Invisible Work

Kristal, Efraín

Published by Vanderbilt University Press

Kristal, E..
Invisible Work: Borges and Translation.
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

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 Afterword:
Borges and Philosophy

A
ccording to an influential view, Borges’s most important
achievements in literature involve his philosophical in-
sights. To some critics holding this view, translation may
seem a side issue, a curiosity. I think Borges was a fabulist, that trans-
lation is at the heart of his concerns as a writer, and that his philo-
sophical concerns—even when they inform a story or a poem—are
a function of his literary ones.
To clarify my position regarding Borges and philosophy, I must
first acknowledge the significance of Ana María Barrenechea’s book
Borges the Labyrinth Maker.1 Since its publication the reception of
Borges has been dominated by two assumptions. First, his works
can be read as a self-contained literary universe; second, in his liter-
ary world he transforms the real, or that which is assumed to be
real, into the unreal: “Borges is an admirable writer pledged to de-
stroy reality and convert Man into a shadow.”2 Barrenechea’s book
offers a telling account of Borges’s metaphysical themes and their
impact on his style, and it continues to be an indispensable refer-
ence for readers of Borges. Barrenechea, however, downplays the
make-believe aspects of Borges’s fictions, his creative process, and
his penchant for irony. The view that Borges was “pledged to de-
stroy reality” does not take sufficiently into consideration that Bor-

141
142 Invisible Work

ges was fond of exploring ideas for their literary possibilities rather
than for their truth, and that, in the footsteps of his admired Kipling,
he also wrote fictions informed by propositions in which he did not
believe, in some cases by ideas he found ludicrous.
Borges himself, who wrote an amiable preface to the English
edition of Barrenechea’s book, helped to promote the view that he
is a skeptical realist insisting, in many essays and interviews, that
literature, metaphysics, and religion have a common source, and that
he is unable to draw a clear boundary between fiction and reality:
“The outside world is as we perceive or imagine it. It does not ex-
ist independently of our minds. Reality and fiction are closely re-
lated. Our ideas are creative fictions.”3
But Borges’s skepticism is tinged with irony and contradiction.
He carefully cultivated an image of himself in which it is impossible
to determine whether his air of perplexity was a mask for philosophi-
cal certainties or whether his philosophical affirmations were a mask
for his perplexity. Borges was not an enemy of contradiction. On
the contrary, as he once said, “Contradiction is often an intimate
conviction. I always distrust those who have a univocal point of view,
or those whose pronouncements are always consistent. Our reflec-
tions are at the mercy of the seasons, they are portraits of particular
moments.”4 Borges’s irony, coupled with his claim that “unreality
is the condition of art,” and his skepticism5 about our ability to draw
boundaries between the fictional and the real have been welcomed
by many prominent critics of Latin American literature. These crit-
ics emphasize either the unreality of the real (which Borges osten-
sibly transforms), the “realism” of his apparent unreality, or his role
in undermining the dichotomy altogether.6
Since Borges considered himself first and foremost a creator of
literary fictions, his response to the criticism of the metaphysical as-
pects of his own work has ranged from caustic bewilderment to play-
ful acquiescence. His most common rejoinder to the claim he was
more a philosopher than a man of letters was to point out that he
used philosophical ideas for his literary purposes, just as he had used
religious ones. Borges often cautioned that he did not necessarily
take seriously the philosophical ideas that sparked his imagination:
“I am fond of the circular form. That does not mean that I believe
 Afterword 143

in circular time, in the hypothesis of Pythagoras, Hume, Nietzsche,

or many others. The stoics also held that history repeats itself in
exactly the same fashion. I do nothing but take advantage, to the
best of my ability, of the literary possibilities of this hypothesis
Nietzsche thought he had invented.”7
Borges also indicated his delight with those philosophers who
pretended to take seriously mysteries that were not mysterious to
them at all. In an essay about a particular paradox in pre-Socratic
philosophy Borges said, “The Greeks only played with perplexity
and with mystery.”8 Fernando Savater summarizes Borges’s philo-
sophical stance as a “speculative zeal always imbued with an ironic
skepticism that liberates him from dogmatic seriousness.”9 Accord-
ing to the Spanish philosopher, Borges has been an inspiration to
philosophers of various tendencies, because philosophy enhanced his
literary resources. The literary criticism that takes Borges’s writings
strictly as philosophical reflection can be misleading, however, when
it neglects the different literary contexts in which Borges toyed with
numerous philosophical ideas he knew to be mutually exclusive,
more specifically: his penchant for the non sequitur, for playful con-
tradiction, for intended imprecision to generate a disorienting illu-
sion of precision, for giving literary form and narrative voice to
points of view he otherwise deplored or derided, for humor, and
for the ambiguous underlying pathos of his ironic refutations of
reality.10
Borges would sometimes offer an apparently more prosaic ex-
planation for his propensity for philosophical skepticism, seeing it
as a consolation for the painful experiences that are all too human:
“The denial of temporal succession, the denial of the self, the de-
nial of the astronomical universe are apparent expressions of despair,
as well as secret consolations.”11 The pain of an unrequited lover,
which abounds in Borges’s poetry, may be the rock bottom of his
emotional range, even when couched in irony. The feeling of hu-
miliation sublimated into a philosophical exploration is also a re-
current theme in Borges’s stories, poems, and essays, including those
he devoted to Dante. Borges’s view that we have to thank Dante’s
humiliation by a historical Beatrice of flesh and blood for the Di-
vine Comedy may be a projection of his own “ironically absurd pas-
144 Invisible Work

