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Lila Singh

The Inconceivable Universe: Written Infinities in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph,” “The Zahir,” and “The Writing of the God”

“It is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” On Mysticism

Among the many conundrums in the short fiction of Jorge Luis Borges is this paradoxical predicament: how can a writer, using the finite symbols of language, capture the infinite? If literature, as Aristotle frames it, is mimetic, language is the semiotic system through which Borges imitates infinity (Domínguez et al. 107). But if one takes a deconstructionist view of language—which would imply even Borges himself does not fully comprehend that which he is writing—how is Borges to provide enough contextual clues for his readers to imagine a concept similar to that which his own imagination has conceived (Hutchinson 87)? In “The Aleph,” “The Writing of the God,” and “The Zahir,” Borges uses metafiction, paradoxical symbols, and specificity in his language to engage this paradox of rendering the infinite through the finite, revealing, in the process, the potentials and limitations of language as a means to the endless and the entire.

One of the ways Borges engages the paradox of writing infinity is through fictional and metafictional examinations of the limitations and potentials of language. In “The Aleph,” for example, Borges fictionally broaches the impossibility of his task via Borges-the-character’s dismissal of the poet Carlos Argentino’s proposal to “versify the entire planet” as absurd (30). Ironically, Borges-the-character later finds himself struggling to comprehend what he has seen in the Aleph—a sphere in which all the points of the universe as seen from every perspective somehow coexist in simultaneity and, importantly, a creation of Borges-the-writer (Sieber 203). To mitigate the task of expressing the contained infinity he has witnessed, Borges concedes that “the enumeration, even partial enumeration, of infinity” is “irresolvable” (for how can a writer capture the simultaneity of reality within the succession of language?) (37). Instead, Borges only claims to attempt capturing “something of it,” making his task as a writer much more attainable (37). In “The Writing of the God,” a similar discussion of the weakness of words as a means to tackle infinity occurs when Tzinacán, the protagonist, acknowledges human words as mere “shadows and simulacra” relative to the Word of the God, a word signifying all the infinite meanings that can be comprehended within a language (Borges 53). A final writerly strategy Borges uses to render the infinite in the finite is to not render it at all, an avoidance that can be seen in the same story, when Tzinicán conveniently claims to not “speak the formula” of the universe because, after all, what do his sentiments matter in comparison to the universe (55)? And yet, Borges contradicts himself, alternatively suggesting that perhaps all words contain infinity, that “there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe” (52). This idea that a single symbol—a word—could signify infinity emerges again in “The Zahir.” Borges muses that Tennyson, writing that we might understand ourselves and the world if we “could but understand a single flower,” was perhaps trying to express that “the visible world can be seen entire in every image” (49). It is a sentiment which bears remarkable similarity to Derrida’s principle of differánce, to the notion that behind every word exists a multiplicity of concepts. Here, then, emerges an example of what Floyd Merrel describes as Borges’ destruction of the “comfortable demarcation” between the sacred and the everyday, Borges’ suggestion that from emptiness simultaneously emerges the possibility of “everythingness” (87). Thus, Borges suggests writing could not possibly capture infinity while also suggesting every written word contains it.

Borges further engages the question of writing infinity through the symbols—often mystical—which occur in his short fiction. Each of the central infinities of the three stories in question are themselves paradoxical symbols; the Aleph is a singular point in time and space that contains all time and space; a single Word—that of the God Qaholom—somehow reveals an understanding of the entire universe; and the Zahir is a coin which both erases the world beyond its limits and is the world beyond its limits. Suggesting an authorial understanding of the difficulty of comprehending paradoxically contained infinities, Borges encourages his readers to read these symbols comparatively with the similarly paradoxical ideas of the mystics, like Alain de Lille’s sphere with a center that’s everywhere and circumference that’s nowhere referenced in “The Aleph” and the gnostics’ “dark light” referenced in “The Zahir” (Hutchinson 44; Borges 44, 37). Writing specifically of “The Aleph,” Sieber argues Borges employs symbols to “prepare readers to understand that they will have to free their minds from certain constraints regarding the nature of a sequential, orderly universe to be able to perceive the nature of the Aleph” (203). In other words, reading Borges’ symbols comparatively with these other symbols encourages the reader to broaden the possibilities of how they perceive reality to make space for the seemingly impossible, for the mystical, for the fantastical. In this way, Borges shows the metaphorical potential for language as a means to infinity; all these emblems are able to suggest the infinite despite the poverty of the words used to describe them.

Finally, Borges reaches for infinity in his writing through specificity in both the words he chooses and how he arranges them. The most obvious way Borges flings words at the infinite is through his usage of the word “infinity” itself, as well as synonymous or related words. Ana María Barrenechea writes of Borges using a vocabulary of vastness, adjectives “like vague gestures in time and space” (24). In “The Writing of the God,” he recruits words like absolute and entire to emphasize the broadness of what the Word of Qaholom must signify, while understanding signifiers such as the Zahir as indicative of everything is something Borges construes as having a vast and inexplicable importance (53; 45). A less obvious way Borges engages language to play with the infinite is through his syntax. For instance: the anaphora of “I saw [x, y, z]” that shows up in “The Aleph” and “The Writing of the God.” Borges uses this construction to introduce the “infinite things” he sees in the Aleph—labyrinths and spiderwebs and memories and an earth mise en abyme en abyme between mirrors—endless visions given an even greater quality of infiniteness through the way Borges juxtaposes the abstract, the erudite, the mundane, and the concrete within a single sentence on the page (38). This anaphoric construction is recruited once more to convey Tzinacán’s witnessing of the “universe,” “the origins,” and a“faceless god” in the Wheel which acts as a cipher to the infinity-implying writing of the God (55). In brief, Borges is intentional in the words he uses as nets for infinity, perhaps because of his awareness of what poor nets words make.

Thus faced with the writerly paradox of capturing infinities and the transcendent within the finite symbols of language, Borges employs an eclectic array of strategies—metafiction, symbols, and precision in his language. More could be said on his use of mirrors to convey infinities and the specific nature of the infinities of sentiment, time, and space he seeks to convey, but such commentary is beyond the scope of this paper. Arguably, the successive nature of language, the mutual construction of meaning between writer and reader, and the inconceivability of the paradoxes Borges presents make translating infinity in its entirety to the page an impossibility. However, Borges-as-mystical translator does succeed in conveying the idea and potential of infinity. In other words, while the finite will never be able to fully convey the infinite, Borges’ short fiction reveals that language can at least suggest it. For the purposes of sharing meaning between writers and readers, perhaps that suggestion of infinity is enough.

Works Cited

Barrenechea, Ana María. Borges: The Labyrinth Maker. Translated by Robert Lima, New York UP, 1965.

Borges, Jorge Luis. On Mysticism. Edited by Suzanne Jill Levine and Maria Kodama, Penguin Books, 2010.

Domínguez, Cesar, et al. Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications. Routledge, 2015.

Hutchinson, Ben. Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2018.

Merrell, Floyd. "Borges: Between Zero and Infinity." Journal of Romance Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, winter 2007, pp. 87-100, https://doi.org/10.3167/jrs.2007/.070307. Accessed 10 June 2022.

Sieber, Sharon Lynn. "Time, Simultaneity, and the Fantastic in the Narrative of Jorge Luis Borges." Romance Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 3, summer 2004, pp. 200-11, https://doi.org/10.3200/RQTR.51.3.200-211. Accessed 10 June 2022.