Abstract
Drawing primarily on Borges’s essays on Buddhism written in the critical decade of the Fifties, this chapter sets up the Borgesian paradigm for Renunciation stories. Borges emphasizes their transcultural and transhistorical circulation—an idea that interfaces with his anti-nationalist aesthetics in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”—and suggests a theory of literature as “morphology” (a notion borrowed from Goethe): a potentially infinite number of poems and stories generated by transformation of a finite number of “archetypes”. Alongside this morphological conception of literature, the theme of apolitical withdrawal and the figure of Buddha as Renouncer also assume a heightened significance in the context of Argentina’s postwar political history.
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Notes
- 1.
The Maker, CF 307.
- 2.
Fictions, CF 110.
- 3.
“A mere handful of arguments have haunted me all these years; I am decidedly monotonous” (Foreword to Brodie’s Report, CF 346).
- 4.
Waisman 237 traces the complicated editorial history of the essay to argue for its centrality to Borges’s aesthetics.
- 5.
On Borges’s early writings in French and English, see Berveiller 75 and Williamson (2004: 59). On the bilingualism of the Borges household, see Rodríguez Monegal 15. Other discussions of Borges’s cosmopolitan background and universalist views of literature include Sarlo 1–10, Balderston (1998: 37–48), Siskind (2007: 75–92), among others.
- 6.
The ‘camel paradox’ which Borges found in Gibbon, is based on a factual error: I. Almond (2004: 441).
- 7.
“Buddhism”, SN 58–75, QB, Borges et al. (2005, 2011).
- 8.
Especially “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths”, The Aleph (CF 263–264), “Parable of the Palace”, The Maker (CF 317–318), “The Mirror and the Mask”, The Book of Sand (CF 451–454). The renunciation story’s links to the parable is discussed in Chapter 4.
- 9.
The essay was initially published in La Nación, 8 June 1952, then included in Otras inquisiciones, and later selected by Borges for the Personal Anthology in 1961: SNF 543 Note.
- 10.
The Christian version, “Saints Barlaam and Josaphat”, can be found in The Golden Legend (Voragine 741–752). For a comprehensive study of the appropriation of the Buddha legend into Islam and Christianity, see Lopez and McCracken.
- 11.
Corroborating Borges’s larger point about the story’s circulation throughout world literature, the legend also entered the Islamic sphere in the form of the eighth century Sufi saint Ibrahim Ibn Adham: Younes 87–99.
- 12.
“El príncipe feliz”, El País, Buenos Aires, 25 June 1910. The translation was mistakenly attributed to his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges: Borges (1970: 211). Wilde’s story is discussed in Chapter 2.
- 13.
“The Dialogues of Ascetic and King”, SNF 383.
- 14.
This is repeated in the late parable “The Mirror and the Mask”: see Chapter 3.
- 15.
Goethe (1995: 76).
- 16.
Goethe revealed his discovery of the Urpflanze in a letter to Johann Gottfried Herder in 1787, during his Italian journey which was the major catalyst for his scientific intuition: “With this model and the key to it an infinite number of additional plants can be invented”. He later postulated an analogous animal archetype in his 1795 “Outline for a General Introduction to a Comparative Anatomy” (Goethe 1995: xx).
- 17.
In his Preface to On Morphology, Goethe acknowledged moving analogically from botany to anatomy: “In the process I was soon obliged to postulate a prototype against which all mammals could be compared as to points of agreement or divergence. As I had earlier sought out the archetypal plant I now aspired to find the archetypal animal; in essence, the concept or idea of the animal” (Goethe 1995: 69). In his conversations with Herder, who was at the time writing his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Goethe also envisioned applying the morphological model to human history. A fragment of Studies for a Physiology of Plants sketches out a parallel between nature and art: “Example of a city as the work of man. Example of the metamorphosis of insects as the work of nature” (Goethe 1995: 75).
- 18.
On the revival of Goethean morphology in Germany in the 1920s, and its subsequent appropriation (and distortion) by various historians and literary critics, see Neubauer (1988: 263) and especially (1998: 223–226).
- 19.
“Oswald Spengler”, SNF 170. Spengler’s morphological view of history is also alluded to in “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”: investigating Fergus Kilpatrick’s death, his biographer Ryan, struck by the parallels with Caesar’s story, is reminded of “the morphologies proposed by Hegel, Spengler and Vico” (CF 144). A later essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne further corroborates this view, remembering Schopenhauer’s kaleidoscope metaphor for history, where infinite configurations of events result from a finite number of glass pieces (OC 2: 57), see Introduction.
- 20.
A discussion of Jolles’s “simple forms” can be found in Scholes 42–50. A revised edition of Jolles’s book appeared in 1956, contemporary with Borges’s essays.
- 21.
Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature, which cautioned against transdisciplinary distortions of biological models, is also contemporary with Borges’s essays (see Neubauer 1998: 228, Note 19).
- 22.
