Shadow Plays

To scrawl a brief plot in the ruins of a mask factory. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon"

A Double Mistrust

Borges, unlike Plotinus, did not mind sitting for his portrait. Perhaps he could barely make out the blurred features of that other image that was his own. Perhaps he was unaware of them; or perhaps he considered that dwelling on the disjecta membra that made up his image was, like the detailed descriptions he condemned in certain authors, an aesthetic mistake. Perhaps, in order to see himself in that fixed visage, he accepted the possibility of inverting the terms of the epilogue to Dreamtigers: instead of discovering that the patient labyrinth of lines that he had traced coincided with his one and only face, he might discover that his face, which he could only see reflected in the mirror, was an image, the starting point of a careful narrative strategy.

"It is enough to be forced to drag around this simulacrum in which nature has imprisoned me. Should I further consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?" (OI 60). Borges consents to a portrait of Borges, but he knows, like Plotinus whom he quotes with special emphasis, that, at the very moment it is fixed, such a portrait becomes a reflection. It is the simulacrum of a perpetually moving entity, an ineffective emblem, a coin whose sides never entirely coincide; it is a yearning for a face or a sign that dissolves the moment someone attempts to inscribe it.

Borges's text works assiduously against fixed images, monstrous images that have been classified, images that are monstrous because they have been classified. As such, they do not differ from the pieces that, for Borges, make up "the terrible, immobile museum of Platonic archetypes" (HE 16). Borges's text tries to ignore that fixity—which, because of its imperfection, merely emphasizes the illusion of all classification—and at the same time it hints at the possibility of movement behind the rigidity of simulacra. Indeed, the same terrible, immobile forms are seen as "vivid, powerful and organic" (HE 9) in a second reading of Plato. Summoned and discarded in texts, decried by Borges and at the same time courted by him, so certain is he of the tension that energizes it, the simulacrum, for Borges, may be a metaphor, a character, a plot, literature, an author. It also may be Borges, it also may be the self: "My life is a flight, and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other" (L 247).

A double mistrust upholds the nowhere of the Borges corpus. A mistrust of immobility (the fixed simulacrum, the mask replacing the living face), it is also mistrust of movement, of the mobile face that only becomes a mask when named. Early in his work, Borges manifests skepticism before that illusory duality, that occlusive duplicity marking the starting point of so many of his stories: "These shifts of identity (as distressing as a masquerade, in which one is not quite certain who is who) omit the real name—presuming there is such a thing as a real name" (UHI 53).

Literature, as conceived and put into practice by Borges, does not differ from that game of plural faces and plural masks. Superimposed texts taint the narratives in which they are inserted; simple words, revitalized in new sequences, seem to question each other. Like those faces and masks, they both harmonize and diverge, in a deliberate, fecund juxtaposition. When discussing the Thousand and One Nights, Borges recognizes in Scheherazade's tales the same duplicity, the same uncertainty, the same playful possibility of exchange and dialogue, that he attributes to the play between a face and its questionable replica. He observes that in the telling of the Thousand and One Nights, "the antechambers blend with the mirrors; the mask is beneath the face; no longer does anyone know which is the real man and which are his idols" (HE 133).

Borges's work is grounded on that mistrust, on that uncertainty. It is a fecund mistrust of the arbitrary, apparently fixed sign, and its reverse, the no less arbitrary and equally fixed metaphor; a mistrust of the elusive face and its wavering mask—the terms are reversible. The confusion of these partial illusions, so clearly intended and adopted by Borges, has nevertheless baffled critics. Thus, for example, the charges of insubstantiality—that is, of lack of "reality"—brought against his fiction: his stories fall short because they lack something. Borges is criticized because "he constructs stories in which ghosts inhabiting geometric spaces or libraries or labyrinths live and suffer in word only." The comment is of course sound since any fiction, any world, any character in a narrative exists in word only. It is intended, however, as a reproach. The absence of realistic mimesis baffles critics; the impossibility of linking a vague extratextual reality with a fixed personal element, a round character that would root that reality in the written letter making it "come alive," causes irritation, an irritation far removed from the fruitful irritation that Borges's work generally propounds.

"A Detailed Web of Theories to Validate the Task" (I 32)

The most detailed weaving of theories concerning character in Borges, and no doubt the most didactic, may be found in the essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne. Borges suggests that Hawthorne "first imagined, perhaps unwittingly, a situation, and then sought the characters to embody it" (OI 53). Such a method, adds Borges, "can produce, or tolerate, admirable stories because their brevity makes the plot more visible than the actors" (OI 53).

Borges uses Hawthorne's "Wakefield" as an example. Let us suppose, as Borges does, that Hawthorne's starting point is indeed a narrative situation: a man leaves home to play a trick on his wife and, once outside, is incapable of returning. The organization of events, the situation that is the story, as read by Borges, is more important than the man Wakefield, an insignificant, disposable character, a "nincompoop" in Hawthorne's words. Like Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames, Wakefield is the ideally empty, somewhat obtuse character, embodying a narrative situation in order to exist. Yet in his telling of the story, Borges significantly alters Hawthorne's Wakefield; tempted by the author's rhetorical question—"What kind of a man is Wakefield? ... We have complete freedom to shape out the idea we have of him and give him the name of Wake-field"—he reshapes the character. Paring down Hawthorne's loquacious, heavily didactic "shaping out" of Wakefield, Borges reduces the character to a sentence but then adds other details that do not appear in the story. In a word, he reshapes Wakefield as he reads him:

[A] calm man, timidly vain, selfish, given to childish mysteries and the keeping of insignificant secrets; a dispassionate man of great imaginative and mental prowess, but capable of long, idle, leisurely, inconclusive, and vague meditations. (0I...