The Theologians



After having razed the garden and profaned the chalices and altars, the
Huns entered the monastery library on horseback and trampled the
incomprehensible books and vituperated and burned them, perhaps fearful
that the letters concealed blasphemies against their god, which was an iron
scimitar. Palimpsests and codices were consumed, but in the heart of the
fire, amid the ashes, there remained almost intact the twelfth book of the
Civitas Dei, which relates how in Athens Plato taught that, at the centuries'
end, all things will recover their previous state and he in Athens, before the
same audience, will teach this same doctrine anew. The text pardoned by the
flames enjoyed special veneration and those who read and reread it in that
remote province came to forget that the author had only stated this doctrine
in order better to refute it. A century later, Aurelian, coadjutor of Aquileia,
learned that on the shores of the Danube the very recent sect of the
Monotones (called also the Annulars) professed that history is a circle and
that there is nothing which has not been and will not be. In the mountains,
the Wheel and the Serpent had displaced the Cross. All were afraid, but all
were comforted by the rumor that John of Pannonia, who had distinguished
himself with a treatise on the seventh attribute of God, was going to impugn
such an abominable heresy.

Aurelian deplored this news, particularly the latter part. He knew that
in questions of theology there is no novelty without risk; then he reflected
that the thesis of a circular time was too different, too astounding, for the
risk to be serious. (The heresies we should fear are those which can be
confused with orthodoxy.) John of Pannonia's intervention—his intrusion—
pained him more. Two years before, with his verbose De septima affectione
Dei sive de aeternitate, he had usurped a topic in Aurelian's speciality; now,
as if the problem of time belonged to him, he was going to rectify the
Annulars, perhaps with Procrustean arguments, with theriacas more fearful
than the Serpent. . . That night, Aurelian turned the pages of Plutarch's
ancient dialogue on the cessation of the oracles; in the twenty-ninth
paragraph he read a satire against the Stoics, who defend an infinite cycle
of worlds, with infinite suns, moons, Apollos, Dianas and Poseidons. The
discovery seemed to him a favorable omen; he resolved to anticipate John of
Pannonia and refute the heretics of the Wheel.

There are those who seek a woman's love in order to forget her, to
think no more of her; Aurelian, in a similar fashion, wanted to surpass John
of Pannonia in order to be rid of the resentment he inspired in him, not in
order to harm him. Tempered by mere diligence, by the fabrication of
syllogisms and the invention of insults, by the negos and autems and
nequaquams, he managed to forget that rancor. He erected vast and almost
inextricable periods encumbered with parentheses, in which negligence and
solecism seemed as forms of scorn. He made an instrument of cacophony.
He foresaw that John would fulminate the Annulars with prophetic gravity;
so as not to coincide with him, he chose mockery as his weapon. Augustine
had written that Jesus is the straight path that saves us from the circular
labyrinth followed by the impious; these Aurelian, laboriously trivial,
compared with Ixion, with the liver of Prometheus, with Sisyphus, with the
king of Thebes who saw two suns, with stuttering, with parrots, with
mirrors, with echoes, with the mules of a noria and with two-horned
syllogisms. (Here the heathen fables survived, relegated to the status of
adornments.) Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he
was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety; this controversy enabled him to
fulfill his obligations with many books which seemed to reproach him for
his neglect. Thus he was able to insert a passage from Origen's work De
principiis, where it is denied that Judas Iscariot will again betray the Lord
and that Paul will again witness Stephen's martyrdom in Jerusalem, and
another from Cicero's Academica priora, where the author scoffs at those
who imagine that, while he converses with Lucullus, other Luculluses and
Ciceros in infinite number say precisely the same thing in an infinite number
of equal worlds. In addition, he wielded against the Monotones the text from
Plutarch and denounced the scandalousness of an idolater's valuing the
lumen naturae more than they did the word of God. The writing took him
nine days; on the tenth, he was sent a transcript of John of Pannonia's
refutation.

It was almost derisively brief; Aurelian looked at it with disdain and
then with fear. The first part was a gloss on the end verses of the ninth
chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where it is said that Jesus was not
sacrificed many times since the beginning of the world, but now, once, in the
consummation of the centuries. The second part adduced the biblical precept
concerning the vain repetitions of the pagans (Matthew 6:7) and the passage
from the seventh book of Pliny which ponders that in the wide universe
there are no two faces alike. John of Pannonia declared that neither are there
two like souls and that the vilest sinner is as precious as the blood Jesus shed
for him. One man's act (he affirmed) is worth more than the nine concentric
heavens and imagining that this act can be lost and return again is a
pompous frivolity. Time does not remake what we lose; eternity saves it for
heaven and also for hell. The treatise was limpid, universal; it seemed not to
have been written by a concrete person, but by any man or, perhaps, by all
men.

Aurelian felt an almost physical humiliation. He thought of destroying
or reforming his own work; then, with resentful integrity, he sent it to Rome
without modifying a letter. Months later, when the council of Pergamum
convened, the theologian entrusted with impugning the Monotones' errors
was (predictably) John of Pannonia; his learned and measured refutation was
sufficient to have Euphorbus the heresiarch condemned to the stake. "This
has happened and will happen again," said Euphorbus. "You are not lighting
a pyre, you are lighting a labyrinth of flames. If all the fires I have been
were gathered together here, they would not fit on earth and the angels
would be blinded. I have said this many times." Then he cried out, because
the flames had reached him.

The Wheel fell before the Cross,20 but Aurelian and John of Pannonia
continued their secret battle. Both served in the same army, coveted the
same guerdon, warred against the same Enemy, but Aurelian did not write
a word which secretly did not strive to surpass John. Their duel was an
invisible one; if the copious indices do not deceive me, the name of the
other does not figure once in the many volumes by Aurelian preserved in
Migne's Patrology. (Of John's works only twenty words have survived.)
Both condemned the anathemas of the second council of Constantinople;
both persecuted the Arrianists, who denied the eternal generation of the Son;
both testified to the othodoxy of Cosmas' Topographia Christiana, which
teaches that the earth is quadrangular, like the Hebrew tabernacle. Un-
fortunately, to the four corners of the earth another tempestuous heresy
spread. Originating in Egypt or in Asia (for the testimonies differ and
Bousset will not admit Harnack's reasoning), it infested the eastern
provinces and erected sanctuaries in Macedonia, in Carthage and in Treves.
It seemed to be everywhere; it was said that in the diocese of Britannia the
crucifixes had been inverted and that in Caesarea the image of the Lord had
been replaced by a mirror. The mirror and the obolus were the new
schismatics' emblems.

-----------------------------------------------------------
20 In the Runic crosses the two contrary emblems coexist entwined.
----------------------------------------------------------

History knows them by many names (Speculars, Abysmals, Cainites),
but the most common of all is Histriones, a name Aurelian gave them and
which they insolently adopted. In Frigia they were called Simulacra, and
also in Dardania. John of Damascus called them Forms; it is well to note that
the passage has been rejected by Erfjord. There is no heresiologist who does
not relate with stupor their wild customs. Many Histriones professed
asceticism; some mutilated themselves, as did Origen; others lived
underground in the sewers; others tore out their eyes; others (the
Nabucodonosors of Nitria) "grazed like oxen and their hair grew like an
eagle's." They often went from mortification and severity to crime; some
communities tolerated thievery; others, homicide; others, sodomy, incest and
bestiality. All were blasphemous; they cursed not only the Christian God but
also the arcane divinities of their own pantheon. They contrived sacred
books whose disappearance is lamented by scholars. In the year 1658, Sir
Thomas Browne wrote: "Time has annihilated the ambitious Histrionic
gospels, not the Insults with which their Impiety was fustigated": Erfjord has
suggested that these "insults" (preserved in a Greek codex) are the lost
gospels. This is incomprehensible if we do not know the Histriones'
cosmology.

In the hermetic books it is written that what is down below is equal to
what is on high, and what is on high is equal to what is down below; in the
Zohar, that the higher world is a reflection of the lower. The Histriones
founded their doctrine on a perversion of this idea. They invoked Matthew
6:12 ("and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors") and 11:12 ("the
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence") to demonstrate that the earth
influences heaven, and I Corinthians 13:12 ("for now we see through a
glass, darkly") to demonstrate that everything we see is false. Perhaps
contaminated by the Monotones, they imagined that all men are two men
and that the real one is the other, the one in heaven. They also imagined that
our acts project an inverted reflection, in such a way that if we are awake,
the other sleeps, if we fornicate, the other is chaste, if we steal, the other is
generous. When we die, we shall join this other and be him. (Some echo of
these doctrines persisted in Léon Bloy.) Other Histriones reasoned that the
world would end when the number of its possibilities was exhausted; since
there can be no repetitions, the righteous should eliminate (commit) the most
infamous acts, so that these will not soil the future and will hasten the
coming of the kingdom of Jesus. This article was negated by other sects,
who held that the history of the world should be fulfilled in every man.
Most, like Pythagoras, will have to transmigrate through many bodies before
attaining their liberation; some, the Proteans, "in the period of one lifetime
are lions, dragons, boars, water and a tree." Demosthenes tells how the
initiates into the Orphic mysteries were submitted to purification with mud;
the Proteans, analogously, sought purification through evil. They knew, as
did Carpocrates, that no one will be released from prison until he has paid
the last obolus (Luke 12:59) and used to deceive penitents with this other
verse: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly" (John 10:10). They also said that not to be evil is a satanic
arrogance. . . Many and divergent mythologies were devised by the
Histriones; some preached asceticism, others licentiousness. All preached
confusion. Theopompus, a Histrione of Berenice, denied all fables; he said
that every man is an organ put forth by the divinity in order to perceive the
world.

The heretics of Aurelian's diocese were of those who affirmed that time
does not tolerate repetitions, not of those who affirmed that every act is
reflected in heaven. This circumstance was strange; in a report to the
authorities in Rome, Aurelian mentioned it. The prelate who was to receive
the report was the empress' confessor; everyone knew that this demanding
post kept him from the intimate delights of speculative theology. His
secretary—a former collaborator of John of Pannonia, now hostile to him—
enjoyed fame as a punctual inquisitor of heterodoxies; Aurelian added an
exposition of the Histrionic heresy, just as it was found in the conventicles
of Genua and of Aquileia. He composed a few paragraphs; when he tried to
write the atrocious thesis that there are no two moments alike, his pen
halted. He could not find the necessary formula; the admonitions of this new
doctrine ("Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at
the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the
bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the
earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.") were much too
affected and metaphorical to be transcribed. Suddenly, a sentence of twenty
words came to his mind. He wrote it down, joyfully; immediately afterwards,
he was troubled by the suspicion that it was the work of another.

The following day, he remembered that he had read it many years before in
the Adversus annulares composed by John of Pannonia. He verified the
quotation; there it was. He was tormented by incertitude. If he changed or
suppressed those words he would weaken the expression; if he left them he
would be plagiarizing a man he abhorred; if he indicated their source, he
would be denouncing him. He implored divine assistance. Towards the
beginning of the second twilight, his guardian angel dictated to him an
intermediate solution. Aurelian kept the words, but preceded them with this
notice: "What the heresiarchs now bark in confusion of the faith was said in
our realm by a most learned man, with more frivolity than guilt." Then the
dreaded, hoped for, inevitable thing happened. Aurelian had to declare who
the man was; John of Pannonia was accused of professing heretical opinions.

Four months later, a blacksmith of Aventinus, deluded by the Histriones'
deceptions, placed a huge iron sphere on the shoulders of his small
son, so that his double might fly. The boy died; the horror engendered
by this crime obliged John's judges to assume an unexceptionable severity.
He would not retract; he repeated that if he negated his proposition he would
fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotones. He did not understand (did
not want to understand) that to speak of the Monotones was to speak of the
already forgotten. With somewhat senile insistence, he abundantly gave
forth with the most brilliant periods of his former polemics; the judges did
not even hear what had once enraptured them. Instead of trying to cleanse
himself of the slightest blemish of Histrionism, he strove to demonstrate that
the proposition of which he was accused was rigorously orthodox. He
argued with the men on whose judgment his fate depended and committed
the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of
October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was
sentenced to die at the stake.

Aurelian witnessed the execution, for refusing to do so meant con-
fessing his own guilt. The place for the ceremony was a hill, on whose
green top there was a pole driven deep into the ground, surrounded by many
bundles of wood. A bailiff read the tribunal's sentence. Under the noonday
sun, John of Pannonia lay with his face in the dust, howling like an animal.
He clawed the ground but the executioners pulled him away, stripped him
naked and finally tied him to the stake. On his head they placed a straw
crown dipped in sulphur; at his side, a copy of the pestilential Adversus
annulares. It had rained the night before and the wood burned badly. John
of Pannonia prayed in Greek and then in an unknown language. The fire was
about to engulf him when Aurelian finally dared to raise his eyes. The bursts
of flame halted; Aurelian saw for the first and last time the face of the hated
heretic. It reminded him of someone, but he could not remember who. Then
he was lost in the flames; then he cried out and it was as if a fire had cried
out. Plutarch has related that Julius Caesar wept for the death of Pompey;
Aurelian did not weep for the death of John, but he felt what a man would
feel when rid of an incurable disease that had become a part of his life. In
Aquileia, in Ephesus, in Macedonia, he let the years pass over him. He
sought the arduous limits of the Empire, the torpid swamps and
contemplative deserts, so that solitude might help him understand his
destiny. In a cell in Mauretania, in a night laden with lions, he reconsidered
the complex accusation brought against John of Pannonia and justified, for
the nth time, the sentence. It was much more difficult to justify his own
tortuous denunciation. In Rusaddir he preached the anachronistic sermon
"Light of lights burning in the flesh of a reprobate." In Hibernia, in one of
the hovels of a monastery surrounded by the forest, he was startled one night
towards dawn by the sound of rain. He remembered a night in Rome when
that minute noise had also startled him. At midday, a lightning bolt set fire to
the trees and Aurelian died just as John had.

