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

Heather Dubnick

continued . . .

Anamorphosis, "The Aleph" and the Chiasm

The Aleph's ability to render visible all things from all points recalls Lacan's concept of anamorphosis. Like anamorphosis, [6] the Aleph reveals the distortions inherent in any given perspective and calls attention to the corporeality of the spectator. Both anamorphosis and the Aleph reveal the limitations of perspective indirectly. Anamorphosis displays the distortion and limitation of one-point perspective by concealing an object and revealing it only from an oblique vantage point [figs.1, 2]. The very impossibility and unrepresentability of the Aleph, as well as impossibility of what Borges sees, suggests the limits of human vision. Moreover, both anamorphosis and the Aleph invoke the corporeality of the spectator, albeit in different ways. Anamorphosis demands that the spectator situate his body at a particular angle in order to see the image; the Aleph permits Borges to see "the circulation of [his] own dark blood" (A Borges Reader 161) and, on another level, to see the reader's face.

In "The Intertwining—The Chiasm," Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes a breakdown of the boundaries between "seer" and "seen" similar to that which occurs in "The Aleph":

The seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself that he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. (The Visible and the Invisible 139)

Merleau-Ponty invokes painting in order to describe this chiasmic moment resulting from the dissolution of an inside and an outside, of subject and object. In his description of anamorphosis, Jacques Lacan borrows and revises Merleau-Ponty's account, [7] describing a confrontation with a specific painting, Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors [fig. 3]. The term anamorphosis "refers to a drawing or painting which is so executed as to give a distorted image of the object represented but which, if viewed from a certain point or reflected in a curved mirror, shows the object in true proportion" (The Oxford Companion to Art 43). Lacan describes the phenomenon as "the appearance of the phallic ghost"(88):

In The Ambassadors . . . [w]hat is this strange, suspended, oblique object in the foreground in front of these two figures? . . . Between them is a series of objects that represent in the painting of the period the symbols of vanitas . . . these objects are all symbolic of the sciences and arts as they were grouped at the time in the trivium and quadrivium. . . . All this shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated. . . . But it is further still that we must seek the function of vision. We shall then see emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function, as it is in this picture.

This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear. (88-89)

Both Lacan and Merleau-Ponty describe a chiasmic moment of confrontation between the subject and the object of the gaze; the subject of the gaze is reflected within its object and captured by it. Both passages figure reflection as a trap or something that captures that which it reflects. For Lacan, the anamorphic skull represents the gaze, which is otherwise invisible. In other words, the gaze must be refigured metonymically in order to appear within the picture. This "ghost" functions doubly; not only does it "make . . . visible" the invisible gaze, but as an image of a skull it alludes to mortality. Death is the ultimate reminder of the limits of intelligibility. The image of the phantom mirrors the spectator, but in his or her future state. The painting sets a "trap for the gaze" both by representing the gaze, and by surprising and humbling the spectator.

The image of the skull in The Ambassadors emerges surreptitiously within the context of that which it challenges and negates: the notion of humanitas, as represented by "a series of objects that represent in the painting of the period the symbols of vanitas." Holbein's painting itself attempts to represent and confront what Merleau-Ponty calls the "fundamental narcissism of all vision." Within the painting, represented objects shift from symbolizing accomplishment to forewarning mortality. The jolting emergence of the skull within the scene of The Ambassadors provokes an instant of surprised humiliation in the spectator as he suddenly confronts his own mortality along with the vanity of human existence and endeavor.

In "The Aleph" a similarly chiasmic moment occurs as the subject suddenly senses his objectification and the undermining of his subjectivity. As Borges noted in "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote," the blurring of boundaries between subject and object within a text can give rise to a sensation of the chiasmic within the reader or spectator. The chiasmic structure created by the mise-en-abîme within the text suggests another chiasmic structure on another level. Yet this further chiasmus requires the reader or spectator to be drawn into the text, albeit figuratively; the reader or spectator must sense that the representation encompasses his world.

Borges exploits this device in order to call into question the status of the reader, after having already undermined his own authority and subjectivity by representing himself as narrator within the text. Borges as narrator expresses his own ontological disorientation within the text; his vision of the Aleph provokes within him a sensation and an emotional response similar to those in "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote." The insinuation of the reader within the text with the statement "I saw your face" provokes the same ontological crisis in that reader, leading him or her to question whether he or she might also be "fictitious" (235). With respect to "[t]he connection between the awareness of fictionality and awareness of death," Brian McHale comments that,

. . . a character's knowledge of his own fictionality often functions as a kind of master-trope for determinism—cultural, historical, psychological determinism, but especially the inevitability of death. . . . being the puppet of playwright and director is a metaphor for being the puppet of fate, history, the human condition. (Postmodern Fiction 123) [8]

The physical and emotional responses that Borges describes in "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote" and attempts to provoke in his readers may ultimately result from the implications of death insinuated by the confrontation of a character or reader with the possibility of his or her fictitiousness. This confrontation occurs not only in "The Aleph," but in many of Borges's other stories as well.

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