A Reader on Reading

But there were those — Borges’s editor at Gallimard, Héctor Bianciotti, for instance, and Cortázar’s widow, Aurora Bernárdez — who saw María Kodama merely as a devoted and zealous companion. According to them, Borges had met at last his adamant, jealous, remote, protective Beatrice. To Bianciotti, Borges had said, “I’m dying of cancer of the liver, and I’d like to end my days in Japan. But I don’t speak Japanese, or only a few words, and I would like to be able to talk my last hours away.” From Geneva he asked Bianciotti to send him books never mentioned in his writings: the comedies of Molière, the poems of Lamartine, the works of Rémy de Gourmont. Then Bianciotti understood: they were the books Borges had told him he had read as an adolescent in Geneva. The last book he chose was Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which he asked the German-speaking nurse to read to him throughout the long, painful wait. The day before he died, Bianciotti came to see him and sat by his bed throughout the night, holding the old man’s hand, until the next morning.

Borges died on 14 June 1986. Ten years later, rereading “The Aleph” for his memory’s sake, I wondered where it was that I’d come across the idea of the all-encompassing space in Borges’s work—Thomas Hobbes’s nunc-stans or hic-stans quoted as an epigraph to “The Aleph.” I looked through my two shelves of Borges: the tattered original Emecé editions, cluttered with typos; the two fat volumes of the incomplete Obras completas and Obras completas en colaboración, no less typo-ridden; the glossy and somewhat more prolix Alianza editions; the erratic English translations; the superb French Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres, so lovingly edited by Jean-Pierre Bernès that in my mind it almost supersedes the original Spanish. (Borges might not have minded: he once said of the English version of William Beckford’s Vathek, written in French, that “the original is unfaithful to the translation.”)

Roger Caillois, responsible for making Borges known in France (“I’m an invention of Caillois,” Borges said once), suggested that the master’s central theme was the labyrinth; as if to confirm this supposition, the best-known collection of somewhat clumsily translated Borges pieces in English bears that title in the plural. Astonishingly (at least for me, who thought myself quite familiar with Borges’s work), as I reread his books, I found that, far more than the labyrinth, it is the idea of an object, or a place or person or moment that is all objects, places, persons, and moments, that pervasively appears throughout his writing.

I made a list on the endpaper pages of my Pléiade volume, but I am sure it is far from exhaustive:

It is headed by the most obvious: “The Zahir,” companion piece to “The Aleph.” The zahir, which means “visible” in Arabic, is an object (a coin, but also a tiger, an astrolabe) that once seen cannot be forgotten. Quoting Tennyson’s line about the flower in the crannied wall, Borges says that “perhaps he meant that there is no event, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of effects and causes.” Then comes the celebrated Library of Babel, “which some call the Universe,” and that universe abridged into a single book of infinitely thin pages, mentioned in a note to the story and expanded in the late “Book of Sand.” The universal encyclopedia sought by the narrator in the long story “The Congress” is not impossible: it already exists and is the universe itself, like the map of the Nation of Cartographers (in Dreamtigers), which Lewis Carroll foresaw in Sylvie and Bruno and which, in Borges’s short fable, coincides with the country it sets out to map.