The end of this story can only be related in metaphors since it takes
place in the kingdom of heaven, where there is no time. Perhaps it would
be correct to say that Aurelian spoke with God and that He was so little
interested in religious differences that He took him for John of Pannonia.
This, however, would imply a confusion in the divine mind. It is more
correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable
divinity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the
abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single
person.

Translated by J.E.I.



Emma Zunz



Returning home from the Tarbuch and Loewenthal textile mills on the
14th of January, 1922, Emma Zunz discovered in the rear of the
entrance hall a letter, posted in Brazil, which informed her that her father
had died. The stamp and the envelope deceived her at first; then the
unfamiliar handwriting made her uneasy. Nine or ten lines tried to fill up
the page; Emma read that Mr. Maier had taken by mistake a large dose of
veronal and had died on the third of the month in the hospital of Bagé. A
boarding-house friend of her father had signed the letter, some Fein or Fain
from Río Grande, with no way of knowing that he was addressing the
deceased's daughter.

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in
her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness,
of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately
afterward she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her
father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on
happening endlessly. She picked up the piece of paper and went to her room.
Furtively, she hid it in a drawer, as if somehow she already knew the ulterior
facts. She had already begun to suspect them, perhaps; she had already
become the person she would be.

In the growing darkness, Emma wept until the end of that day for the
suicide of Manuel Maier, who in the old happy days was Emmanuel Zunz.
She remembered summer vacations at a little farm near Gualeguay, she
remembered (tried to remember) her mother, she remembered the little
house at Lanús which had been auctioned off, she remembered the yellow
lozenges of a window, she remembered the warrant for arrest, the ignominy,
she remembered the poison-pen letters with the newspaper's account of "the
cashier's embezzlement," she remembered (but this she never forgot) that
her father, on the last night, had sworn to her that the thief was Loewenthal.
Loewenthal, Aaron Loewenthal, formerly the manager of the factory and
now one of the owners. Since 1916 Emma had guarded the secret. She had
revealed it to no one, not even to her best friend, Elsa Urstein. Perhaps she
was shunning profane incredulity; perhaps she believed that the secret was a
link between herself and the absent parent. Loewenthal did not know that
she knew; Emma Zunz derived from this slight fact a feeling of power.

She did not sleep that night and when the first light of dawn defined
the rectangle of the window, her plan was already perfected. She tried to
make the day, which seemed interminable to her, like any other. At the
factory there were rumors of a strike. Emma declared herself, as usual,
against all violence. At six o'clock, with work over, she went with Elsa to
a women's club that had a gymnasium and a swimming pool. They signed
their names; she had to repeat and spell out her first and her last name,
she had to respond to the vulgar jokes that accompanied the medical
examination. With Elsa and with the youngest of the Kronfuss girls she
discussed what movie they would go to Sunday afternoon. Then they talked
about boyfriends and no one expected Emma to speak. In April she would be
nineteen years old, but men inspired in her, still, an almost pathological fear.
. . Having returned home, she prepared a tapioca soup and a few vegetables,
ate early, went to bed and forced herself to sleep. In this way, laborious and
trivial, Friday the fifteenth, the day before, elapsed.

Impatience awoke her on Saturday. Impatience it was, not uneasiness,
and the special relief of it being that day at last. No longer did she have
to plan and imagine; within a few hours the simplicity of the facts would
suffice. She read in La Prensa that the Nordstjärnan, out of Malmö, would
sail that evening from Pier 3. She phoned Loewenthal, insinuated that she
wanted to confide in him, without the other girls knowing, something
pertaining to the strike; and she promised to stop by at his office at nightfall.
Her voice trembled; the tremor was suitable to an informer. Nothing else of
note happened that morning. Emma worked until twelve o'clock and then
settled with Elsa and Perla Kronfuss the details of their Sunday stroll. She
lay down after lunch and reviewed, with her eyes closed, the plan she had
devised. She thought that the final step would be less horrible than the first
and that it would doubtlessly afford her the taste of victory and justice.
Suddenly, alarmed, she got up and ran to the dresser drawer. She opened it;
beneath the picture of Milton Sills, where she had left it the night before,
was Fain's letter. No one could have seen it; she began to read it and tore it
up.

To relate with some reality the events of that afternoon would be
difficult and perhaps unrighteous. One attribute of a hellish experience is
unreality, an attribute that seems to allay its terrors and which aggravates
them perhaps. How could one make credible an action which was scarcely
believed in by the person who executed it, how to recover that brief chaos
which today the memory of Emma Zunz repudiates and confuses? Emma
lived in Almagro, on Liniers Street: we are certain that in the afternoon she
went down to the waterfront. Perhaps on the infamous Paseo de Julio she
saw herself multiplied in mirrors, revealed by lights and denuded by hungry
eyes, but it is more reasonable to suppose that at first she wandered,
unnoticed, through the indifferent portico. . . She entered two or three bars,
noted the routine or technique of the other women. Finally she came across
men from the Nordstjärnan. One of them, very young, she feared might
inspire some tenderness in her and she chose instead another, perhaps
shorter than she and coarse, in order that the purity of the horror might not
be mitigated. The man led her to a door, then to a murky entrance hall and
afterwards to a narrow stairway and then a vestibule (in which there was a
window with lozenges identical to those in the house at Lanús) and then to a
passageway and then to a door which was closed behind her. The arduous
events are outside of time, either because the immediate past is as if dis-
connected from the future, or because the parts which form these events
do not seem to be consecutive.

During that time outside of time, in that perplexing disorder of discon-
nected and atrocious sensations, did Emma Zunz think once about the
dead man who motivated the sacrifice? It is my belief that she did think
once, and in that moment she endangered her desperate undertaking. She
thought (she was unable not to think) that her father had done to her mother
the hideous thing that was being done to her now. She thought of it with
weak amazement and took refuge, quickly, in vertigo. The man, a Swede or
Finn, did not speak Spanish. He was a tool for Emma, as she was for him,
but she served him for pleasure whereas he served her for justice.
When she was alone, Emma did not open her eyes immediately. On the
little night table was the money that the man had left: Emma sat up and
tore it to pieces as before she had torn the letter. Tearing money is an
impiety, like throwing away bread; Emma repented the moment after she did
it. An act of pride and on that day. . . Her fear was lost in the grief of her
body, in her disgust. The grief and the nausea were chaining her, but Emma
got up slowly and proceeded to dress herself. In the room there were no
longer any bright colors; the last light of dusk was weakening. Emma was
able to leave without anyone seeing her; at the corner she got on a Lacroze
streetcar heading west. She selected, in keeping with her plan, the seat
farthest toward the front, so that her face would not be seen. Perhaps it
comforted her to verify in the insipid movement along the streets that
what had happened had not contaminated things. She rode through the
diminishing opaque suburbs, seeing them and forgetting them at the same
instant, and got off on one of the side streets of Warnes. Paradoxically her
fatigue was turning out to be a strength, since it obligated her to concentrate
on the details of the adventure and concealed from her the background and
the objective.

Aaron Loewenthal was to all persons a serious man, to his intimate
friends a miser. He lived above the factory, alone. Situated in the barren
outskirts of the town, he feared thieves; in the patio of the factory there was
a large dog and in the drawer of his desk, everyone knew, a revolver. He had
mourned with gravity, the year before, the unexpected death of his wife—a
Gauss who had brought him a fine dowry—but money was his real passion.
With intimate embarrassment, he knew himself to be less apt at earning it
than at saving it. He was very religious; he believed he had a secret pact with
God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and
piety. Bald, fat, wearing the band of mourning, with smoked glasses and
blond beard, he was standing next to the window awaiting the confidential
report of worker Zunz.

He saw her push the iron gate (which he had left open for her) and
cross the gloomy patio. He saw her make a little detour when the chained
dog barked. Emma's lips were moving rapidly, like those of someone
praying in a low voice; weary, they were repeating the sentence which Mr.
Loewenthal would hear before dying.

Things did not happen as Emma Zunz had anticipated. Ever since the
morning before she had imagined herself wielding the firm revolver, forcing
the wretched creature to confess his wretched guilt and exposing the daring
stratagem which would permit the Justice of God to triumph over human
justice. (Not out of fear but because of being an instrument of Justice she
did not want to be punished.) Then, one single shot in the center of his
chest would seal Loewenthal's fate. But things did not happen that way.
In Aaron Loewenthal's presence, more than the urgency of avenging her
father, Emma felt the need of inflicting punishment for the outrage she
had suffered. She was unable not to kill him after that thorough dishonor.
Nor did she have time for theatrics. Seated, timid, she made excuses to
Loewenthal, she invoked (as a privilege of the informer) the obligation of
loyalty, uttered a few names, inferred others and broke off as if fear had
conquered her. She managed to have Loewenthal leave to get a glass of
water for her. When the former, unconvinced by such a fuss but indulgent,
returned from the dining room, Emma had already taken the heavy revolver
out of the drawer. She squeezed the trigger twice. The large body collapsed
as if the reports and the smoke had shattered it, the glass of water smashed,
the face looked at her with amazement and anger, the mouth of the face
swore at her in Spanish and Yiddish. The evil words did not slacken; Emma
had to fire again. In the patio the chained dog broke out barking, and a gush
of rude blood flowed from the obscene lips and soiled the beard and the
clothing. Emma began the accusation she had prepared ("I have avenged my
father and they will not be able to punish me. . ."), but she did not finish it,
because Mr. Loewenthal had already died. She never knew if he managed to
understand.

The straining barks reminded her that she could not, yet, rest. She
disarranged the divan, unbuttoned the dead man's jacket, took off the
bespattered glasses and left them on the filing cabinet. Then she picked up
the telephone and repeated what she would repeat so many times again, with
these and with other words: Something incredible has happened. . . Mr.
Loewenthal had me come over on the pretext of the strike. . . He abused me,
I killed him . . .

Actually, the story was incredible, but it impressed everyone because
substantially it was true. True was Emma Zunz' tone, true was her shame,
true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the
circumstances were false, the time, and one or two proper names.

Translated by D.A.Y.



The House of Asterion



And the queen gave birth to a child who was called Asterion.
Apollodorus: Bibliotheca, III, I


I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps of misanthropy, and
perhaps of madness. Such accusations (for which I shall extract punish-
ment in due time) are derisory. It is true that I never leave my house, but
it is also true that its doors (whose number is infinite)22 are open day and
night to men and to animals as well. Anyone may enter. He will find here no
female pomp nor gallant court formality, but he will find quiet and solitude.
And he will also find a house like no other on the face of the earth. (There
are those who declare there is a similar one in Egypt, but they lie.) Even my
detractors admit there is not one single piece of furniture in the house.
Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I
repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?
Besides, one afternoon I did step into the street; if I returned before night, I
did so because of the fear that the faces of the common people inspired in
me, faces as discolored and flat as the palm of one's hand. The sun had
already set, but the helpless crying of a child and the rude supplications of
the faithful told me I had been recognized. The people prayed, fled,
prostrated themselves; some climbed onto the stylobate of the temple of the
Axes, others gathered stones. One of them, I believe, hid himself beneath the
sea. Not for nothing was my mother a queen; I cannot be confused with the
populace, though my modesty might so desire.

The fact is that I am unique. I am not interested in what one man may
transmit to other men; like the philosopher, I think that nothing is
communicable by the art of writing. Bothersome and trivial details have no
place in my spirit, which is prepared for all that is vast and grand; I have
never retained the difference between one letter and another. A certain
generous impatience has not permitted that I learn to read. Sometimes I
deplore this, for the nights and days are long.

Of course, I am not without distractions. Like the ram about to charge, I
run through the stone galleries until I fall dizzy to the floor. I crouch in the
shadow of a pool or around a corner and pretend I am being followed. There
are roofs from which I let myself fall until I am bloody. At any time I can
pretend to be asleep, with my eyes closed and my breathing heavy.
(Sometimes I really sleep, sometimes the color of day has changed when I
open my eyes.) But of all the games, I prefer the one about the other
Asterion. I pretend that he comes to visit me and that I show him my house.
With great obeisance I say to him: Now we shall return to the first inter-
section or Now we shall come out into another courtyard or I knew you
would like the drain or Now you will see a pool that was filled with sand or
You will soon see how the cellar branches out. Sometimes I make a mistake
and the two of us laugh heartily.

------------------------------------------------------------------
22 The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion,
this numeral stands for infinite.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Not only have I imagined these games, I have also meditated on the
house. All the parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is
another place. There is no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger; the
mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, pools are fourteen (infinite) in
number. The house is the same size as the world; or rather, it is the world.
However, by dint of exhausting the courtyards with pools and dusty gray
stone galleries I have reached the street and seen the temple of the Axes and
the sea. I did not understand this until a night vision revealed to me that the
seas and temples are also fourteen (infinite) in number. Everything is
repeated many times, fourteen times, but two things in the world seem to be
only once: above, the intricate sun; below, Asterion. Perhaps I have created
the stars and the sun and this enormous house, but I no longer remember.
Every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them
from all evil. I hear their steps or their voices in the depths of the stone
galleries and I run joyfully to find them. The ceremony lasts a few minutes.
They fall one after another without my having to bloody my hands. They
remain where they fell and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from
another. I do not know who they are, but I know that one of them
prophesied, at the moment of his death, that some day my redeemer would
come. Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my
redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust. If my ear could
capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will
take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my
redeemer be like?, I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps
be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

The morning sun reverberated from the bronze sword. There was no
longer even a vestige of blood.

