Bodying Forth the Impossible: Metamorphosis, Mortality and Aesthetics in the
Works of Jorge Luis Borges

Heather Dubnick

continued . . .

Borges sets himself an impossible task in "The Aleph," attempting to capture in writing the impossible vision given to him by the Aleph. Before beginning, Borges provides a disclaimer:

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. . . . All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? . . . Really what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. (A Borges Reader 160-61)

Language fails at this instant because Borges has seen what no one else has seen—a lack of shared vision renders the Aleph ineffable. The Aleph presents a paradox, permitting Borges to see all things from all perspectives at all times, but isolating him in this totalizing vision that he cannot share. [3] Borges's experience cannot be represented precisely because it encompasses and transcends all human experience. His transcription will be an imperfect, second-degree rendering of something fundamentally indescribable. Unable to transcribe what he saw, Borges attempts nonetheless to communicate the sensation he experienced by creating a mise-en-abîme structure within the text of "The Aleph" and by appealing to sensation as the common language that remains beyond the transgression of boundaries enabling language and perspective.

Borges remarks upon the impossibility of registering simultaneity within a language based upon succession. He bypasses this problem by creating the impression of having represented everything that he saw in the Aleph. Borges often subverts the concepts against which he is arguing by hyperbolizing them. Beatriz Sarlo has suggested that the story "Funes the Memorious" is "[a] conte philosophique on literary theory . . . a parable dealing with the possibilities and impossibilities of representation. Funes is not a paradox but a hyperbolic image of the devastating effects of an absolute and naive realism which trusts the 'natural' force of perceptions and events" (31). Similarly, through a combination of selective enumeration, mise-en-abîme, and chiasmic tropes, Borges produces within his short story a parable for literature itself. The Aleph both concretizes the mise-en-abîme structure and acts as a metaphor and/or symbol for representation itself. The entire story mimics what it cannot describe, weaving together various configurations which, like the innumerable fragmentary mirrors within the Aleph, reiterate the same idea on various levels. The Aleph is not merely an object within the story, but also the story itself and the story of storytelling.

"The Aleph" contains many different mise-en-abîmes that together form the story as mise-en-abîme structure: (1) the title of the story (and the collection containing the story) is the name of the object; (2) the Aleph is a complete microcosm of the universe that contains it, and that it in turn contains; (3) Borges claims that he saw the world within the Aleph and the Aleph within the world; (4) within the Aleph, Borges see innumerable mirrors that are themselves fragmentary analogies for the Aleph; (5) "The Aleph" is a metaphor for the very problem of writing that Borges elucidates before beginning his description of the Aleph (as object); (6) another character, Carlos Argentino Daneri, uses the Aleph to write a poem entitled The Earth, in which he proposes to describe the entire planet. [4]

Borges owes his knowledge of the Aleph to Daneri, the cousin of Borges's beloved and recently deceased Beatriz Viterbo. The story itself begins with Beatriz's death:

On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died . . . I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realized that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first in an endless series. . . . (154-55) [5]

Borges goes to Beatriz's house pay his respects, and there encounters Daneri; Borges repeats this pilgrimage every year. Many years after Beatriz's death, Daneri telephones Borges unexpectedly. Quite upset by the impending demolition of his house, Daneri complains that "to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points, . . . the only place on earth where all places are seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending" (159). Despite doubts about Daneri's sanity, Borges returns to the house on Garay Street and, following Daneri's instructions, descends into the cellar and sees the Aleph.

Whereas for Daneri the Aleph is a means to an end, an instrument with which to view and then to transcribe the world into his poem The Earth, Borges focuses instead on describing the Aleph and (re)creating its effect by cataloguing some of the objects he sees within it. The Aleph hyperbolizes representation and its limits. The Aleph is not, as Daneri believes, merely an apparatus through to obtain a view of the world in its entirety; it raises serious epistemological and representational questions. Daneri's exploitation of the Aleph and Borges's attempt to describe it differ in that for Daneri the Aleph is merely a medium for representing the world, while for Borges the Aleph, like language, is a world in its own right, worthy of attention and description.

In his account, Borges writes that "[e]ach thing . . . was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe" (161). Borges's catalogue of what he saw in the Aleph begins with broad, allusive gestures, evoking that which he cannot actually enumerate. He thus he begins by listing "the teeming sea . . . daybreak and nightfall . . . the multitudes of America . . . a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid . . . a splintered labyrinth (it was London) . . . unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror . . . all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me . . . " (161). Borges alludes to the powers of the Aleph through images of infinite eyes and mirrors, objects which, like the Aleph itself, duplicate and multiply images. This first moment in the enumeration, where a mise-en-abîme structure seems to emerge, is doubled towards the end of the list, where the enumeration begins to alternate between macrocosmic and microcosmic, infinite and infinitesimal images. Borges zooms in on elements of the story framing the Aleph, until finally his references gesture outwards, towards the reader:

. . . I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino . . . I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon-the unimaginable universe. (161)

These final images are not merely impossible, but transgressive, even obscene. Here the vertiginous moment is triggered not only by an object (the Aleph and all of the objects that it contains), but also by Beatriz's corpse and by the "obscene letters" that insinuate an incestuous relationship between Beatriz and her cousin Daneri. The entire enumeration transgresses the boundaries of the visible and the intelligible: Borges sees Beatriz's rotting remains; he sees not only his own reflection, but his internal anatomy and physiological processes; ultimately he sees the reader. He claims to have seen the reader's face, writing "I felt dizzy and wept." His vision of the reader is the ultimate transgression, crossing the boundary between fiction and reality, breaking down language and giving way to the sensations and emotions that remain.

The ultimate moment of reflection, when Borges writes "I saw your face," implicates the reader into text and transforms the text into a mirror. This implication of the reader within the text is not uncommon in Borges. In "The Library of Babel," for example, Borges asks, "You who read me-are you certain you understand my language?" (Collected Fictions 118). In "The Aleph," however, Borges specifically invokes the figure of the reader, the image of his face as he reads. This chiasmic moment not only transgresses boundaries between the world of the text and the world of the reader; it also implies a contemporaneity, a presence and presentness of the reader with the moment at which Borges looks through the Aleph, even though the narrative itself is in the past tense.

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