Abstract
Fernández aims to show how this enigmatic phrase in the famous first sentence of “The Circular Ruins” is inextricably linked to the story’s last words. Toward this purpose, he argues—against plausible foundational interpretations of the story—for a nonfoundational reading of the text and, moreover, that Borges’s use of ‘unánime’ (one soul) can be understood as one character or one form; namely, as an archetype of “Dreamanity” that leads to a vertiginous Third Man regress.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Hulme and Gordon Brotherston touch on the notorious difficulties translators have faced with the phrase “unánime noche,” or “unanimous night.” The authors understand the phrase as “an effective if slightly forced metaphor” and as “perfectly comprehensible”; however, they do not explain why the metaphor is so effective and comprehensible. My task here is to fill in these gaps. See “A partial history of traduction: Borges in English,” in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, ed. Elinor Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2: 325.
- 2.
See Ronald Christ, Alexander Coleman, and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, “Borges at NYU,” in Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, ed. Richard Burgin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 123.
- 3.
This is the ancient Greek concept of xenia. See Aeschylus, “The Libation Bearers,” in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 208.
- 4.
Henry James, “The Writer Makes the Reader,” in Theory of Fiction, ed., James E. Miller, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972): “In every novel the work is divided between the writer and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters. When he makes him ill, that is, indifferent, he does no work; the writer does all. When he makes him interested, then the reader does quite the labour” (321).
- 5.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part 1, trans. Peter Salm (New York: Bantam, 1985), 54. The most direct translation of Goethe’s message in these lines is given by the inimitable Jaroslav Pelikan: “What you have as heritage, now take as task, for thus you will make it your own.” See Jaroslav Pelikan, Faust the Theologian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 28.
- 6.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 158.
- 7.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), xv. Foucault is jolted by the irrationally exuberant extensional memberships categorized in the so-called Chinese Encyclopedia. See “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000 [1964]), 103.
- 8.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 81.
- 9.
John Updike, “The Author as Librarian,” in The New Yorker 41 (October 30, 1965): 223.
- 10.
Aristotle, “Poetics,” in The Basic Work of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 15–35.
- 11.
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 9.
- 12.
Foucault , The Order of Things: “That passage from Borges kept me laughing a long time, though not without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off” (xvii).
- 13.
Carter Wheelock, “Borges’ New Prose,” in Jorge Luis Borges: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 106.
- 14.
Ibid., my italics.
- 15.
Aristotle’s references to the Third Man Argument (TMA) can be found in scattered and underdeveloped forms in “Metaphysics” in The Basic Work of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 990b17, 1039a2, 1059b8, and 1079a13. For a comprehensive treatment of the TMA, see Gail Fine’s notable monograph On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
- 16.
Plato, Parmenides in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper, trans. Lombardo and Bell (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), [131e-132b], 365–66.
- 17.
Borges, “Note on Whitman,” in Other Inquisitions, 71, n 3.
- 18.
“Avatars of the Tortoise,” in Other Inquisitions, 110–11.
- 19.
Borges, “Death and the Compass,” in Collected Fictions. The title’s reference to a “compass” is a play on ambiguity, and conveys a double entendre: on the one hand, it refers to the compass-and-straightedge style of geometrical reason which dooms the protagonist; on the other hand, it is an instrument used as a tool for navigation (brújula), with a 360° circular design. Borges uses these dual aspects to emphasize the hazards of the former and the labyrinthian implications of the latter.
- 20.
“Death and the Compass,” 148.
- 21.
Ibid., 155.
- 22.
This is why Aristotle writes that there can be no science of the accidental. See “Metaphysics” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 1026b–1027a20.
- 23.
Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 81.
- 24.
Borges, “Chess,” in Jorge Luis Borges: A Personal Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 76.
- 25.
See Donald Yates, “A Colloquy with Jorge Luis Borges,” in Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations: “When you are reading a book, if you don’t find your way inside it, then everything is useless” (162).
- 26.
See Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1967–1968 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2.
- 27.
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, [1949]), 15–16.
- 28.
Paul de Man writes that fiction is degraded if readers need to refer it to “a reality from which it has forever taken leave.” See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 17.
- 29.
“The Circular Ruins,” in Collected Fictions, 96–100.
- 30.
Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His Work (London: Continuum Books, 2003), 179.
- 31.
“The Circular Ruins,” 96, my italics. That the mysterious man descended from an “infinite” village already suggests a regressive series.
- 32.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1990), 136.
- 33.
See “An Interview with Jorge Luis Borges,” in Philosophy and Literature 1, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 339: “I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes.”
- 34.
Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere,” in Other Inquisitions, 6.
- 35.
Borges, “Deutsches Requiem,” in Collected Fictions, 233.
- 36.
Borges, “Borges and I,” in Collected Fictions, 324.
- 37.
See “An Interview with Jorge Luis Borges,” Philosophy and Literature 1, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 339.
- 38.
“The Circular Ruins,” 97.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Plato, Theaetetus in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 150b–151.
- 41.
See Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 1: 20–24.
- 42.
“The Circular Ruins,” 97.
- 43.
Ibid., 99.
- 44.
Ibid., 100.
- 45.
See George R. McMurray, Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 68.
- 46.
See Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fictions: A Guide to His Mind and Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 56.
- 47.
See Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 121.
- 48.
Julio Cortázar, “The Night Face Up,” in Blow-Up and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).
- 49.
“The Night Face Up,” 67.
- 50.
Ibid., 66.
- 51.
Ibid., 69.
- 52.
Ibid., 76.
- 53.
John Stark, The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov, Barth (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974).
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Fernández, J.L. (2018). Borges and the Third Man: Toward an Interpretation of ‘Unánime noche’ in “The Circular Ruins”. In: García-Osuna, A. (eds) Borges, Language and Reality. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95912-2_2
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