"Would you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus. "The Minotaur scarcely
defended himself."

For Marta Mosquera Eastman

Translated by J.E.I.



Deutsches Requiem

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.
Job 13:15



My name is Otto Dietrich zur Linde. One of my ancestors, Christoph
zur Linde, died in the cavalry charge which decided the victory of
Zorndorf. My maternal great-grandfather, Ulrich Forkel, was shot in the
forest of Marchenoir by franc-tireurs, late in the year 1870; my father,
Captain Dietrich zur Linde, distinguished himself in the siege of Namur in
1914, and, two years later, in the crossing of the Danube.23 As for me, I will
be executed as a torturer and murderer. The tribunal acted justly; from the
start I declared myself guilty. Tomorrow, when the prison clock strikes nine,
I will have entered into death's realm; it is natural that I think now of my
forebears, since I am so close to their shadow, since, after a fashion, I am
already my ancestors.

I kept silent during the trial, which fortunately was brief; to try to justify
myself at that time would have obstructed the verdict and would have
seemed an act of cowardice. Now things have changed; on the eve of the
execution I can speak without fear. I do not seek pardon, because I feel no
guilt; but I would like to be understood. Those who care to listen to me will
understand the history of Germany and the future history of the world. I
know that cases like mine, which are now exceptional and astonishing, will
shortly be commonplace. Tomorrow I will die, but I am a symbol of future
generations.

I was born in Marienburg in 1908. Two passions, which now are al-
most forgotten, allowed me to bear with valor and even happiness the
weight of many unhappy years: music and metaphysics. I cannot mention all
my benefactors, but there are two names which I may not omit, those of
Brahms and Schopenhauer. I also studied poetry; to these last I would add
another immense Germanic name, William Shakespeare. Formerly I was
interested in theology, but from this fantastic discipline (and from the
Christian faith) I was led away by Schopenhauer, with his direct arguments;
and by Shakespeare and Brahms, with the infinite variety of their worlds. He
who pauses in wonder, moved with tenderness and gratitude, before any
facet of the work of these auspicious creators, let him know that I also
paused there, I, the abominable.

------------------------------------------------------------------
23 lt is significant that the narrator has omitted the name of his most illustrious ancestor,
the theologian and Hebraist Johannes Forkel (1799-1846), who applied the Hegelian
dialectic to Christology, and whose literal version of several books of the Apocrypha
merited the censure of Hengstenberg and the approval of Thilo and Gesenius.
(Editor's note.)
------------------------------------------------------------------

Nietzsche and Spengler entered my life about 1927. An eighteenth
century author has observed that no one wants to owe anything to his
contemporaries. I, in order to free myself from an influence which I felt to
be oppressive, wrote an article titled Abrechnung mit Spengler, in which I
noted that the most unequivocal monument to those traits which the author
calls Faust-like is not the miscellaneous drama of Goethe24 but a poem
written twenty centuries ago, the De rerum natura. I paid homage, however,
to the sincerity of the philosopher of history, to his essentially German
(kerndeutsch) and military spirit. In 1929 I entered the Party.

I will say little of my years of apprenticeship. They were more diffi-
cult for me than for others, since, although I do not lack courage, I am
repelled by violence. I understood, however, that we were on the verge of
a new era, and that this era, comparable to the initial epochs of Islam and
Christianity, demanded a new kind of man. Individually my comrades were
disgusting to me; in vain did I try to reason that we had to suppress our
individuality for the lofty purpose which brought us together.

The theologians maintain that if God's attention were to wander for a
single second from the right hand which traces these words, that hand would
plunge into nothingness, as if fulminated by a lightless fire. No one, I say,
can exist, no one can taste a glass of water or break a piece of bread, without
justification. For each man that justification must be different; I awaited the
inexorable war that would prove our faith. It was enough for me to know
that I would be a soldier in its battles. At times I feared that English and
Russian cowardice would betray us. But chance, or destiny, decided my
future differently. On March first, 1939, at nightfall, there was a disturbance
in Tilsit which was not mentioned in the newspapers; in the street behind the
synagogue, my leg was pierced by two bullets and it was necessary to
amputate.25 A few days later our armies entered Bohemia. As the sirens
announced their entry, I was in a quiet hospital, trying to lose and forget
myself in Schopenhauer. An enormous and flaccid cat, symbol of my vain
destiny, was sleeping on the window sill.

------------------------------------------------------------------
24 Other nations live innocently, in themselves and for themselves, like minerals or
meteors; Germany is the universal mirror which receives all, the consciousness of the
world (das Weltbewusstsein). Goethe is the prototype of that ecumenic comprehension.
I do not censure him, but I do not see in him the Faust-like man of
Spengler's thesis.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
25 It has been rumored that the consequences of this wound were very serious. (Editor's
note.)
------------------------------------------------------------------

In the first volume of Parerga und Paralipomena I read again that ever-
ything which can happen to a man, from the instant of his birth until his
death, has been preordained by him. Thus, every negligence is deliberate,
every chance encounter an appointment, every humiliation a penitence,
every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more
skillful consolation than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes;
this individual teleology reveals a secret order and prodigiously confounds
us with the divinity. What unknown intention (I questioned vainly) made me
seek, that afternoon, those bullets and that mutilation? Surely not fear of
war, I knew; something more profound. Finally I hit upon it. To die for a
religion is easier than to live it absolutely; to battle in Ephesus against the
wild beasts is not so trying (thousands of obscure martyrs did it) as to be
Paul, servant of Jesus; one act is less than a man's entire life. War and glory
are facilities; more arduous than the undertaking of Napoleon was that of
Raskolnikov. On the seventh of February, 1941, I was named subdirector of
the concentration camp at Tarnowitz.

The carrying out of this task was not pleasant, but I was never negligent.
The coward proves his mettle under fire; the merciful, the pious, seeks
his trial in jails and in the suffering of others. Essentially, Nazism is an
act of morality, a purging of corrupted humanity, to dress him anew. This
transformation is common in battle, amidst the clamor of the captains and
the shouting; such is not the case in a wretched cell, where insidious
deceitful mercy tempts us with ancient tenderness. Not in vain do I pen this
word: for the superior man of Zarathustra, mercy is the greatest of sins. I
almost committed it (I confess) when they sent us the eminent poet David
Jerusalem from Breslau.

He was about fifty years old. Poor in the goods of this world, perse-
cuted, denied, vituperated, he had dedicated his genius to the praise of
Happiness. I recall that Albert Soergel, in his work Dichtung der Zeit,
compared him with Whitman. The comparison is not exact. Whitman cel-
ebrates the universe in a preliminary, abstract, almost indifferent manner;

Jerusalem takes joy in each thing, with a scrupulous and exact love. He
never falls into the error of enumerations and catalogues. I can still repeat
from memory many hexameters from that superb poem, Tse Yang, Painter
of Tigers, which is, as it were, streaked with tigers, overburdened and criss
crossed with transversal and silent tigers. Nor will I ever forget the soliloquy
called Rosencrantz Speaks with the Angel, in which a sixteenth-century
London moneylender vainly tries on his deathbed to vindicate his crimes,
without suspecting that the secret justification of his life is that of having
inspired in one of his clients (whom he has seen but once and does not
remember) the character of Shylock. A man of memorable eyes, jaundiced
complexion, with an almost black beard, David Jerusalem was the prototype
of the Sephardic Jew, although, in fact, he belonged to the depraved and
hated Ashkenazim. I was severe with him; I permitted neither my compas-
sion nor his glory to make me relent. I had come to understand many years
before that there is nothing on earth that does not contain the seed of a
possible Hell; a face, a word, a compass, a cigarette advertisement, are
capable of driving a person mad if he is unable to forget them. Would not a
man who continually imagined the map of Hungary be mad? I decided to
apply this principle to the disciplinary regimen of our camp, and. . .26 By the
end of 1942, Jerusalem had lost his reason; on March first, 1943, he
managed to kill himself.27

I do not know whether Jerusalem understood that, if I destroyed him,
it was to destroy my compassion. In my eyes he was not a man, not even a
Jew; he had been transformed into a detested zone of my soul. I agonized
with him, I died with him and somehow I was lost with him; therefore, I was
implacable.

Meanwhile we reveled in the great days and nights of a successful
war. In the very air we breathed there was a feeling not unlike love. Our
hearts beat with amazement and exaltation, as if we sensed the sea nearby.

------------------------------------------------------------------
26 It has been necessary to omit a few lines here. (Editor's note.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
27 We have been unable to find any reference to the name of Jerusalem, even in Soergel's
work. Nor is he mentioned in the histories of German literature. Nevertheless, I do not
believe that he is fictitious. Many Jewish intellectuals were tortured at Tarnowitz
under orders of Otto Dietrich zur Linde; among them, the pianist Emma Rosenzweig.
"David Jerusalem" is perhaps a symbol of several individuals. It is said that he died
March first, 1943; on March first, 1939, the narrator was wounded in Tilsit. (Editor's
note.)
------------------------------------------------------------------

Everything was new and different then, even the flavor of our dreams. (I,
perhaps, was never entirely happy. But it is known that misery requires lost
paradises.) Every man aspires to the fullness of life, that is, to the sum of
experiences which he is capable of enjoying; nor is there a man unafraid of
being cheated out of some part of his infinite patrimony. But it can be said
that my generation enjoyed the extremes of experience, because first we
were granted victory and later defeat.

In October or November of 1942 my brother Friedrich perished in the
second battle of El Alamein, on the Egyptian sands. Months later an aerial
bombardment destroyed our family's home; another, at the end of 1943,
destroyed my laboratory. The Third Reich was dying, harassed by vast
continents; it struggled alone against innumerable enemies. Then a singular
event occurred, which only now do I believe I understand. I thought I was
emptying the cup of anger, but in the dregs I encountered an unexpected
flavor, the mysterious and almost terrible flavor of happiness. I essayed
several explanations, but none seemed adequate. I thought: I am pleased
with defeat, because secretly I know I am guilty, and only punishment can
redeem me. I thought: I am pleased with the defeat because it is an end and I
am very tired. I thought: I am pleased with defeat because it has occurred,
because it is irrevocably united to all those events which are, which were,
and which will be, because to censure or to deplore a single real occurrence
is to blaspheme the universe. I played with these explanations, until I found
the true one.

It has been said that every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist.
This is the same as saying that every abstract contention has its counterpart
in the polemics of Aristotle or Plato; across the centuries and latitudes, the
names, faces and dialects change but not the eternal antagonists. The history
of nations also registers a secret continuity. Arminius, when he cut down the
legions of Varus in a marsh, did not realize that he was a precursor of the
German Empire; Luther, translator of the Bible, could not suspect that his
goal was to forge a people destined to destroy the Bible for all time;
Christoph zur Linde, killed by a Russian bullet in 1758, was in some way
preparing the victories of 1914; Hitler believed he was fighting for a nation
but he fought for all, even for those which he detested and attacked. It
matters not that his I was ignorant of this fact; his blood and his will were
aware of it. The world was dying of Judaism and from that sickness of
Judaism, the faith of Jesus; we taught it violence and the faith of the sword.
That sword is slaying us, and we are comparable to the wizard who
fashioned a labyrinth and was then doomed to wander in it to the end of his
days; or to David, who, judging an unknown man, condemns him to death,
only to hear the revelation: You are that man. Many things will have to be
destroyed in order to construct the New Order; now we know that Germany
also was one of those things. We have given more than our lives, we have
sacrificed the destiny of our beloved Fatherland. Let others curse and weep;
I rejoice in the fact that our destiny completes its circle and is perfect.

An inexorable epoch is spreading over the world. We forged it, we
who are already its victim. What matters if England is the hammer and we
the anvil, so long as violence reigns and not servile Christian timidity? If
victory and injustice and happiness are not for Germany, let them be for
other nations. Let Heaven exist, even though our dwelling place is Hell.

I look at myself in the mirror to discover who I am, to discern how I
will act in a few hours, when I am face to face with death. My flesh may be
afraid; I am not.

Translated by Julian Palley



The Waiting



The cab left him at number four thousand four on that street in the
northwest part of Buenos Aires. It was not yet nine in the morning; the
man noted with approval the spotted plane trees, the square plot of earth at
the foot of each, the respectable houses with their little balconies, the
pharmacy alongside, the dull lozenges of the paint and hardware store. A
long window-less hospital wall backed the sidewalk on the other side of the
street; the sun reverberated, farther down, from some greenhouses. The man
thought that these things (now arbitrary and accidental and in no special
order, like the things one sees in dreams) would in time, if God willed,
become invariable, necessary and familiar. In the pharmacy window por-
celain letters spelled out the name "Breslauer"; the Jews were displacing
the Italians, who had displaced the Creoles. It was better that way; the man
prefered not to mingle with people of his kind.

The cabman helped him take down his trunk; a woman with a distracted
or tired air finally opened the door. From his seat, the cabman returned
one of the coins to him, a Uruguayan twenty-centavo piece which had
been in his pocket since that night in the hotel at Melo. The man gave
him forty centavos and immediately felt: "I must act so that everyone will
forgive me. I have made two errors: I have used a foreign coin and I have
shown that the mistake matters to me."

