose totality is never achieved. Borges found this library to be a storehouse of the culture of several millennia and of diaries of each archangel, but he did more than just explore it: he played at putting different hexagons in contact with one another, at inserting pages from one book into those of another (or at least at discovering the possible books in which this disorder had already taken place).
When it comes to the latest form of contemporary experimentalism, postmodernism, there is much talk of playing with intertextuality. But Borges had gone beyond intertextuality to anticipate the age of hypertextuality, in which one book not only talks of another, but one can penetrate one book from within another. In not only designing the form of his library but also prescribing in every page how one should peruse it, Borges had designed the World Wide Web ahead of its time.
Borges had to choose between dedicating his life to the search for God’s secret idiom (a search he tells us about) or celebrating the millennial universe of knowledge as a dance of atoms, an interweaving of quotations, a welding together of ideas to produce not only everything that is and has been but also that which will be or could be,
