Abstract
In his preface to the short story collection Doctor Brodie’s Report (1970), Jorge Luis Borges remarks: “I want to make it quite clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a preacher of parables or a fabulist and is now known as a committed writer. I do not aspire to be Aesop.” Borges denies here a moralistic or didactic dimension to his writing—a position which remains consistent throughout his writing and seems to be intimately linked with his view of poetic inspiration as an irrational event and of himself as a “dreamweaver.” At the same time, he remarks that in his works he has been able to achieve a “modest and secret complexity.” y aim in this essay is to unravel one of the dreamweaver’s yarns, the short story “Emma Zunz” from the collection The Aleph (1949), and to present the narrative and ethical foundations of the “modest and secret complexity” of which Borges speaks.
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Notes
- 1.
Jorge Luis Borges, Doctor Brodie’s Report, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972, pp. 9–10. (Borges 1972).
- 2.
“La modesta y secreta complejidad”, in: Jorge Luis Borges, Obras Completas, vol. II, Barcelona: Emecé Editores, 1996, p. 236; hereafter abbreviated OC. (Borges 1996).
- 3.
Monegal Rodriguez Emir, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography, New York: Dutton, 1978, p. 138. (Emir 1978).
- 4.
Compare to Wittgenstein’s notion of “perspicuous representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung—literally, “overview representation,” lucid representation from an elevated vantage point, as if from a mountaintop).
- 5.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishers, 2009, Part II, sections xi–xiv. (Wittgenstein 2009).
- 6.
See Julio Woscoboinik, The Secret of Borges, trans. D. C. Pozzi, New York: University Press of America, 1998, p. 106. (Woscoboinik 1998).
- 7.
All passages from “Emma Zunz” are quoted from Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, New York: Penguin, 1999. (Borges 1999).
- 8.
In his afterword to The Aleph, Borges acknowledges by way of negation the story’s realism: “Aside from ‘Emma Zunz’…and ‘Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden’ (which attempts to interpret two supposedly real occurrences), the stories in this book belong to the genre of fantasy” (Collected Fictions, p. 287). (Borges 1999).
- 9.
On Plato’s view of mimetic art as a mirror of reality, see the Republic, 596c–597a.
- 10.
Republished in 1960 in the collection El Hacedor (“The Maker”); English translation in J. L. Borges, Dreamtigers, trans. M. Boyer and H. Morland, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 90. (Borges 1964).
- 11.
J. L. Borges, Other Inquisitions, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968, p. 137. (Borges 1968).
- 12.
On the interpretive debate whether “simple objects” are metaphysical or theoretical, see Eli Friedlander, Signs of Sense, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 167–175. (Friedlander 2001).
- 13.
For more on the weird concept of superposition in quantum mechanics and the associated theoretical problems (e.g., the Copenhagen interpretation and “Schrödinger’s cat” experiment), see Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. (Feynman 1985).
- 14.
In her preface to the Hebrew translation of Philosophical Investigations, Edna Ulmann-Margalit writes: “As for the section titled ‘Part II’ in the work’s English-language editions, there is no external evidence that Wittgenstein intended to include this part in the book, nor is there internal evidence requiring such inclusion. The decision to include Part II was made by the editors of the English edition, Anscombe and Rhees.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Edna Ulmann-Margalit, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997, p. 10. (Wittgenstein 1997).
- 15.
On aspect concepts and aspect-seeing in the larger context of Wittgenstein’s later thought, see William Day and V. J. Krebs (eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Day and Krebs 2010).
- 16.
See N. K. Verbin, “Religious Beliefs and Aspect Seeing,” Religious Studies 36 (2000), pp. 1–23 (Verbin 2000); David B. Seligman, “Wittgenstein on Seeing Aspects and Experiencing Meaning,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37:2 (1976), pp. 205–217 (Seligman 1976); Joachim Schulte, “‘The Life of the Sign’: Wittgenstein on Reading a Poem,” in John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (eds.), The Literary Wittgenstein, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 146–165 (Schulte 2004); Gilead Bar-Elli, “Wittgenstein on the Experience of Meaning and the Meaning of Music,” Philosophical Investigations 29:3 (2006), pp. 217–249 (Bar-Elli 2006).
- 17.
The Wittgensteinian concept of “seeing as” is employed, for example, in Menachem Brinker’s essay “Theme and Interpretation,” in Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy and Thomas G. Pavel (eds.), Thematics: New Approaches, New York: SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 33–44. (Brinker 1995).
- 18.
On p. 212, however, Wittgenstein seems to view aspect change as a perceptual state—as a way of seeing, not of thinking: “Do I really see something different each time, or do I only interpret what I see in a different way? I am inclined to say the former. But why?—To interpret is to think, to do something, seeing is a state.”
- 19.
- 20.
In the section quoted above (6.41), Wittgenstein uses the term “value.” However, in a letter to the editor of Der Brenner, he clarifies that the Tractatus is “mainly concerned with ethics” (“Letters to Ludwig von Ficker,” in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979, pp. 94–95) (Wittgenstein 1979). This implies that when Wittgenstein speaks of “value,” he mainly refers to ethical value. For more on Wittgenstein’s concept of value, see Chap. 1 of Eric B. Litwack, Wittgenstein and Values: The Quest for Meaning, London: Continuum, 2009. (Litwack 2009).
- 21.
For a critical discussion of the fact/value dichotomy in Wittgenstein, see G. E. M. Anscombe, Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, London: Hutchinson University Library, 1959 (Anscombe 1959).
- 22.
Wittgenstein clarifies his view of ethics as transcendent in a 1929 passage: “What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. P. Winch, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977, p. 3. (Wittgenstein 1977).
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review (74) 1965, pp. 3–12, at p. 6. (Wittgenstein 1965).
- 25.
“Lecture on Ethics”, p. 6. (Wittgenstein 1965).
- 26.
In this section of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein describes linguistic propositions as reflecting the logical form of the world itself.
- 27.
For more on the interpretive controversy on this topic, see Friedlander, Signs of Sense, pp. 167–74. (Friedlander 2001).
- 28.
Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York: Horizon Press, 1967. (Engelmann 1967).
- 29.
Shlomy Mualem, “The Imminence of Revelation: Aesthetics and Poetic Expression in Early Wittgenstein and Jorge Luis Borges,” Variaciones Borges, 18, October 2004, pp. 197–217. (Mualem 2004).
- 30.
Engelmann, Letters from Wittgenstein, p. 7. (Engelmann 1967).
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Mualem, S. (2017). Narrative Aspect Change and Alternating Systems of Justice: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Borges. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_5
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