Led by the woman, he crossed the entrance hall and the first patio.
The room they had reserved for him opened, happily, onto the second patio.
The bed was of iron, deformed by the craftsman into fantastic curves
representing branches and tendrils; there was also a tall pine wardrobe, a
bedside table, a shelf with books at floor level, two odd chairs and a
washstand with its basin, jar, soap dish and bottle of turbid glass. A map of
the province of Buenos Aires and a crucifix adorned the walls; the wallpaper
was crimson, with a pattern of huge spread-tailed peacocks. The only door
opened onto the patio. It was necessary to change the placement of the chairs
in order to get the trunk in. The roomer approved of everything; when the
woman asked him his name, he said Villari, not as a secret challenge, not to
mitigate the humiliation which actually he did not feel, but because that
name troubled him, because it was impossible for him to think of any other.

Certainly he was not seduced by the literary error of thinking that
assumption of the enemy's name might be an astute maneuver.
Mr. Villari, at first, did not leave the house; after a few weeks, he took
to going out for a while at sundown. One night he went into the movie
theater three blocks away. He never went beyond the last row of seats; he
always got up a little before the end of the feature. He would see tragic
stories of the underworld; these stories, no doubt, contained errors; these
stories, no doubt, contained images which were also those of his former life;
Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art
and reality was alien to him. He would submissively try to like the things; he
wanted to anticipate the intention with which they were shown. Unlike
people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of
art.

No letters nor even a circular ever arrived for him, but with vague
hope he would always read one of the sections of the newspaper. In the
afternoons, he would put one of the chairs by the door and gravely make and
drink his maté, his eyes fixed on the vine covering the wall of the several
storied building next door. Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's
memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even
in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a
translucent network of minimal surprises. In other confinements, he had
given in to the temptation of counting the days and the hours, but this
confinement was different, for it had no end—unless one morning the
newspaper brought news of Alejandro Villari's death. It was also possible
that Villari had already died and in that case this life was a dream. This
possibility disturbed him, because he could never quite understand whether
it seemed a relief or a misfortune; he told himself it was absurd and dis-
counted it. In distant days, less distant because of the passage of time than
because of two or three irrevocable acts, he had desired many things with an
unscrupulous passion; this powerful will, which had moved the hatred of
men and the love of some women, no longer wanted any particular thing: it
only wanted to endure, not to come to an end. The taste of the maté, the taste
of black tobacco, the growing line of shadows gradually covering the patio
—these were sufficient incentives.

In the house there was a wolf-dog, now old. Villari made friends with
him. He spoke to him in Spanish, in Italian, in the few words he still retained
of the rustic dialect of his childhood. Villari tried to live in the simple pre-
sent, with no memories or anticipation; the former mattered less to him than
the latter. In an obscure way, he thought he could see that the past is the
stuff time is made of; for that reason, time immediately turns into the past.
His weariness, one day, was like a feeling of contentment; in moments like
this, he was not much more complex than the dog.

One night he was left astonished and trembling by an intimate discharge
of pain in the back of his mouth. This horrible miracle recurred in a few
minutes and again towards dawn. Villari, the next day, sent for a cab
which left him at a dentist's office in the Once section. There he had the
tooth pulled. In this ordeal he was neither more cowardly nor more tranquil
than other people.

Another night, returning from the movies, he felt that he was being
pushed. With anger, with indignation, with secret relief, he faced the
insolent person. He spat out a coarse insult; the other man, astonished,
stammered an excuse. He was tall, young, with dark hair, accompanied by a
German-looking woman; that night, Villari repeated to himself that he did
not know them. Nevertheless, four or five days went by before he went out
into the street.

Amongst the books on the shelf there was a copy of the Divine Comedy,
with the old commentary by Andreoli. Prompted less by curiosity than
by a feeling of duty, Villari undertook the reading of this capital work;
before dinner, he would read a canto and then, in rigorous order, the notes.
He did not judge the punishments of hell to be unbelievable or excessive and
did not think Dante would have condemned him to the last circle, where
Ugolino's teeth endlessly gnaw Ruggieri's neck.

The peacocks on the crimson wallpaper seemed destined to be food
for tenacious nightmares, but Mr. Villari never dreamed of a monstrous
arbor inextricably woven of living birds. At dawn he would dream a dream
whose substance was the same, with varying circumstances. Two men and
Villari would enter the room with revolvers or they would attack him as he
left the movie house or all three of them at once would be the stranger who
had pushed him or they would sadly wait for him in the patio and seem not
to recognize him. At the end of the dream, he would take his revolver from
the drawer of the bedside table (and it was true he kept a revolver in that
drawer) and open fire on the men. The noise of the weapon would wake him,
but it was always a dream and in another dream the attack would be repeated
and in another dream he would have to kill them again.

One murky morning in the month of July, the presence of strange
people (not the noise of the door when they opened it) woke him. Tall in the
shadows of the room, curiously simplified by those shadows (in the fearful
dreams they had always been clearer), vigilant, motionless and patient, their
eyes lowered as if weighted down by the heaviness of their weapons,
Alejandro Villari and a stranger had overtaken him at last. With a gesture,
he asked them to wait and turned his face to the wall, as if to resume his
sleep. Did he do it to arouse the pity of those who killed him, or because it is
less difficult to endure a frightful happening than to imagine it and endlessly
await it, or—and this is perhaps most likely—so that the murderers would be
a dream, as they had already been so many times, in the same place, at the
same hour?

He was in this act of magic when the blast obliterated him.

Translated by J.E.I.



The God's Script



The prison is deep and of stone; its form, that of a nearly perfect
hemisphere, though the floor (also of stone) is somewhat less than a
great circle, a fact which in some way aggravates the feelings of oppression
and of vastness. A dividing wall cuts it at the center; this wall, although very
high, does not reach the upper part of the vault; in one cell am I, Tzinacán,
magician of the pyramid of Qaholom, which Pedro de Alvarado devastated
by fire; in the other there is a jaguar measuring with secret and even paces
the time and space of captivity. A long window with bars, flush with the
floor, cuts the central wall. At the shadowless hour [midday], a trap in the
high ceiling opens and a jailer whom the years have gradually been effacing
maneuvers an iron sheave and lowers for us, at the end of a rope, jugs of
water and chunks of flesh. The light breaks into the vault; at that instant I
can see the jaguar.

I have lost count of the years I have lain in the darkness; I, who was
young once and could move about this prison, am incapable of more than
awaiting, in the posture of my death, the end destined to me by the gods.
With the deep obsidian knife I have cut open the breasts of victims and now
I could not, without magic, lift myself from the dust.

On the eve of the burning of the pyramid, the men who got down from
the towering horses tortured me with fiery metals to force me to reveal the
location of a hidden treasure. They struck down the idol of the god before
my very eyes, but he did not abandon me and I endured the torments in
silence. They scourged me, they broke and deformed me, and then I awoke
in this prison from which I shall not emerge in mortal life.

Impelled by the fatality of having something to do, of populating time
in some way, I tried, in my darkness, to recall all I knew. Endless nights I
devoted to recalling the order and the number of stone-carved serpents or
the precise form of a medicinal tree. Gradually, in this way, I subdued the
passing years; gradually, in this way, I came into possession of that which
was already mine. One night I felt I was approaching the threshold of an
intimate recollection; before he sights the sea, the traveller feels a quick-
ening in the blood. Hours later I began to perceive the outline of the re-
collection. It was a tradition of the god. The god, foreseeing that at the
end of time there would be devastation and ruin, wrote on the first day of
Creation a magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils. He
wrote it in such a way that it would reach the most distant generations and
not be subject to chance. No one knows where it was written nor with what
characters, but it is certain that it exists, secretly, and that a chosen one shall
read it. I considered that we were now, as always, at the end of time and that
my destiny as the last priest of the god would give me access to the privilege
of intuiting the script. The fact that a prison confined me did not forbid my
hope; perhaps I had seen the script of Qaholom a thousand times and needed
only to fathom it.

This reflection encouraged me, and then instilled in me a kind of
vertigo. Throughout the earth there are ancient forms, forms incorruptible
and eternal; any one of them could be the symbol I sought. A mountain
could be the speech of the god, or a river or the empire or the configuration
of the stars. But in the process of the centuries the mountain is levelled and
the river will change its course, empires experience mutation and havoc and
the configuration of the stars varies. There is change in the firmament. The
mountain and the star are individuals and individuals perish. I sought
something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought of the generations
of cereals, of grasses, of birds, of men. Perhaps the magic would be written
on my face, perhaps I myself was the end of my search. That anxiety was
consuming me when I remembered the jaguar was one of the attributes of
the god.

Then my soul filled with pity. I imagined the first morning of time; I
imagined my god confiding his message to the living skin of the jaguars,
who would love and reproduce without end, in caverns, in cane fields, on
islands, in order that the last men might receive it. I imagined that net of
tigers, that teeming labyrinth of tigers, inflicting horror upon pastures and
flocks in order to perpetuate a design. In the next cell there was a jaguar; in
his vicinity I perceived a confirmation of my conjecture and a secret favor.
I devoted long years to learning the order and the configuration of the
spots. Each period of darkness conceded an instant of light, and I was able
thus to fix in my mind the black forms running through the yellow fur. Some
of them included points, others formed cross lines on the inner side of the
legs; others, ring-shaped, were repeated. Perhaps they were a single sound or
a single word. Many of them had red edges.

I shall not recite the hardships of my toil. More than once I cried out
to the vault that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, the
concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a
sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an
absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages
there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the
tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it,
the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass,
the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language
of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts,
and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but
instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or
blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in
that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the
universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that
single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are
the poor and ambitious human words, all, world, universe.

One day or one night—what difference between my days and nights
can there be?—I dreamt there was a grain of sand on the floor of the prison.
Indifferent, I slept again; I dreamt I awoke and that on the floor there were
two grains of sand. I slept again; I dreamt that the grains of sand were three.
They went on multiplying in this way until they filled the prison and I lay
dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with
a vast effort I roused myself and awoke. It was useless to awake; the
innumerable sand was suffocating me. Someone said to me: You have not
awakened to wakefulness, but to a previous dream. This dream is enclosed
within another, and so on to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand.
The path you must retrace is interminable and you will die before you ever
really awake.

I felt lost. The sand burst my mouth, but I shouted: A sand of dreams
cannot kill me nor are there dreams within dreams. A blaze of light awoke
me. In the darkness above there grew a circle of light. I saw the face and
hands of the jailer, the sheave, the rope, the flesh and the water jugs.
A man becomes confused, gradually, with the form of his destiny; a
man is, by and large, his circumstances. More than a decipherer or an
avenger, more than a priest of the god, I was one imprisoned. From the
tireless labyrinth of dreams I returned as if to my home to the harsh prison.
I blessed its dampness, I blessed its tiger, I blessed the crevice of light, I
blessed my old, suffering body, I blessed the darkness and the stone.

Then there occurred what I cannot forget nor communicate. There
occurred the union with the divinity, with the universe (I do not know
whether these words differ in meaning). Ecstasy does not repeat its symbols;
God has been seen in a blazing light, in a sword or in the circles of a rose. I
saw an exceedingly high Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind
me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time. That Wheel was made of
water, but also of fire, and it was (although the edge could be seen) infinite.
Interlinked, all things that are, were and shall be formed it, and I was one of
the fibers of that total fabric and Pedro de Alvarado who tortured me was
another. There lay revealed the causes and the effects and it sufficed me
to see that Wheel in order to understand it all, without end. O bliss of
understanding, greater than the bliss of imagining or feeling. I saw the
universe and I saw the intimate designs of the universe. I saw the origins
narrated in the Book of the Common. I saw the mountains that rose out of
the water, I saw the first men of wood, the cisterns that turned against the
men, the dogs that ravaged their faces. I saw the faceless god concealed
behind the other gods. I saw infinite processes that formed one single felicity
and, understanding all, I was able also to understand the script of the tiger.
It is a formula of fourteen random words (they appear random) and to
utter it in a loud voice would suffice to make me all powerful. To say it
would suffice to abolish this stone prison, to have daylight break into my
night, to be young, to be immortal, to have the tiger's jaws crush Alvarado,
to sink the sacred knife into the breasts of Spaniards, to reconstruct the
pyramid, to reconstruct the empire. Forty syllables, fourteen words, and I,
Tzinacán, would rule the lands Moctezuma ruled. But I know I shall never
say those words, because I no longer remember Tzinacán.

May the mystery lettered on the tigers die with me. Whoever has seen
the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot
think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes,
though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more
to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if
he, now, is no one. This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying
here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me.

Translated by L. A. Murillo




Essays



The Argentine Writer and Tradition



I wish to formulate and justify here some skeptical proposals concerning
the problem of the Argentine writer and tradition. My skepticism does not
relate to the difficulty or impossibility of solving this problem, but rather to
its very existence. I believe we are faced with a mere rhetorical topic which
lends itself to pathetic elaborations; rather than with a true mental difficulty,
I take it we are dealing with an appearance, a simulacrum, a pseudo
problem.

Before examining it, I want to consider the most commonly offered
statements and solutions. I shall begin with a solution which has become
almost instinctive, which appears without the aid of logical reasoning; it
maintains that the Argentine literary tradition already exists in the
gauchesque poetry. According to this solution, the vocabulary, devices and
themes of gauchesque poetry should guide the contemporary writer, and are
a point of departure and perhaps an archetype. This is the usual solution and
for that reason I intend to examine it at some length.

This same solution was set forth by Lugones in El payador; there one
may read that we Argentines possess a classic poem, Martín Fierro, and that
this poem should be for us what the Homeric poems were for the Greeks. It
seems difficult to contradict this opinion without slighting Martín Fierro. I
believe that Martín Fierro is the most lasting work we Argentines have
written; and I believe with the same intensity that we cannot suppose
Martín Fierro is, as it has sometimes been said, our Bible, our canonical
book.