In a 1796 handwritten note to the Morphology: quoted in Engelstein 28.
- 23.
The importance of the Goethe-Propp connection is discussed by yet another writer whose work Borges was certainly aware of, although he did not mention him in his essays: anthropologist Mircea Eliade . Writing in 1951 after a visit to the Palermo botanical garden, and recalling Goethe’s earlier and famous botanical epiphany in an Italian garden, Eliade acknowledges both the significance of Goethe’s morphology for Propp’s critical work and its relevance as a hermeneutic model not only for the natural world, but for spiritual creations as well, in particular for his own field: Spineto 370–372. On the correspondences between Borges’s archetypal theory of narrative and Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, see Christ 33–34 and 217.
- 24.
Quoted in Toporov 255.
- 25.
“The images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet… poets are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them” (Shklovsky 7). Sturrock (212–213) stresses the role of Eikhenbaum’s serial narrative principle. Despite similar conceptions of poetry as re-elaboration and disposition of images, Alazraki (1990: 104) argues against a direct influence of the Russian Formalists on Borges, because their writings would be translated only after the war, when Victor Erlich and Roman Jakobson introduced them to American scholars. What is certain, however, is that later literary critics, in particular Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette , would bring together the ideas of the Russian Formalists and those of Borges, ensuring a key place for Borges in the history of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. On hypertextuality as “open Structuralism” and Borges’s place in this configuration, see Genette (1997: ix and 251–254).
- 26.
“Ello no significa, naturalmente, que se haya agotado el número de metáforas; los modos de indicar, o insinuar estas secretas simpatías de los conceptos resultan, de hecho, ilimitados” (“La metáfora”, Historia de la eternidad, OC 2: 384). One of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures that Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967–1968, “The Metaphor”, expanded and illustrated the same idea: Borges (2000: 21–41).
- 27.
“A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)”, CF 212.
- 28.
Translation mine. In the original: “Cuatro son las historias. Durante el tiempo que nos queda seguiremos narrándolas, transformadas” (OC 2: 506). The same idea is emphasized in Borges’s interview with Jacques Chancel: “I do not write, I rewrite… We are all the heirs of millions of scribes who have already written down all that is essential a long time before us. We are all copyists, and all the stories have already been told. There are no longer any original ideas” (Chancel 1999: 74; quoted in Kristal 2002: 135).
- 29.
Borges’s theories are “never fixed, never final, always fluid and always susceptible to further alterations”: Flynn 23.
- 30.
On this key aspect of Borges’s aesthetic, see in particular Lafon, Alazraki (1990) and Regazzoni (1999: 555–564). More recently, cognitive approaches to narratology seem to offer new and productive ways of revisiting Borges’s archetypal theories, see Conclusion, p. 135.
- 31.
The similarity with Auerbach’s manifesto “Philology and Weltliteratur”, published a year later (1952) is also striking: “Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation” (Auerbach 73).
- 32.
George Steiner, however, stresses the breadth and reach of Goethe’s Weltliteratur, noting that Goethe translated for over 73 years, from 18 languages, and although in some cases the translations were secondary, “nevertheless, the range of linguistic-literary awareness and active involvement is formidable” (Steiner 261). For a more recent reappraisal of Weltliteratur’s global reach, see Pizer 25–28.
- 33.
Strich 33–34. Strich’s book, which Borges may very well have read, was published directly after the war, and has strong symbolic resonances with Goethe’s own historical situation. Honoring the founder of Weltliteratur after the defeat of Nazi Germany made a compelling universalist statement in favor of cultural tolerance and diversity: Steiner 268.
- 34.
Aizenberg (48–50), Woodall (185–186) and Sarlo (26–28) all contextualize that essay within the contemporary debate between Borges and nationalist critics.
- 35.
Berman 88.
- 36.
Goethe (1986: 207).
- 37.
Strich 21. Berman (104–109) stresses Goethe’s innovative and fundamental conception of translation as regeneration. Borges too praised translations of his own works enthusiastically.
- 38.
Although Damrosch’s focus is on Goethe’s Weltliteratur , while Borges is only mentioned briefly on two occasions (Damrosch 2003: 97, 262).
- 39.
Goethe (1986: 227 and 226) respectively. On Goethe’s involvement with the cultural networks of his time, translations and the press, see Damrosch 1–14 and Guillén 145–146.
- 40.
Kristal (2002: 39–41).
- 41.
Goethe (1986: 228).
- 42.
According to John Gearey, the ultimate purpose of Goethe’s Weltliteratur is social and political (“Postscript”, Goethe 1986: 240). Pizer also points to the desire for peace as “a core motivating factor” for Goethe’s Weltliteratur (21).
- 43.
Borges shares this skeptical view with Auerbach, for whom contemporary Weltliteratur is “less practical, less political”, and no longer aims at “spiritual exchange between peoples” or “the reconciliation of races” (Auerbach 2012: 68).
- 44.