sion,” but as Harold Bloom has put the matter, it is an acute pro-
jection on the “scandalous disproportion” between the almost vacu-
ous experiences that can provoke a work of literature, and the work
of literature itself. Bloom draws on Borges’s insights to argue that
“disproportion is Dante’s royal road to the sublime.” One could
add that in Borges the disproportion between the poverty of expe-
rience and the consolation of literature is a recurrent theme in his
poetry and frames the most intimate of his confessional moments.12
It is possible, of course, to ignore the pathos of Borges’s pro-
nouncements on the consoling powers of metaphysical speculation
and philosophical skepticism. But it is ever present, as in his famous
couplet where his lyrical voice puts on the mask of the Heraclitus
to lament his fortune: “I, who have been many men, have never
been / The one in whose arms swooned Matilde Urbach.”13 In a
lecture entitled “Spinoza, a Pathetic Figure,” Borges argues that
Spinoza’s philosophical system may be a consolation in its sugges-
tion that “everything that happens to us is ephemeral, and there-
fore not important. We ought to love God, but for Spinoza what
does it mean to love God? It certainly does not mean to love an
individual person.”14 The central idea of the lecture echoes a poem
Borges wrote about the philosopher: “The most prodigal love was
bestowed on him / The love that does not hope for love in re-
turn.”15 A consolation for unrequited love, invoked by the poem
and the lecture, is not ultimately fulfilling for the fabulist. Borges
ends the lecture with a confessional statement in which he reflects
on the limited solace philosophy can provide for his personal trials:
“Sometimes, far from any philosophical idea, I wonder why the des-
tiny of an individual named Borges who lived in the twentieth cen-
tury in a city named Buenos Aires, in the southern hemisphere, is
of any interest to myself, why his fate, which is nothing in this uni-
verse, interests me so. But it is difficult to console oneself in this
way. I have tried to take Spinoza seriously, but I have never been
able to do so.”16
Borges gave this lecture on Spinoza in 1981 at the Freudian
School of Buenos Aires. Given his skepticism about Freud, and his
sometimes disparaging remarks about psychoanalysis (“psychoanlysis
involves gossip and indiscretions about sexual life,”)17 his identifi-
 Afterword 145

cation with Spinoza as a pathetic figure takes on an ironic twist. Is

he making a painful confession, or is he playing a joke on an audi-
ence trained to untangle the sublimations of their patients, or is he,
perhaps, poking fun at the literary criticism that purports to read
his fictions as serious philosophical reflection?18
Nestor Ibarra said that Borges’s confessions are sometimes pa-
thetic to an exaggerated degree because he is being ironic. The dis-
avowal of his philosophical proclivities may well be another in the
repertoire of his literary conceits that are, according to Ibarra, “a
part of him, they are him, and thanks to them he has written some
extraordinary pages.”19 Ibarra points out that it is not necessary to
enter into Borges’s game to appreciate his achievements: “I do not
think it is necessary to enter into his game. One must give him the
better part of ourselves, including our refusals. Let us not make it
easy on him; he is better than that. It is against those who object
and who demand that Borges will gain his most significant victo-
ries.”20 In this sense, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot made an observa-
tion of enduring significance, in one of the first books written about
Borges, when he said that the Argentine master began as a skeptic
and ended as an ironist.21 One could add that Borges expresses his
irony in the amiable tone of an individual fascinated by ideas rather
than in the high-pitched voice of a debunker.22 Characteristically,
whenever Borges was pressed on his philosophical positions, he
would respond with ironic or humorous rejoinders: “I live com-
fortably baffled, and I am astonished that people take me seriously,
I do not know if I take myself seriously.”23

I N THIS STUDY I have circumvented both Borges’s skepticism and

his irony by approaching his works from the perspective of the role
of translation in his creative process. No skepticism, irony, or even
humor can obscure the central role that translation has played in
every one of his literary pursuits, including the project of incorpo-
rating philosophical material into his fictional world. Nor can any-
thing place in doubt Borges’s design, as with other twentieth-
century writers such as Kafka and Beckett, to resist facile interpre-
tation.