Ricardo Rojas, who has also recommended the canonization of
Martín Fierro, has a page in his Historia de la literatura argentina that
almost seems to be commonplace and is really quite astute.

Rojas studies the poetry of the gauchesque writers—in other words,
the poetry of Hidalgo, Ascasubi, Estanislao del Campo and José Hernández
—and sees it as being derived from the poetry of the payadores, from the
spontaneous poetry of the gauchos. He points out that the meter of popular
poetry is the octosyllable and that the authors of gauchesque poetry employ
this meter and ends up by considering the poetry of the gauchesque writers
as a continuation or enlargement of the poetry of the payadores.

I suspect there is a grave error in this affirmation; we might even say a
skillful error, for it is evident that Rojas, in order to give the gauchesque
poetry a popular basis beginning with Hidalgo and culminating with
Hernández, presents this poetry as a continuation or derivation of that of the
gauchos. Thus, Bartolomé Hidalgo is, not the Homer of this poetry as Mitre
said, but simply a link in its development.
Ricardo Rojas makes of Hidalgo a payador; however, according to his
own Historia de la literatura argentina, this supposed payador began by
composing hendecasyllabic verses, a meter by nature unavailable to the
payadores, who could not perceive its harmony, just as Spanish readers
could not perceive the harmony of the hendecasyllable when Garcilaso
imported it from Italy.
I take it there is a fundamental difference between the poetry of the
gauchos and the poetry of the gauchesque writers. It is enough to compare
any collection of popular poetry with Martín Fierro, with Paulino Lucero,
with Fausto, to perceive this difference, which lies no less in the vocabulary
than in the intent of the poets. The popular poets of the country and the
suburbs compose their verses on general themes: the pangs of love and
loneliness, the unhappiness of love, and do so in a vocabulary which is also
very general; on the other hand, the gauchesque poets cultivate a
deliberately popular language never essayed by the popular poets
themselves. I do not mean that the idiom of the popular poets is a correct
Spanish, I mean that if there are errors they are the result of ignorance. On
the other hand, in the gauchesque poets there is a seeking out of native
words, a profusion of local color. The proof is this: a Colombian, Mexican
or Spaniard can immediately understand the poetry of the payadores, of the
gauchos, and yet they need a glossary in order to understand, even
approximately, Estanislao del Campo or Ascasubi.
All this can be summed up as follows: gauchesque poetry, which has
produced—I hasten to repeat—admirable works, is a literary genre as
artificial as any other. In the first gauchesque compositions, in Bartolomé
Hidalgo's trovas, we already see the intention of presenting the work in
terms of the gaucho, as uttered by the gaucho, so that the reader will read it
in a gaucho intonation. Nothing could be further removed from popular
poetry. The people, while versifying,—and I have observed this not only in
the country payadores, but also in those from the outskirts of Buenos Aires
—have the conviction that they are executing something important and
instinctively avoid popular words and seek high-sounding terms and
expressions. It is probable that gauchesque poetry has now influenced the
172
payadores and that they too now abound in criollismos, but in the beginning
it was not so, and we have proof of this (which no one has ever pointed out)
in Martín Fierro.
Martín Fierro is cast in a Spanish of gauchesque intonation, and for a
long while never lets us forget that it is a gaucho who is singing; it abounds
in comparisons taken from country life; however, there is a famous passage
in which the author forgets this preoccupation with local color and writes in
a general Spanish, and does not speak of vernacular themes, but of great
abstract themes, of time, of space, of the sea, of the night. I refer to the
payada between Martín Fierro and the Negro, which comes at the end of the
second part. It is as if Hernández himself had wanted to show the difference
between his gauchesque poetry and the genuine poetry of the gauchos. When
these two gauchos, Fierro and the Negro, begin to sing, they leave behind all
gauchesque affectation and address themselves to philosophical themes. I
have observed the same while listening to the payadores of the suburbs; they
avoid using the dialect of that area and try to express themselves correctly.
Of course they fail, but their intention is to make their poetry something
elevated; something distinguished, we might say with a smile.
The idea that Argentine poetry should abound in differential
Argentine traits and Argentine local color seems to me a mistake. If we are
asked which book is more Argentine, Martín Fierro or the sonnets in
Enrique Banchs' La urna, there is no reason to say that it is the first. It will
be said that in La urna of Banchs we do not find the Argentine countryside,
Argentine topography, Argentine botany, Argentine zoology; however, there
are other Argentine conditions in La urna.
I recall now some lines from La urna which seem to have been
written so that no one could say it was an Argentine book, the lines which
read: ". . . The sun shines on the slanting roofs / and on the windows.
Nightingales / try to say they are in love."
Here it seems we cannot avoid condemning the phrase "the sun shines
on the slanting roofs and on the windows." Enrique Banchs wrote these lines
in a suburb of Buenos Aires, and in the suburbs of Buenos Aires there are no
slanting roofs, but rather flat roofs. "Nightingales try to say they are in
love": the nightingale is less a bird of reality than of literature, of Greek and
Germanic tradition. However, I would say that in the use of these
conventional images, in these anomalous roofs and nightingales, Argentine
architecture and ornithology are of course absent, but we do find in them the
173
Argentine's reticence, his constraint; the fact that Banchs, when speaking of
this great suffering which overwhelms him, when speaking of this woman
who has left him and has left the world empty for him, should have recourse
to foreign and conventional images like slanted roofs and nightingales, is
significant: significant of Argentine reserve, distrust and reticence, of the
difficulty we have in making confessions, in revealing our intimate nature.
Besides, I do not know if it is necessary to say that the idea that a
literature must define itself in terms of its national traits is a relatively new
concept; also new and arbitrary is the idea that writers must seek themes
from their own countries. Without going any further, I think Racine would
not even have understood a person who denied him his right to the title of
poet of France because he cultivated Greek and Roman themes. I think
Shakespeare would have been amazed if people had tried to limit him to
English themes, and if they had told him that, as an Englishman, he had no
right to compose Hamlet, whose theme is Scandinavian, or Macbeth, whose
theme is Scottish. The Argentine cult of local color is a recent European cult
which the nationalists ought to reject as foreign.
Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that
what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this
confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon
observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no
camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran,
this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It
was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to
know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of
reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first
thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of
camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was
unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we
Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being
Argentine without abounding in local color.
Perhaps I may be permitted to make a confession here, a very small
confession. For many years, in books now happily forgotten, I tried to copy
down the flavor, the essence of the outlying suburbs of Buenos Aires. Of
course, I abounded in local words; I did not omit such words as cuchilleros,
milonga, tapia and others, and thus I wrote those forgettable and forgotten
books. Then, about a year ago, I wrote a story called "La muerte y la
174
brújula" ("Death and the Compass"), which is a kind of nightmare, a
nightmare in which there are elements of Buenos Aires, deformed by the
horror of the nightmare. There I think of the Paseo Colón and call it rue de
Toulon; I think of the country houses of Adrogue and call them Triste-le
Roy; when this story was published, my friends told me that at last they had
found in what I wrote the flavor of the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Precisely
because I had not set out to find that flavor, because I had abandoned myself
to a dream, I was able to accomplish, after so many years, what I had
previously sought in vain.
Now I want to speak of a justly illustrious work which the nationalists
often invoke. I refer to Güiraldes' Don Segundo Sombra. The nationalists tell
us that Don Segundo Sombra is the model of a national book; but if we
compare it with the works of the gauchesque tradition, the first thing we
note are differences. Don Segundo Sombra abounds in metaphors of a kind
having nothing to do with country speech but a great deal to do with the
metaphors of the then current literary circles of Montmartre. As for the
fable, the story, it is easy to find in it the influence of Kipling's Kim, whose
action is set in India and which was, in turn, written under the influence of
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the epic of the Mississippi. When I make
this observation, I do not wish to lessen the value of Don Segundo Sombra;
on the contrary, I want to emphasize the fact that, in order that we might
have this book, it was necessary for Güiraldes to recall the poetic technique
of the French circles of his time and the work of Kipling which he had read
many years before; in other words, Kipling and Mark Twain and the
metaphors of French poets were necessary for this Argentine book, for this
book which, I repeat, is no less Argentine for having accepted such
influences.
I want to point out another contradiction: the nationalists pretend to
venerate the capacities of the Argentine mind but want to limit the poetic
exercise of that mind to a few impoverished local themes, as if we
Argentines could only speak of orillas and estancias and not of the universe.
Let us move on to another solution. It is said that there is a tradition to
which Argentine writers should adhere and that that tradition is Spanish
literature. This second recommendation is of course somewhat less limited
than the first, but it also tends to restrict us; many objections could be raised
against it, but it is sufficient to mention two. The first is this: Argentine
history can be unmistakably defined as a desire to become separated from
175
Spain, as a voluntary withdrawal from Spain. The second objection is this:
among us, the enjoyment of Spanish literature—an enjoyment which I
personally happen to share—is usually an acquired taste; many times I have
loaned French and English works to persons without special literary
preparations, and these works have been enjoyed immediately, with no
effort. However, when I have proposed to my friends the reading of Spanish
works, I have evidenced that it was difficult for them to find pleasure in
these books without special apprenticeship; for that reason, I believe the fact
that certain illustrious Argentines write like Spaniards is less the testimony
of an inherited capacity than it is a proof of Argentine versatility.
I now arrive at a third opinion on Argentine writers and tradition
which I have read recently and which has surprised me very much. It says in
essence that in Argentina we are cut off from the past, that there has been
something like a dissolution of continuity between us and Europe.
According to this singular observation, we Argentines find ourselves in a
situation like that of the first days of Creation; the search for European
themes and devices is an illusion, an error; we should understand that we are
essentially alone and cannot play at being Europeans.
This opinion seems unfounded to me. I find it understandable that
many people should accept it, because this declaration of our solitude, of our
loss, of our primeval character, has, like existentialism, the charm of the
pathetic. Many people can accept this opinion because, once they have done
so, they feel alone, disconsolate and, in some way or another, interesting.
However, I have observed that in our country, precisely because it is a new
country, we have a great sense of time. Everything that has taken place in
Europe, the dramatic happenings of the last few years in Europe, have had
profound resonance here. The fact that a person was a sympathizer of
Franco or of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, or a sympathizer of
the Nazis or of the Allies, has in many cases caused very grave quarrels and
animosity. This would not occur if we were cut off from Europe. As far as
Argentine history is concerned, I believe we all feel it profoundly; and it is
natural that we should feel it in this way, because it is, in terms of
chronology and in terms of our own inner being, quite close to us; the
names, the battles of the civil war, the War of Independence, all of these are,
both in time and in tradition, very close to us.
What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this question
easily and that there is no problem here. I believe our tradition is all of
176
Western culture, and I also believe we have a right to this tradition, greater
than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have.
I recall here an essay of Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist,
on the pre-eminence of Jews in Western culture. He asks if this preeminence
allows us to conjecture about the innate superiority of the Jews, and answers
in the negative; he says that they are outstanding in Western culture because
they act within that culture and, at the same time, do not feel tied to it by any
special devotion; "for that reason," he says, "a Jew will always find it easier
than a non-Jew to make innovations in Western culture"; and we can say the
same of the Irish in English culture. In the case of the Irish, we have no
reason to suppose that the profusion of Irish names in British literature and
philosophy is due to any racial pre-eminence, for many of those illustrious
Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley, Swift) were the descendants of Englishmen, were
people who had no Celtic blood; however, it was sufficient for them to feel
Irish, to feel different, in order to be innovators in English culture. I believe
that we Argentines, we South Americans in general, are in an analogous
situation; we can handle all European themes, handle them without
superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have,
fortunate consequences.
This does not mean that all Argentine experiments are equally
successful; I believe that this problem of tradition and Argentina is simply a
contemporary and passing form of the eternal problem of determination. If I
am going to touch the table with one of my hands and I ask myself whether I
should touch it with my left or my right, as soon as I touch it with my right,
the determinists will say that I could not act in any other way and that the
entire previous history of the universe obliged me to touch it with my right
hand and that touching it with the left would have been a miracle. However,
if I had touched it with my left hand, they would have said the same: that I
was obliged to do so. The same thing happens with literary themes and
devices. Anything we Argentine writers can do successfully will become
part of our Argentine tradition, in the same way that the treatment of Italian
themes belongs to the tradition of England through the efforts of Chaucer
and Shakespeare.
I believe, in addition, that all these a priori discussions concerning the
intent of literary execution are based on the error of supposing that
intentions and plans matter a great deal. Let us take the case of Kipling:
Kipling dedicated his life to writing in terms of certain political ideals, he
177
tried to make his work an instrument of propaganda and yet, at the end of his
life, he was obliged to confess that the true essence of a writer's work is
usually unknown to him. He recalled the case of Swift, who, when he wrote
Gulliver's Travels, tried to bring an indictment against all humanity but
actually left a book for children. Plato said that poets are the scribes of a god
who moves them against their own will, against their intentions, just as a
magnet moves a series of iron rings.
For that reason I repeat that we should not be alarmed and that we
should feel that our patrimony is the universe; we should essay all themes,
and we cannot limit ourselves to purely Argentine subjects in order to be
Argentine; for either being Argentine is an inescapable act of fate—and in
that case we shall be so in all events—or being Argentine is a mere
affectation, a mask.
I believe that if we surrender ourselves to that voluntary dream which
is artistic creation, we shall be Argentine and we shall also be good or
tolerable writers.
Translated by J.E.I.