On Borges’s interest in Judaism as a paradigm for Argentine postcolonial cultural identity, see Aizenberg’s seminal analysis, especially vii–viii and 3–53.
- 45.
Deleuze and Guattari (1975). On the concept of minor literature applied to Borges, see De Toro 68–110, Waisman 132 and Jullien (2007: 205–223).
- 46.
On Borges’s “absolute antihistoricism” in connection to Buddhism, see Paoli 184. This, of course, is an important difference between Borges’s and Goethe’s conceptions of world literature, since Goethe understood Weltliteratur as an essentially contemporary phenomenon linked to the emergence of a world market for the trade of spiritual as well as material goods: Berman 90–91. More on Borges’s a-historicism in Chapter 2.
- 47.
In an early essay, “La nadería de la personalidad” (first published in Proa in 1922 and later included in Inquisiciones, translated as “The Nothingness of Personality” and included in SNF 3), Borges used the word to substantiate an absence, as if to suggest an equivalence between “everything” and “nothing”—not coincidentally, the title of another famous text (“Everything and Nothing”), which immediately follows “Parábola del palacio” in El Hacedor (OC 2: 181).
- 48.
- 49.
Christ 283.
- 50.
In addition to chronological indifference, the table of contents also juxtaposes stories, essays and poems without regard for generic taxonomies: parables about authorial dispossession (“The Maker”, “Everything and Nothing”) are positioned next to the essay on Shakespeare “From Someone to No One”, for instance.
- 51.
First published in Sur, nos. 192–194, 1950, but not reprinted since nor included in the Obras completas: see the Note, SNF 542.
- 52.
The late lecture on Buddhism (SN 58–75) covers many of the same points but also goes deeper into questions of doctrine. Both this lecture and the conversation with C. Parodi and I. Almeida (2005: 101–124) commend Buddhism as a religion that does not require an act of faith in its story or its character, since the historical individuality of Buddha is irrelevant, even illusory.
- 53.
On the interface of Buddhism with literary creation, see San Francisco, especially 148–151.
- 54.
See in particular “El espejo de los enigmas”, OC 2: 98–100.
- 55.
Balderston (1987: 77).
- 56.
A highly critical review of Finnegans Wake appeared in 1939: “El último libro de Joyce” (OC 4: 535). Vincent Message (3–18) interprets “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths”, which was written directly after this negative review, as a metaphor for the contrast between the laborious Joycean labyrinth and the minimalist Borgesian labyrinth.
- 57.
Williamson (2004: ix).
- 58.
SP 149.
- 59.
On haiku, see Kodama (1986: 170–181).
- 60.
On “The Immortal” as an allegory of literary creation, see Christ 207–246 and Jullien (1995: 136–159).
- 61.
Similarly, “Averroes’ Search”, also from The Aleph, claims impersonality and universality on behalf of poetry: “The image that only a single man can shape is the image that interests no man” (CF 240).
- 62.
Slavuski 11, quoted in Williamson (2004: 459).
- 63.
Given as a lecture in Buenos Aires’s Teatro Coliseo on 6 July 1977: OCP 2: 1384–1385.
- 64.
On this excruciating process, see Williamson’s remarkable analysis, “Deconstructing the Nation” (Williamson 2004: 452–467), which gives a more nuanced view of Borges’s political evolution than Alazraki (1988: 187).
- 65.
Williamson (2004: 322) interprets “Dialogues of Ascetic and King” in terms of Borges’s opposition to Perón. Also see Williamson (2007: 288–294) for an intersecting reading of the essay and the story “The End” in the context of Borges’s opposition to Perón.
- 66.
Like his father before him, Borges had always had poor eyesight, and it had been steadily deteriorating in the early fifties. On the 1954 accident that precipitated a state of near-total blindness, see Williamson (2004: 324).
- 67.
Quoted in Williamson (2004: ix, xxii, etc.). Naturally, autobiography here is not to be taken in any confessional sense, but rather as an ironic construct about the paradoxes of authorship, as a parable such as “Borges and I” (CF 124) demonstrates.
- 68.
SP 95.
- 69.
“The Library of Babel”, CF 112.
- 70.
Suzanne Jill Levine refers to Borges’s “multiple and contradictory personae: the agnostic priest of literature, the ascetic homo ludens, the blind seer, the intellectual mystic, and perhaps ultimately, the soul-seeking skeptic” (Borges et al. 2010: xix). A recent trend of criticism focuses on Borges’s spirituality and mysticism: see in particular Flynn (2009), who privileges the Christian perspective in Borges’s final years, and Bossart (2003), who, in a final section, highlights the Buddhist dimension of Borges’s spiritual trajectory.
- 71.
“Alguien” imagines the origin of the 1001 Nights : OC 3: 171.
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Jullien, D. (2019). A Borgesian Morphology: Renunciation, Morphology, and World Literature. In: Borges, Buddhism and World Literature. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04717-7_1
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