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

Heather Dubnick

continued . . .

Notes             

1. As Borges explains in his postscript to the story, the Hebrew letter itself has multiple functions, representing a number as well as a letter, and symbolizing the En Soph in Kabbalism (A Borges Reader 162).

2. In Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, such a relationship exists between the novel and Melquiades's parchments, which contain the entire history of the Buendía family, but the format, material, author and genre of the text have been altered. In a sense, these texts are positing an origin or point of genesis for themselves, a sort of Urtext, not unlike Cervantes's reference to Cid Hamete Benengali, author of the Quixote.

3. This is comparable to Funes's isolation in "Funes the Memorious."

4. It is interesting to note that, with the exception of the final relationship, all of the instances of the mise-en-abîme emerge in part from Borges's use of homonymy.

5. "The Zahir," a companion piece to "The Aleph," also takes its point of departure from the death of a beloved woman. Soon after the death of Clementina Villar, Borges happens upon a protean coin that constantly metamorphoses into other objects.

6. Allen S. Weiss provides an excellent explanation of the implications of anamorphosis in Mirrors to Infinity:

Euclid's eighth theorem of his Optics . . . establishes the fact that the principle according to which the pictorial representation of the relative size of objects must be determined is not the distance of the objects from the eye . . . but rather according to the measure of the angle of vision. This . . . implies the primacy of the spherical field of vision . . . the ambient space of the spectatorial position; it is a system of coherent deformation that implies . . . the originary form of lived vision itself. As Merleau-Ponty notes, every perspectival projection, after a certain degree of deformation, determines a reflexivity that returns to the spectator's point of view . . . Visibility implies vision, that is, the specific, though ever-changing, viewpoint of an equally specific body. But the narcissism of vision is not merely a function of the radical isolatability or individuality of the perceiving subject. Rather, it is determined by the manner in which vision itself is a mode of placing the body in the world . . . vision is the communal nexus of everybody's gaze. . . . Every painting created according to the axiomatic system of one-point linear perspective has a unique viewpoint from which it must be seenY.When we realize that any other viewing position creates a distorted view of the scene, that is, transforms the painting itself into a vast anamorphosis, we realize the extreme fragility of such representational systems. . . ." (Mirrors to Infinity 35-7) [see figs. 1, 2]

7. For an excellent account of the relationship between the theories of vision in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, see Jay, Downcast Eyes, chapters five and six.

8. McHale continues: ". . . in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . Aureliano, last of his line, reads the gypsy Melquíades's prophetic narrative of the destiny of the Buendías down to the very page on which the moment of his reading of this page is itself prefigured. The specter of infinite regress—Scheherezade beginning to tell her story—is forestalled, however, by the instantaneous destruction of the manuscript and its reader, which is simultaneously the end of the book One Hundred Years of Solitude" (Postmodern Fiction 123). Cien años de soledad is another interesting example of the textual phenomena I am discussing.

9. This last idea is not unlike the creation of the imaginary land of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

10. Although the mise en abîme creates a crisis by undermining representation, it is also a means of moving beyond the limitations of representation. In his discussion of Gide's Faux-monnayeurs, Lucien Dällenbach notes that the mise en abîme structure in Gide's novel allows him to theorize the "« roman pur »", which is impossible to write, within a possible form (Le récit spéculaire 48). The existence of the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs creates a mise en abîme, and "une ambiguïté qui, sur le plan romanesque, s'avère payante":

i.   . . . En dehors de l'alibi qu'il lui donne, Édouard permet à Gide de mener double jeu. S'avançant sous son masque, il lui est loisible de théoriser en feignant de n'accorder aucun crédit à ses théories, de laisser entre voir la genèse de l'oeuvre en suggérant qu'elle est autre, d'intégrer à son livre une critique positive ou négative selon au'Édouard en est le sujet ou l'objet; enfin de résoudre lui-même le conflit entre « roman pur » et flux de la vie, en adoptant « la seule solution esthétique qui fût possible : verser dans l'impur roman qu'on écrit la théorie d'un roman pur qu'il est impossible d'écrire ».

ii. On voit donc que la mise en abyme, malgré les acrobaties et les passages à la limite qu'elle autorisait, était loin, pour Gide, de ne représenter qu'un instrument d'illusion propre à mystifier le lecteur . . . elle était seule à servir un thème qui n'avait cessé de commander en profondeur la pensée gidienne : accorder contingence et nécessité, vitalisme et symbolisme, réalité et idéal, vie et art. (49)                                 

For Gide, then, the mise-en-abîme allows for the creation of the "roman pur" by providing a way to interpolate theory and self-criticism into his own fiction. This is much the same strategy that Borges employs in the mises-en-abîme in his fictions.

11. These feelings are comparable to those Borges describes in "Sentirse en muerte" or "Feeling in Death," which he published as part of "A New Refutation of Time."

12. Julio Cortázar's "Continuity of Parks," in which the reader represented within the text is murdered by a character in the novel he is reading, provides another excellent example of this phenomenon.

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