The Fearful Sphere of Pascal
t may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors.
The purpose of this note will be to sketch a chapter of this history.
I
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of
Colophon, wearied of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, lashed
out at the poets who attributed anthropomorphic traits to the gods, and
offered the Greeks a single God, a god who was an eternal sphere. In the
Timaeus of Plato we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most
uniform figure, for all points of its surface are equidistant from its center;
Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands
Xenophanes to speak analogically: God is spherical because that form is best
—or least inadequate—to represent the Divinity. Parmenides, forty years
later, rephrased the image: "The Divine Being is like the mass of a well
rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction."
Calogero and Mondolfo reasoned that Parmenides intuited an infinite, or
infinitely expanding sphere, and that the words just transcribed possess a
dynamic meaning (Albertelli: Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a
few years after his death, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigentum
constructed a laborious cosmogony: a stage exists in which the particles of
earth, water, air and fire make up a sphere without end, "the rounded
Sphairos, which exults in its circular solitude."
Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom
Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to
demons—although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus,
had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of
Alexandria; 20,000 according to Hamblicus; 36,525 according to the priests
of Thoth—who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things.
Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the
third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum; in one of
these fragments, or in the Asclepius, which was also attributed to
Trismegistus, the French theologian Alain de Lille (Alanus de Insulis)
discovered, at the end of the twelfth century, the following formula, which
future ages would not forget: "God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The Pre-Socratics spoke
of a sphere without end; Albertelli (as Aristotle before him) thinks that to
182
speak in this wise is to commit a contradictio in adjecto, because subject and
predicate cancel each other; this may very well be true, but still, the formula
of the Hermetic books allows us, almost, to intuit this sphere. In the
thirteenth century, the image reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose,
where it is given as a citation from Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum
Triplex; in the sixteenth century, the last chapter of the last book of
Pantagruel referred to "that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere
and whose circumference is nowhere and which we call God." For the
medieval mind the sense was clear—God is in each one of His creatures, but
none of them limits Him. "The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain
thee," said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometric metaphor of the sphere
seemed a gloss on these words.
Dante's poem preserved the Ptolemaic astronomy which for 1,400
years reigned in the imagination of mankind. The earth occupies the center
of the universe. It is an immobile sphere; around it circle nine concentric
spheres. The first seven are "planetary" skies (the firmaments of the Moon,
Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn); the eighth, the firmament
of the fixed stars; the ninth, the crystal firmament which is also called the
Primum mobile. This in turn is surrounded by the Empyrean, which is
composed of light. All this elaborate apparatus of hollow, transparent and
gyrating spheres (one system required 55 of them) had come to be an
intellectual necessity; De hypothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus
is the timid title which Copernicus, denier of Aristotle, placed at the head of
the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos.
For one man, for Giordano Bruno, the rupture of the stellar vaults was
a liberation. He proclaimed, in the Cena de la ceneri, that the world is the
infinite effect of an infinite cause, and that divinity is close by, "for it is
within us even more than we ourselves are within ourselves." He searched
for words to tell men of Copernican space, and on one famous page he
inscribed: "We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, or that
the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere"
(Delia causa, principio ed uno, V).
This phrase was written with exultation, in 1584, still in the light of
the Renaissance; seventy years later there was no reflection of that fervor
left and men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the
past are infinite, there can not really be a when; in space, because if every
being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, neither can there
183
be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows
the size of his own countenance. In the Renaissance, humanity thought to
have reached the age of virility, and it declares as much through the lips of
Bruno, of Campanella, and of Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity
was cowed by a feeling of senescence; in order to justify itself it exhumed
the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures consequent on
Adam's sin. (We know—from the fifth chapter of Genesis—that "all the
days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years"; from the sixth
chapter, that "there were giants in the earth in those days.") The First
Anniversary of John Donne's elegy, Anatomy of the World, lamented the
very brief life and limited stature of contemporary men, who are like
pigmies and fairies; Milton, according to Johnson's biography, feared that
the appearance on earth of a heroic species was no longer possible; Glanvill
was of the opinion that Adam, "the medal of God," enjoyed both telescopic
and microscopic vision; Robert South conspicuously wrote: "An Aristotle
was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise." In
that dispirited century, the absolute space which had inspired the hexameters
of Lucretius, the absolute space which had meant liberation to Bruno,
became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He abhorred the universe and
would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the
abhorred universe. He deplored the fact that the firmament did not speak,
and he compared our life with that of castaways on a desert island. He felt
the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright
and solitude, and he put his feelings into these words: "Nature is an infinite
sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
Thus do the words appear in the Brunschvicg text; but the critical edition
published by Tourneur (Paris, 1941), which reproduces the crossed-out
words and variations of the manuscript, reveals that Pascal started to write
the word effroyable: "a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere."
It may be that universal history is the history of the different
intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
184
Partial Magic in the Quixote
I
t is plausible that these observations may have been set forth at some time
and, perhaps, many times; a discussion of their novelty interests me less
than one of their possible truth.
Compared with other classic books (the Iliad, the Aeneid, the
Pharsalia, Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies), the
Quixote is a realistic work; its realism, however, differs essentially from that
practiced by the nineteenth century. Joseph Conrad could write that he
excluded the supernatural from his work because to include it would seem a
denial that the everyday was marvelous; I do not know if Miguel de
Cervantes shared that intuition, but I do know that the form of the Quixote
made him counterpose a real prosaic world to an imaginary poetic world.
Conrad and Henry James wrote novels of reality because they judged reality
to be poetic; for Cervantes the real and the poetic were antinomies. To the
vast and vague geographies of the Amadis, he opposes the dusty roads and
sordid wayside inns of Castille; imagine a novelist of our time centering
attention for purposes of parody on some filling stations. Cervantes has
created for us the poetry of seventeenth-century Spain, but neither that
century nor that Spain were poetic for him; men like Unamuno or Azorín or
Antonio Machado, who were deeply moved by any evocation of La Mancha,
would have been incomprehensible to him. The plan of his book precluded
the marvelous; the latter, however, had to figure in the novel, at least
indirectly, just as crimes and a mystery in a parody of a detective story.
Cervantes could not resort to talismans or enchantments, but he insinuated
the supernatural in a subtle—and therefore more effective—manner. In his
intimate being, Cervantes loved the supernatural. Paul Groussac observed in
1924: "With a deleble coloring of Latin and Italian, Cervantes' literary
production derived mostly from the pastoral novel and the novel of chivalry,
soothing fables of captivity." The Quixote is less an antidote for those
fictions than it is a secret, nostalgic farewell.
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality;
Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective and the subjective, the
world of the reader and the world of the book. In those chapters which argue
whether the barber's basin is a helmet and the donkey's packsaddle a steed's
fancy regalia, the problem is dealt with explicity; other passages, as I have
185
noted, insinuate this. In the sixth chapter of the first part, the priest and the
barber inspect Don Quixote's library; astoundingly, one of the books
examined is Cervantes' own Galatea and it turns out that the barber is a
friend of the author and does not admire him very much, and says that he is
more versed in misfortunes than in verses and that the book possesses some
inventiveness, proposes a few ideas and concludes nothing. The barber, a
dream or the form of a dream of Cervantes, passes judgment on
Cervantes. . . It is also surprising to learn, at the beginning of the ninth
chapter, that the entire novel has been translated from the Arabic and that
Cervantes acquired the manuscript in the marketplace of Toledo and had it
translated by a morisco whom he lodged in his house for more than a month
and a half while the job was being finished. We think of Carlyle, who
pretended that the Sartor Resartus was the fragmentary version of a work
published in Germany by Doctor Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh; we think of the
Spanish rabbi Moses of Leon, who composed the Zohar or Book of Splendor
and divulged it as the work of a Palestinian rabbi of the second century.
This play of strange ambiguities culminates in the second part; the
protagonists have read the first part, the protagonists of the Quixote are, at
the same time, readers of the Quixote. Here it is inevitable to recall the case
of Shakespeare, who includes on the stage of Hamlet another stage where a
tragedy more or less like that of Hamlet is presented; the imperfect
correspondence of the principal and secondary works lessens the efficacy of
this inclusion. An artifice analogous to Cervantes', and even more
astounding, figures in the Ramayana, the poem of Valmiki, which narrates
the deeds of Rama and his war with the demons. In the last book, the sons of
Rama, who do not know who their father is, seek shelter in a forest, where
an ascetic teaches them to read. This teacher is, strangely enough, Valmiki;
the book they study, the Ramayana. Rama orders a sacrifice of horses;
Valmiki and his pupils attend this feast. The latter, accompanied by their
lute, sing the Ramayana. Rama hears his own story, recognizes his own sons
and then rewards the poet. . . Something similar is created by accident in the
Thousand and One Nights. This collection of fantastic tales duplicates and
reduplicates to the point of vertigo the ramifications of a central story in
later and subordinate stories, but does not attempt to gradate its realities, and
the effect (which should have been profound) is superficial, like a Persian
carpet. The opening story of the series is well known: the terrible pledge of
the king who every night marries a virgin who is then decapitated at dawn,
186
and the resolution of Scheherazade, who distracts the king with her fables
until a thousand and one nights have gone by and she shows him their son.
The necessity of completing a thousand and one sections obliged the
copyists of the work to make all manner of interpolations. None is more
perturbing than that of the six hundred and second night, magical among all
the nights. On that night, the king hears from the queen his own story. He
hears the beginning of the story, which comprises all the others and also—
monstrously—itself. Does the reader clearly grasp the vast possibility of this
interpolation, the curious danger? That the queen may persist and the
motionless king hear forever the truncated story of the Thousand and One
Nights, now infinite and circular. . . The inventions of philosophy are no less
fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The
World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: "Let us
imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly
and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect;
there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not
registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in
such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of
the map of the map, and so on to infinity."
Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the
thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why
does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a
spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions
suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators,
we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that
the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and
read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.
Translated by J.E.I.
187
Valéry as Symbol
B
ringing together the names of Whitman and Paul Valéry is, at first
glance, an arbitrary and (what is worse) inept operation. Valéry is a
symbol of infinite dexterities but, at the same time, of infinite scruples;
Whitman, of an almost incoherent but titanic vocation of felicity; Valéry
illustriously personifies the labyrinths of the mind; Whitman, the
interjections of the body. Valéry is a symbol of Europe and of its delicate
twilight; Whitman, of the morning in America. The whole realm of literature
would not seem to admit two more antagonistic applications of the word
"poet." One fact, however, links them: the work of both is less valuable as
poetry than it is as the sign of an exemplary poet created by that work. Thus,
the English poet Lascelles Abercrombie could praise Whitman for having
created "from the richness of his noble experience that vivid and personal
figure which is one of the few really great things of the poetry of our time:
the figure of himself." The dictum is vague and superlative, but it has the
singular virtue of not identifying Whitman, the man of letters and devote of
Tennyson, with Whitman, the semidivine hero of Leaves of Grass. The
distinction is valid; Whitman wrote his rhapsodies in terms of an imaginary
identity, formed partly of himself, partly of each of his readers. Hence the
discrepancies that have exasperated the critics; hence the custom of dating
his poems in places where he had never been; hence the fact that, on one
page of his work, he was born in the Southern states, and on another (and
also in reality) on Long Island.
One of the purposes of Whitman's compositions is to define a possible
man—Walt Whitman—of unlimited and negligent felicity; no less
hyperbolic, no less illusory, is the man defined by Valéry's compositions.
The latter does not magnify, as does the former, the human faculties of
philanthropy, fervor and joy; he magnifies the virtues of the mind. Valéry
created Edmond Teste; this character would be one of the myths of our time
if intimately we did not all judge him to be a mere Doppelgänger of Valéry.
For us, Valéry is Edmond Teste. In other words, Valéry is a derivation of
Poe's Chevalier Dupin and the inconceivable God of the theologians. Which
fact, plausibly enough, is not true.
Yeats, Rilke and Eliot have written verses more memorable than those
of Valéry; Joyce and Stefan George have effected more profound
188
modifications in their instrument (perhaps French is less modifiable than
English and German); but behind the work of these eminent artificers there
is no personality comparable to Valéry's. The circumstance that that
personality is, in some way, a projection of the work does not diminish this
fact. To propose lucidity to men in a lowly romantic era, in the melancholy
era of Nazism and dialectical materialism, of the augurs of Freudianism and
the merchants of surréalisms, such is the noble mission Valéry fulfilled (and
continues to fulfill).
Paul Valéry leaves us at his death the symbol of a man infinitely
sensitive to every phenomenon and for whom every phenomenon is a
stimulus capable of provoking an infinite series of thoughts. Of a man who
transcends the differential traits of the self and of whom we can say, as
William Hazlitt did of Shakespeare, "he is nothing in himself." Of a man
whose admirable texts do not exhaust, do not even define, their all
embracing possibilities. Of a man who, in an age that worships the chaotic
idols of blood, earth and passion, preferred always the lucid pleasures of
thought and the secret adventures of order.
Translated by J.E.I.
189
Kafka and His Precursors
I
once premeditated making a study of Kafka's precursors. At first I had
considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after
frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or
his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a
few of these here, in chronological order.
The first is Zeno's paradox against movement. A moving object at A
(declares Aristotle) cannot reach point B, because it must first cover half the
distance between the two points, and before that, half of the half, and before
that, half of the half of the half, and so on to infinity; the form of this
illustrious problem is, exactly, that of The Castle, and the moving object and
the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkian characters in literature. In the
second text which chance laid before me, the affinity is not one of form but
one of tone. It is an apologue of Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century,
and is reproduced in Margouliès' admirable Anthologie raisonnée de la
littérature chinoise (1948). This is the paragraph, mysterious and calm,
which I marked: "It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural
being of good omen; such is declared in all the odes, annals, biographies of
illustrious men and other texts whose authority is unquestionable. Even
children and village women know that the unicorn constitutes a favorable
presage. But this animal does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not
always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification. It is not like the
horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. In such conditions, we could be face
to face with a unicorn and not know for certain what it was. We know that
such and such an animal with a mane is a horse and that such and such an
animal with horns is a bull. But we do not know what the unicorn is like."30
The third text derives from a more easily predictable source: the
writings of Kierkegaard. The spiritual affinity of both writers is something
of which no one is ignorant; what has not yet been brought out, as far as I
know, is the fact that Kierkegaard, like Kafka, wrote many religious parables
on contemporary and bourgeois themes. Lowrie, in his Kierkegaard (Oxford
30 Non-recognition of the sacred animal and its opprobrious or accidental death at the
hands of the people are traditional themes in Chinese literature. See the last chapter of
Jung's Psychologie und Alchemie (Zürich, 1944), which contains two curious
illustrations.
190
University Press, 1938), transcribes two of these. One is the story of a
counterfeiter who, under constant surveillance, counts banknotes in the Bank
of England; in the same way, God would distrust Kierkegaard and have
given him a task to perform, precisely because He knew that he was familiar
with evil. The subject of the other parable is the North Pole expeditions.
Danish ministers had declared from their pulpits that participation in these
expeditions was beneficial to the soul's eternal well-being. They admitted,
however, that it was difficult, and perhaps impossible, to reach the Pole and
that not all men could undertake the adventure. Finally, they would
announce that any trip—from Denmark to London, let us say, on the
regularly scheduled steamer—was, properly considered, an expedition to the
North Pole.
The fourth of these prefigurations I have found is Browning's poem
"Fears and Scruples," published in 1876. A man has, or believes he has, a
famous friend. He has never seen this friend and the fact is that the friend
has so far never helped him, although tales are told of his most noble traits
and authentic letters of his circulate about. Then someone places these traits
in doubt and the handwriting experts declare that the letters are apocryphal.
The man asks, in the last line: "And if this friend were. . . God?"
My notes also register two stories. One is from Léon Bloy's Histoires
désobligeantes and relates the case of some people who possess all manner
of globes, atlases, railroad guides and trunks, but who die without ever
having managed to leave their home town. The other is entitled
"Carcassonne" and is the work of Lord Dunsany. An invincible army of
warriors leaves an infinite castle, conquers kingdoms and sees monsters and
exhausts the deserts and the mountains, but they never reach Carcassonne,
though once they glimpse it from afar. (This story is, as one can easily see,
the strict reverse of the previous one; in the first, the city is never left; in the
second, it is never reached.)
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated
resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other.
This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find
Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never
written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would
not exist. The poem "Fears and Scruples" by Browning foretells Kafka's
work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our
reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics'
191
vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed
of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer
creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as
it will modify the future.31 In this correlation the identity or plurality of the
men involved is unimportant. The early Kafka of Betrachtung is less a
precursor of the Kafka of somber myths and atrocious institutions than is
Browning or Lord Dunsany.
Translated by J.E.I.





