Only in the light of this Borgesian experimentalism (playing with ideas, not words) can one understand the poetics of The Aleph, that magic object in which one can see at a glance the countless and separate objects that make up whatever populates the universe. One has to be able to see everything at once, and change the criterion of what links things together, and be able to see something else, changing at every vision of the “Celestial Emporium.”
At this point the question of whether the Library is infinite or of indefinite size, or whether the number of books inside it is finite or unlimited and recurring, becomes a secondary question. The true hero of the Library of Babel is not the library itself but its Reader, a new Don Quixote, on the move, adventurous, restlessly inventive, alchemically combinatory, capable of overcoming the windmills he makes rotate ad infinitum.
For this Reader, Borges has suggested a prayer and an act of faith, and it comes in the other poem dedicated to Joyce:
Entre el alba y la noche está la historia
Universal. Desde la noche veo
A mis pies los caminos del hebreo,
Cartago aniquilada, Infierno y Gloria.
Dame, Señor, coraje y alegría
Para escalar la cumbre de este día.
Between dawn and night lies universal
History. From the depths of night I see
At my feet the wandering of the Jew,
Carthage annihilated, Hell, and the Glory of Heaven. Grant me, Lord, the happiness and courage To touch the summit of my day.
This is a revised version of a lecture given on 22 May 1997 at the University of Castilla-La Mancha on the occasion of being awarded an honorary degree.
BORGES AND MY ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
I have always maintained that one should never invite heart patients to a cardiologists’ conference. However, now that I am here, my duty should be, apart from thanking you for the many kind things you have said about me in the last few days, to stay silent and be consistent with my idea that a written text is a manuscript in a bottle. This does not mean that a manuscript can be read any way we like, but it should be read when the old man’s gone, to use another popular expression. That is why, as I listened to each paper over the past few days, I have been jotting down questions to answer and points to elaborate, but in the end I have decided not to discuss the papers individually.
I prefer to take advantage of the suggestions received from all of you to discuss the concept of influence. It is a crucial concept for criticism, for literary history, for narratology; but it is also dangerous. Over the last few days I have noticed this danger repeatedly, and for that reason I wish to pursue these reflections.
When we speak of a relationship of influence between two authors, A and B, we are in one of two situations:
(1) A and B were contemporaries. We could, for instance, discuss whether there was any influence between Proust and Joyce. There was not; they met just once, and each of them said more or less of the other: “I don’t like him, and I have read little or nothing of anything he’s written.”
(2) A came before B, as was the case with the two writers discussed in the last few days, so the debate is concerned only with the influence of A on B.
Nevertheless, one cannot speak of influence in literature, in philosophy, or even in scientific research, if one does not place an X at the top of the triangle. Shall we call this X culture, the chain of previous influences? To be consistent with our exchanges over the last few days, let’s call it the universe of the encyclopedia. One has to take this X into account, and above all in the case of Borges, since, like Joyce, although in a different way, he used universal culture as an instrument of play.
The relationship between A and B can take place in different ways: (1) B finds something in the work of A and does not realize that behind it lies X; (2) B finds something in the work of A and through it goes back to X; (3) B refers to X and only later discovers that X was already in the work of A.
I do not intend to construct a typology of my relationship with Borges. Instead I will quote some examples in an almost haphazard order, and leave to someone else the question as to how these examples correspond to different positions in this triangle. Moreover, it is often the case that these moments are confused because any consideration of influence must take account of the temporality of memory: an author can easily recall something he read in another author in—let’s say—1958, forget that thing in 1980 while writing something of his own, and rediscover it (or be induced to remember it) in 1990. One could carry out a psychoanalysis of influences. For instance, in the course of my fictional work critics have found influences of which I was totally conscious, others that could not possibly have been influences because I had never known the source, and still others that astonished me but that I then found convincing—as when Giorgio Celli, discussing The Name of the Rose, spotted the influence of the historical novels of Dmitri Merezkovskij, and I had to admit that I had read them when I was twelve, even though I never thought of them while I was writing the novel.
In any case, the diagram is not quite so simple, because in addition to A, B, and the sometimes millennial chain of culture represented by X, there is also the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist must not be considered a metaphysical or metahistorical concept; I believe it can be broken down into a chain of reciprocal influences, but what is extraordinary about it is that it can work even in the mind of a child. Some time ago I found in an old drawer something I had written at the age of ten, the diary of a magician who claimed he was the discoverer, colonizer, and reformer of an island in the Glacial Arctic Ocean called Acorn. Looking back on it now, this seems a very Borgesian story, but obviously I could not have read Borges at the age of ten (and in a foreign language). Nor had I read the Utopian works of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, with their tales of ideal communities. However, I had read many adventure stories, fairy tales of course, and even an abbreviated version of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and who knows what chemical reactions had taken place in my imagination.
The Zeitgeist can even make us think of reversals of time’s arrow. I remember writing some stories about planets at the age of sixteen (so around 1948): the plots had as protagonists the Earth, the Moon, Venus falling in love with the Sun, etc. They were in their own way Cosmicomic stories. I sometimes amuse myself wondering how Calvino managed to burgle my house years later and find these youthful writings, which existed only in a single copy. I’m joking, of course, but the point is that sometimes one must believe in the Zeitgeist. In any case, I know you will not believe me, but Calvino’s cosmic stories are better than mine.
Lastly, there are themes common to many authors because they come, as it were, directly from reality. For example, I remember how after The Name of the Rose was published a number of people pointed to other books in which an abbey was burned, many of which I had not read at all. And nobody bothered to mention the fact that in the Middle Ages it was quite common for abbeys, as it was for cathedrals, to burn.
Now, without sticking rigorously to my diagram, I would like to introduce into my triad— intentio auctoris, intentio operis, intentio lectoris—the intentio intertextualitatis, which must play a role in this discussion. Allow me to reflect, once more in no particular order, on three types of relationship with Borges:
1) the cases where I was fully conscious of Borgesian influence;
2) the cases where I was not aware of it, but subsequently readers (among whom I would also count you over the past few days) forced me to recognize that Borges had influenced me unconsciously;
3) the cases where, without adopting a triangle based on preceding sources and the universe of intertextuality, we are led to consider as straight two-way influence cases of three-way influence—namely, the debts Borges owed to the universe of culture, so that we cannot attribute to Borges what he always proudly declared he took from culture.
It was no accident that yesterday I called him a “delirious archivist”: Borges’s delirium could not exist without the archive on which he was working. I believe that if someone had gone to him and said: “You invented this,” he would have replied: “No, no, it was already there, it already existed.” And he would have proudly taken as his own model that phrase of Pascals that I placed as an epigraph to my book A Theory of Semiotics: “And don’t let anyone tell me that I have not said anything new: la disposition des matiéres est nouvelle.”
I say this not to deny my debts to him, which are many, but to lead you back, and to lead myself back, to a principle that I think is fundamental for all those who have taken part in this conference, certainly for me, and certainly for Borges:
