Cynthia Lucy Stephens’ The Borges Enigma:
Mini-Commentary

by Ralph Dumain

Stephens, Cynthia Lucy. The Borges Enigma: Mirrors, Doubles, and Intimate Puzzles. Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2021.

Stephens approaches Borges’ work unconventionally—as autobiography in disguise—taking a hint from Borges’ own remark that he is always writing about himself. We can always learn something from such exercises, assuming the interpretations aren’t too stretched, but in the end, do the personal provenances and allusions really matter in comparison to the objectively perceptible content? I am reminded of my irritation at the erstwhile obsession of interpreting celebrated ’60s pop songs as being about drugs. Why would that matter, even if the songs were written under the influence, if the songs are related to something much more important and universal upon examination? Hence I am not inspired by the author’s project.

I have devoted concentrated attention to three Borges stories:

On “The Congress” by Jorge Luis Borges: Observations and Questions

On “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges: Observations and Questions

On “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges

Of these, Stephens has nothing to say about “The Congress.” About “The Aleph” she offers these two passages:

‘El Aleph’ is about infinity, humiliation, and the love for a dead woman, confessed or concealed through allusions and other strategies.

And:

Humberto Núñez-Faraco writes about a ‘Poetics of Falsehood’ in ‘El Aleph’; and Borges’s hidden confessions, and emotions veiled from the sight of the reader. [77] He thinks that Borges may have written ‘El Aleph’ ‘in order to expurgate his troubled emotions surrounding his relationship with Estela Canto. He notes the words the Borges character uses in that story: ‘Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre, soy yo, soy Borges.’ (Dear Beatriz, Beatriz lost for ever, it’s me, I am Borges.) And he compares them with the words used in Borges’s essay on Dante and also in his letter to Estela Canto. The emotions of the real man, his inner confessions, are hidden in amongst a complex mesh of literary allusions and concealment strategies. As Núñez-Faraco writes: ‘As is often the case in Borges’s narrative, the author of “El Aleph” veils his emotions from the sight of the reader. It is as if writing constitutes an attempt to expose the self to an inner truth, an exercise that necessarily requires concealment.’ As Núñez-Faraco writes, ‘It is a frequent habit of Borges to confront his identity and thought under the guise of other writers or fictional characters’.

Compare this to my logical analysis of the story. Note in particular my maps of the covert logical relationships of Borges’ stories. They are original with me, and I don’t see anything like them in other commentaries.

Of the many stories substantively analyzed in the book, there is only one that I analyze at length: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. Here you see my logic diagram with commentary on the logic of the content.

This is not to say that personae, motives and references do not enter into these stories, but that doesn’t mean that that is what they’re essentially about.

The concluding chapter yields capsule analyses of the works discussed in the book. Among them:

“Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” is a tale in which Pierre Menard’s invisible work involves rewriting Cervantes’s classic. It can be thought of as a metaphor for jokey literary piracy. But Menard does not possess a single draft of his invisible work; he says he did not merely transcribe or copy Cervantes; yet should we believe him? Much of Menard’s ‘visible’ work is involved with dialectical matters, in which philosophical and literary ideas do battle – ideas about poetry, translations, and the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise; ideas that Borges also dramatized. All ideas are debated, including Cervantes’ Arms versus Letters dispute, in which the superiority of the sword was pitted against the pen. Four explanations are given for the fact that Menard’s Don Quixote is in favour of arms; the fourth is that owing to his modesty, or through resignation or irony, he contradicts himself and expresses ideas the exact opposite of those he believes in. Menard is a clever liar, a trickster, and a philosophical plagiarist. We are told, though, that he has enriched the art of reading through deliberate anachronism, so we could read Homer’s Odyssey as though it were later than Virgil’s Aeneid. Like Menard, Borges was fond of contradiction, fond of borrowing textual fragments from other authors, and fond of literary hoaxes of various kinds. But as in this hoax he often highlights interesting aspects of literature in the process, in this case the fluctuating meanings of texts under the stresses of historical relativism; and the issue of authorial attribution, with its uneasy literary and ethical boundaries between translation, intertextuality, and plagiarism. The issue of authorial attribution also relates to the translation of Urne-Buriall by Biorges, that literary double; and also to the topic of the Universal Author in ‘El inmortal’, a story with many other authors’ texts woven into it. The duelling ideas under debate also relates to ‘El fin’ in which Borges appropriates the ending of another author’s work; and to many of Borges’s stories in which lettered culture and physical violence are pitted against each other. ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ is also amusing, like many of Borges’s bizarre plots; and not just paradoxical, but also parodic. I can almost see trickster Borges grinning from beyond the grave as he reads Delia Ungureanu’s revelations about a real graphologist called Dr Pierre Menard, in an article whose theme is plagiarism as a form of literary creation.

This strikes me as rather trivial.

The concluding chapter gives a recap:

Amongst the tales that have received new readings in this book are the following:

From Ficciones (Fictions):

‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius),

‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ (Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote),

‘Las ruinas circulares’ (The Circular Ruins),

‘Funes el memorioso’ (Funes the Memorious),

‘La forma de la espada’ (The Shape of the Sword),

‘La muerte y la brújula’ (Death and the Compass),

‘El fin’ (The End),

‘La secta del Fénix’ (Sect of the Phoenix),

‘El Sur’ (The South).

From El Aleph (The Aleph):

‘El inmortal’ (The Immortal),

‘Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva’ (Story of the Warrior and the Captive Woman),

‘Emma Zunz’ (Emma Zunz),

‘La otra muerte’ (The Other Death),

‘El Zahir’ (The Zahir).

From later collections:

‘El evangelio según Marcos’ (The Gospel according to Mark),

‘El otro’ (The Other),

‘Ulrica’ (Ulrica).

From his final collection:

‘La rosa de Paracelso’ (The Rose of Paracelsus),

‘La memoria de Shakespeare’ (Shakespeare’s Memory).

Selected from the bibliography:

Dapía, Silvia G., Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) (Electronic Book)

Griffin, Clive, ‘Philosophy and Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Kindle

Martín, Marina, ‘Borges via the Dialectics of Berkeley and Hume’, Variaciones Borges, 9 (2000), 147–62

Novillo-Corvalán, Patricia, Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Pub., 2011)

Novillo-Corvalán, Patricia, ‘Joyce’s and Borges’s Afterlives of Shakespeare’, Comparative Literature, 60 (2008) 207–27

9 August 2024, edited & uploaded 10 October 2024

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Study Materials on the Web

James Joyce: Special Topics: Bibliography, Links, Quotes