Avatars of the Tortoise
T
here is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to
Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. I once
longed to compile its mobile history. The numerous Hydra (the swamp
monster which amounts to a prefiguration or emblem of geometric
progressions) would lend convenient horror to its portico; it would be
crowned by the sordid nightmares of Kafka and its central chapters would
not ignore the conjectures of that remote German cardinal—Nicholas of
Krebs, Nicholas of Cusa—who saw in the circumference of the circle a
polygon with an infinite number of sides and wrote that an infinite line
would be a straight line, a triangle, a circle and a sphere (De docta
ignorantia, I, 13). Five or seven years of metaphysical, theological and
mathematical apprenticeship would allow me (perhaps) to plan decorously
such a book. It is useless to add that life forbids me that hope and even that
adverb.
The following pages in some way belong to that illusory Biography of
the Infinite. Their purpose is to register certain avatars of the second paradox
of Zeno.
Let us recall, now, that paradox.
Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise and gives the animal a
headstart of ten meters. Achilles runs those ten meters, the tortoise one;
Achilles runs that meter, the tortoise runs a decimeter; Achilles runs that
decimeter, the tortoise runs a centimeter; Achilles runs that centimeter, the
tortoise, a millimeter; Fleet-footed Achilles, the millimeter, the tortoise, a
tenth of a millimeter, and so on to infinity, without the tortoise ever being
overtaken. . . Such is the customary version. Wilhelm Capelle (Die
Vorsokratiker, 1935, page 178) translates the original text by Aristotle: "The
second argument of Zeno is the one known by the name of Achilles. He
reasons that the slowest will never be overtaken by the swiftest, since the
pursuer has to pass through the place the pursued has just left, so that the
slowest will always have a certain advantage." The problem does not
change, as you can see; but I would like to know the name of the poet who
provided it with a hero and a tortoise. To those magical competitors and to
the series
193
the argument owes its fame. Almost no one recalls the one preceding it—the
one about the track—, though its mechanism is identical. Movement is
impossible (argues Zeno) for the moving object must cover half of the
distance in order to reach its destination, and before reaching the half, half of
the half, and before half of the half, half of the half of the half, and
before. . .32
We owe to the pen of Aristotle the communication and first refutation
of these arguments. He refutes them with a perhaps disdainful brevity, but
their recollection served as an inspiration for his famous argument of the
third man against the Platonic doctrine. This doctrine tries to demonstrate
that two individuals who have common attributes (for example, two men)
are mere temporal appearances of an eternal archetype. Aristotle asks if the
many men and the Man—the temporal individuals and the archetype—have
attributes in common. It is obvious that they do: the general attributes of
humanity. In that case, maintains Aristotle, one would have to postulate
another archetype to include them all, and then a fourth. . . Patricio de
Azcárate, in a note to his translation of the Metaphysics, attributes this
presentation of the problem to one of Aristotle's disciples: "If what is
affirmed of many things is at the same time a separate being, different from
the things about which the affirmation is made (and this is what the
Platonists pretend), it is necessary that there be a third man. Man is a
denomination applicable to individuals and the idea. There is, then, a third
man separate and different from individual men and the idea. There is at the
same time a fourth man who stands in the same relationship to the third and
to the idea and individual men; then a fifth and so on to infinity." Let us
postulate two individuals, a and b, who make up the generic type c. We
would then have:
a + b = c
But also, according to Aristotle:
a + b + c = d
a + b + c + d = e
32 A century later, the Chinese sophist Hui Tzu reasoned that a staff cut in two every day
is interminable (H. A. Giles: Chuang Tzu, 1889, page 453).
194
a + b + c + d + e = f. . .
Rigorously speaking, two individuals are not necessary: it is enough
to have one individual and the generic type in order to determine the third
man denounced by Aristotle. Zeno of Elea resorts to the idea of infinite
regression against movement and number; his refuter, against the idea of
universal forms.33
The next avatar of Zeno my disorderly notes register is Agrippa the
skeptic. He denies that anything can be proven, since every proof requires a
previous proof (Hypotyposes, I, 166). Sextus Empiricus argues in a parallel
manner that definitions are in vain, since one will have to define each of the
words used and then define the definition (Hypotyposes, II, 207). One
thousand six hundred years later, Byron, in the dedication to Don Juan, will
write of Coleridge: "I wish he would explain his Explanation."
So far, the regressus in infinitum has served to negate; Saint Thomas
Aquinas resorts to it (Summa theologica, I, 2, 3) in order to affirm that God
exists. He points out that there is nothing in the universe without an effective
cause and that this cause, of course, is the effect of another prior cause. The
world is an interminable chain of causes and each cause is also an effect.
Each state derives from a previous one and determines the following, but the
whole series could have not existed, since its terms are conditional, i.e.,
fortuitous. However, the world does exist; from this we may infer a
noncontingent first cause, which would be the Divinity. Such is the
cosmological proof; it is prefigured by Aristotle and Plato; later Leibniz
33 In the Parmenides—whose Zenonian character is irrefutable—Plato expounds a very
similar argument to demonstrate that the one is really many. If the one exists, it
participates in being; therefore, there are two parts in it, which are being and the one,
but each of these parts is one and exists, so that they enclose two more parts, which in
turn enclose two more, infinitely. Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy,
1919, page 138) substitutes for Plato's geometrical progression an arithmetical one. If
one exists, it participates in being: but since being and the one are different, duality
exists; but since being and two are different, trinity exists, etc. Chuang Tzu (Waley:
Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, page 25) resorts to the same interminable
regressus against the monists who declared that the Ten Thousand Things (the
Universe) are one. In the first place—he argues—cosmic unity and the declaration of
that unity are already two things; these two and the declaration of their duality are
already three; those three and the declaration of their trinity are already four . . .
Russell believes that the vagueness of the term being is sufficient to invalidate this
reasoning. He adds that numbers do not exist, that they are mere logical fictions.
195
rediscovers it.34
Hermann Lotze has recourse to the regressus in order not to
understand that an alteration of object A can produce an alteration of object
B. He reasons that if A and B are independent, to postulate an influence of A
on B is to postulate a third element C, an element which in order to affect B
will require a fourth element D, which cannot work its effect without E,
which cannot work its effect without F. . . In order to elude this
multiplication of chimeras, he resolves that in the world there is one sole
object: an infinite and absolute substance, comparable to the God of
Spinoza. Transitive causes are reduced to immanent causes; phenomena, to
manifestations or modalities of the cosmic substance.35
Analogous, but even more alarming, is the case of F. H. Bradley. This
thinker (Appearance and Reality, 1897, pages 19-34) does not limit himself
to combatting the relation of cause; he denies all relations. He asks if a
relation is related to its terms. The answer is yes and he infers that this
amounts to admitting the existence of two other relations, and then of two
more. In the axiom "the part is less than the whole" he does not perceive two
terms and the relation "less than"; he perceives three ("part," "less than,"
"whole") whose linking implies two more relations, and so on to infinity. In
the statement "John is mortal," he perceives three invariable concepts (the
third is the copula) which we can never bring together. He transforms all
concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to
become contaminated with unreality.
Lotze inserts Zeno's periodic chasms between the cause and the effect;
Bradley, between the subject and the predicate, if not between the subject
and its attributes; Lewis Carroll (Mind, volume four, page 278), between the
second premise of the syllogism and the conclusion. He relates an endless
dialogue, whose interlocutors are Achilles and the tortoise. Having now
reached the end of their interminable race, the two athletes calmly converse
about geometry. They study this lucid reasoning:
a) Two things equal to a third are equal to one another.
34 An echo of this proof, now defunct, resounds in the first verse of the Paradiso:
La gloria di Colui che tutto move.
35 I follow the exposition by James (A Pluralistic Universe, 1909, pages 55-60). Cf.
Wentscher: Fechner und Lotze, 1924, pages 166-171.
196
b) The two sides of this triangle are equal to MN.
c) The two sides of this triangle are equal to one another.
The tortoise accepts the premises a and b, but denies that they justify
the conclusion. He has Achilles interpolate a hypothetical proposition:
a) Two things equal to a third are equal to one another.
b) The two sides of this triangle are equal to MN.
c) If a and b are valid, z is valid.
z) The two sides of this triangle are equal to one another.
Having made this brief clarification, the tortoise accepts the validity
of a, b and c, but not of z. Achilles, indignant, interpolates:
d) if a, b and c are valid, z is valid.
And then, now with a certain resignation:
e) If a, b, c and d are valid, z is valid.
Carroll observes that the Greek's paradox involves an infinite series of
distances which diminish, whereas in his, the distances grow.
One final example, perhaps the most elegant of all, but also the one
differing least from Zeno. William James (Some Problems of Philosophy,
1911, page 182) denies that fourteen minutes can pass, because first it is
necessary for seven to pass, and before the seven, three and a half, and
before the three and a half, a minute and three quarters, and so on until the
end, the invisible end, through tenuous labyrinths of time.
Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Mill, Renouvier, Georg Cantor,
Gomperz, Russell and Bergson have formulated explanations—not always
inexplicable and vain in nature—of the paradox of the tortoise. (I have
registered some of them in my book Discusión, 1932, pages 151-161).
Applications abound as well, as the reader has seen. The historical
applications do not exhaust its possibilities: the vertiginous regressus in
infinitum is perhaps applicable to all subjects. To aesthetics: such and such a
verse moves us for such and such a reason, such and such a reason for such
and such a reason. . . To the problem of knowledge: cognition is recognition,
197
but it is necessary to have known in order to recognize, but cognition is
recognition. . . How can we evaluate this dialectic? Is it a legimate
instrument of investigation or only a bad habit?
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies
are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also
venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them
—at least in an infinitesimal way—does not resemble the universe a bit
more than the others. I have examined those which enjoy certain prestige; I
venture to affirm that only in the one formulated by Schopenhauer have I
recognized some trait of the universe. According to this doctrine, the world
is a fabrication of the will. Art—always—requires visible unrealities. Let it
suffice for me to mention one: the metaphorical or numerous or carefully
accidental diction of the interlocutors in a drama. . . Let us admit what all
idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no
idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find
them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.
"The greatest magician (Novalis has memorably written) would be the
one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his
own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our
case?" I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating
within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious,
visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we
have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is
false.
Translated by J.E.I.




The Mirror of Enigmas
T
he idea that the Sacred Scriptures have (aside from their literal value) a
symbolic value is ancient and not irrational: it is found in Philo of
Alexandria, in the Cabalists, in Swedenborg. Since the events related in the
Scriptures are true (God is Truth, Truth cannot lie, etc.), we should admit
that men, in acting out those events, blindly represent a secret drama
determined and premeditated by God. Going from this to the thought that the
history of the universe—and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of
our lives—has an incalculable, symbolical value, is a reasonable step. Many
have taken that step; no one so astonishingly as Léon Bloy. (In the
psychological fragments by Novalis and in that volume of Machen's
autobiography called The London Adventure there is a similar hypothesis:
that the outer world—forms, temperatures, the moon—is a language we
humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish. . . It is also
declared by De Quincey:36 "Even the articulate or brutal sounds of the globe
must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their
corresponding keys—have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least
things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.")
A verse from St. Paul (I Corinthians, 13:12) inspired Léon Bloy.
Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tune autem facie ad faciem. Nunc
cognosco ex parte: tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum. Torres
Amat has miserably translated: "At present we do not see God except as in a
mirror and beneath dark images; but later we shall see him face to face. I
only know him now imperfectly; but later I shall know him in a clear vision,
in the same way that I know myself." 49 words do the work of 22; it is
impossible to be more languid and verbose. Cipriano de Valera is more
faithful: "Now we see in a mirror, in darkness; but later we shall see face to
face. Now I know in part; but later I shall know as I am known." Torres
Amat opines that the verse refers to our vision of the divinity; Cipriano de
Valera (and Léon Bloy), to our general vision of things.
So far as I know, Bloy never gave his conjecture a definitive form.
Throughout his fragmentary work (in which there abound, as everyone
knows, lamentations and insults) there are different versions and facets.
Here are a few that I have rescued from the clamorous pages of Le mendiant
36 Writings, 1896, Vol. I, page 129.
199
ingrat, Le Vieux de la Montagne and L'invendable. I do not believe I have
exhausted them: I hope that some specialist in Léon Bloy (I am not one) may
complete and rectify them.
The first is from June 1894. I translate it as follows: "The statement
by St. Paul: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate would be a skylight
through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the
soul of man. The terrifying immensity of the firmament's abysses is an
illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived 'in a mirror.'
We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the
infinitude of our hearts, for which God was willing to die. . . If we see the
Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls."
The second is from November of the same year. "I recall one of my
oldest ideas. The Czar is the leader and spiritual father of a hundred fifty
million men. An atrocious responsibility which is only apparent. Perhaps he
is not responsible to God, but rather to a few human beings. If the poor of
his empire are oppressed during his reign, if immense catastrophies result
from that reign, who knows if the servant charged with shining his boots is
not the real and sole person guilty? In the mysterious dispositions of the
Profundity, who is really Czar, who is king, who can boast of being a mere
servant?"
The third is from a letter written in December. "Everything is a
symbol, even the most piercing pain. We are dreamers who shout in our
sleep. We do not know whether the things afflicting us are the secret
beginning of our ulterior happiness or not. We now see, St. Paul maintains,
per speculum in aenigmate, literally: 'in an enigma by means of a mirror' and
we shall not see in any other way until the coming of the One who is all in
flames and who must teach us all things."
The fourth is from May 1904. "Per speculum in aenigmate, says St.
Paul. We see everything backwards. When we believe we give, we receive,
etc. Then (a beloved, anguished soul tells me) we are in Heaven and God
suffers on earth."
The fifth is from May 1908. "A terrifying idea of Jeanne's, about the
text Per speculum. The pleasures of this world would be the torments of
Hell, seen backwards, in a mirror."
The sixth is from 1912. It is each of the pages of L'Âme de Napoléon,
a book whose purpose is to decipher the symbol Napoleon, considered as the
precursor of another hero—man and symbol as well—who is hidden in the
200
future. It is sufficient for me to cite two passages. One: "Every man is on
earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle or a
mountain of the invisible materials that will serve to build the City of God."
The other: "There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with
certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do,
what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name
is, his enduring Name in the register of Light. . . History is an immense
liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire
verses or chapters, but the importance of one and the other is indeterminable
and profoundly hidden."
The foregoing paragraphs will perhaps seem to the reader mere
gratuities by Bloy. So far as I know, he never took care to reason them out. I
venture to judge them verisimilar and perhaps inevitable within the Christian
doctrine. Bloy (I repeat) did no more than apply to the whole of Creation the
method which the Jewish Cabalists applied to the Scriptures. They thought
that a work dictated by the Holy Spirit was an absolute text: in other words,
a text in which the collaboration of chance was calculable as zero. This
portentous premise of a book impenetrable to contingency, of a book which
is a mechanism of infinite purposes, moved them to permute the scriptural
words, add up the numerical value of the letters, consider their form,
observe the small letters and capitals, seek acrostics and anagrams and
perform other exegetical rigors which it is not difficult to ridicule. Their
excuse is that nothing can be contingent in the work of an infinite mind.37
Léon Bloy postulates this hieroglyphical character—this character of a
divine writing, of an angelic cryptography—at all moments and in all beings
on earth. The superstitious person believes he can decipher this organic
writing: thirteen guests form the symbol of death; a yellow opal, that of
misfortune.
It is doubtful that the world has a meaning; it is even more doubtful
that it has a double or triple meaning, the unbeliever will observe. I
understand that this is so; but I understand that the hieroglyphical world
postulated by Bloy is the one which best befits the dignity of the theologian's
37 What is a divine mind? the reader will perhaps inquire. There is not a theologian who
does not define it; I prefer an example. The steps a man takes from the day of his birth
until that of his death trace in time an inconceivable figure. The Divine Mind
intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle. This figure (perhaps)
has its given function in the economy of the universe.
201
intellectual God.
No man knows who he is, affirmed Léon Bloy. No one could illustrate
that intimate ignorance better than he. He believed himself a rigorous
Catholic and he was a continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of
Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs.
Translated by J.E.I.



A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw
A
t the end of the thirteenth century, Raymond Lully (Raimundo Lulio)
was prepared to solve all arcana by means of an apparatus of
concentric, revolving discs of different sizes, subdivided into sectors with
Latin words; John Stuart Mill, at the beginning of the nineteenth, feared that
some day the number of musical combinations would be exhausted and there
would be no place in the future for indefinite Webers and Mozarts; Kurd
Lasswitz, at the end of the nineteenth, toyed with the staggering fantasy of a
universal library which would register all the variations of the twenty-odd
orthographical symbols, in other words, all that it is given to express in all
languages. Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be
the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propension which is common:
making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.
Those who practice this game forget that a book is more than a verbal
structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with
its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and
durable images it leaves in his memory. This dialogue is infinite; the words
amica silentia lunae now mean the intimate, silent and shining moon, and in
the Aeneid they meant the interlunar period, the darkness which allowed the
Greeks to enter the stronghold of Troy. . .38 Literature is not exhaustible, for
the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an
isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. One
literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text
than because of the way in which it is read: if I were granted the possibility
of reading any present-day page—this one, for example—as it will be read
in the year two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two
38 Thus Milton and Dante interpreted them, to judge by certain passages which seem to
be imitative. In the Commedia (Inferno, I, 60; V, 28) we have: dogni luce muto and
dove il sol tace to signify dark places; in the Samson Agonistes (86-89):
The Sun to me is dark
And silent as the Moon
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Cf. E.M.W. Tillyard: The Miltonic Setting, 101.
203
thousand will be like. The conception of literature as a formalistic game
leads, in the best of cases, to the fine chiseling of a period or a stanza, to an
artful decorum (Johnson, Renan, Flaubert), and in the worst, to the
discomforts of a work made of surprises dictated by vanity and chance
(Gracián, Herrera y Reissig).
If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could
produce any book by essaying variations. The lapidary formula "Everything
flows" abbreviates in two words the philosophy of Heraclitus: Raymond
Lully would say that, with the first word given, it would be sufficient to
essay the intransitive verbs to discover the second and obtain, thanks to
methodical chance, that philosophy and many others. Here it is fitting to
reply that the formula obtained by this process of elimination would lack all
value and even meaning; for it to have some virtue we must conceive it in
terms of Heraclitus, in terms of an experience of Heraclitus, even though
"Heraclitus" is nothing more than the presumed subject of that experience. I
have said that a book is a dialogue, a form of relationship; in a dialogue, an
interlocutor is not the sum or average of what he says: he may not speak and
still reveal that he is intelligent, he may omit intelligent observations and
reveal his stupidity. The same happens with literature; d'Artagnan executes
innumerable feats and Don Quixote is beaten and ridiculed, but one feels the
valor of Don Quixote more. The foregoing leads us to an aesthetic problem
never before posed: Can an author create characters superior to himself? I
would say no and in that negation include both the intellectual and the
moral. I believe that from us cannot emerge creatures more lucid or more
noble than our best moments. It is on this opinion that I base my conviction
of Shaw's pre-eminence. The collective and civic problems of his early
works will lose their interest, or have lost it already; the jokes in the
Pleasant Plays run the risk of becoming, some day, no less uncomfortable
than those of Shakespeare (humor, I suspect, is an oral genre, a sudden favor
of conversation, not something written); the ideas declared in his prologues
and his eloquent tirades will be found in Schopenhauer and Samuel Butler;39
but Lavinia, Blanco Posnet, Keegan, Shotover, Richard Dudgeon and, above
all, Julius Caesar, surpass any character imagined by the art of our time. If
39 And in Swedenborg. In Man and Superman we read that Hell is not a penal
establishment but rather a state dead sinners elect for reasons of intimate affinity, just
as the blessed do with Heaven; the treatise De Coelo et Inferno by Swedenborg,
published in 1758, expounds the same doctrine.
204
we think of Monsieur Teste alongside them or Nietzsche's histrionic
Zarathustra, we can perceive with astonishment and even outrage the
primacy of Shaw. In 1911, Albert Soergel could write, repeating a
commonplace of the time, "Bernard Shaw is an annihilator of the heroic
concept, a killer of heroes" (Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit, 214); he did not
understand that the heroic might dispense with the romantic and be
incarnated in Captain Bluntschli of Arms and the Man, not in Sergius
Saranoff.
The biography of Bernard Shaw by Frank Harris contains an
admirable letter by the former, from which I copy the following words: "I
understand everything and everyone and I am nothing and no one." From
this nothingness (so comparable to that of God before creating the world, so
comparable to that primordial divinity which another Irishman, Johannes
Scotus Erigena, called Nihil), Bernard Shaw educed almost innumerable
persons or dramatis personae: the most ephemeral of these is, I suspect, that
G.B.S. who represented him in public and who lavished in the newspaper
columns so many facile witticisms.
Shaw's fundamental themes are philosophy and ethics: it is natural
and inevitable that he should not be valued in this country, or that he be so
only in terms of a few epigrams. The Argentine feels that the universe is
nothing but a manifestation of chance, the fortuitous concourse of
Democritus' atoms; philosophy does not interest him. Nor does ethics: the
social realm, for him, is reduced to a conflict of individuals or classes or
nations, in which everything is licit, save being ridiculed or defeated.
Man's character and its variations are the essential theme of the novel
of our time; lyric poetry is the complacent magnification of amorous
fortunes or misfortunes; the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers make
each of us the interesting interlocutor in a secret and continuous dialogue
with nothingness or the divinity; these disciplines, which in the formal sense
can be admirable, foment that illusion of the ego which the Vedanta
censures as a capital error. They usually make a game of desperation and
anguish, but at bottom they flatter our vanity; they are, in this sense,
immoral. The work of Shaw, however, leaves one with a flavor of liberation.
The flavor of the stoic doctrines and the flavor of the sagas.
Translated by J.E.I.



Parables



Ragnarök
I
n our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think
they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx;
we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel. If this is so, how
could a mere chronicle of its forms transmit the stupor, the exaltation, the
alarm, the menace and the jubilance which made up the fabric of that dream
that night? I shall attempt such a chronicle, however; perhaps the fact that
the dream was composed of one single scene may remove or mitigate this
essential difficulty.
The place was the School of Philosophy and Letters; the time, toward
sundown. Everything (as usually happens in dreams) was somewhat
different; a slight magnification altered things. We were electing officials: I
was talking with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who in the world of waking reality
died many years ago. Suddenly we were stunned by the clamor of a
demonstration or disturbance. Human and animal cries came from the Bajo.
A voice shouted "Here they come!" and then "The Gods! The Gods!" Four
or five individuals emerged from the mob and occupied the platform of the
main lecture hall. We all applauded, tearfully; these were the Gods returning
after a centuries-long exile. Made larger by the platform, their heads thrown
back and their chests thrust forward, they arrogantly received our homage.
One held a branch which no doubt conformed to the simple botany of
dreams; another, in a broad gesture, extended his hand which was a claw;
one of the faces of Janus looked with distrust at the curved beak of Thoth.
Perhaps aroused by our applause, one of them—I no longer know which—
erupted in a victorious clatter, unbelievably harsh, with something of a
gargle and of a whistle. From that moment, things changed.
It all began with the suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the Gods did
not know how to talk. Centuries of fell and fugitive life had atrophied the
human element in them; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been
implacable with these outlaws. Very low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy
mulatto or Chinese mustaches and thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy
of the Olympian lineage. Their clothing corresponded not to a decorous
poverty but rather to the sinister luxury of the gambling houses and brothels
of the Bajo. A carnation bled crimson in a lapel and the bulge of a knife was
outlined beneath a close-fitting jacket. Suddenly we sensed that they were
225
playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old
beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or pity, they
would finally destroy us.
We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers
in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.
Translated by J.E.I.



Elegy
Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forbears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.
(1964)
Translated by D.A.Y.