"The South" (Jorge Luis Borges)

from A Personal Anthology by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Anthony Kerrigan, story translated by Anthony Kerrigan (Grove Press, 1967)


A man named Juan Dahlmann suddenly took ill, was hospitalized, almost died, was cured, and then journeyed by train to the South, to his property ranch. After he came down from the train, Dahlmann walked into a store to eat and there encountered some bystanders who provoked him to a fight. Dahlmann stood up and confronted them. A knife suddenly materialized.

That's the bare bones of the story, told in just a few pages, ending with a duel to the death. What was interesting here was that Borges fashioned the existential pains of a convalescent man into an inquiry on the nature of time and violence: Time had never erased the desire to fight, always in the guise of upholding one's pride. Thus, what one sometimes ascribe to fate's decisions was but one's own flirtation with self-destruction, the seeming inevitability of violence when confronted with the other.

"Time" can mean here, in this place, in the South, an onward movement toward blood and dust. Time is biding its time. As we are all marked for death at the beginning, the entrance of (random) chance that seizes us without warning, forgets to apprise us of its malign intents. Time is the natural forward motion of existence. The seeming randomness or purposelessness of living is more than a matter of chance; rather, it is just a matter of time.

One seems to be presented with a conventional story, something with more of an actual plot than "Pierre Menard" or "The Library of Babel." The narrative at least appears to move linearly, the fantastical speculations held at bay. Or maybe not? Time suddenly shifted from 1871 to 1939. Time expanded such that eight interminable days seemed like eight centuries of bondage. Pure chance, aided by the beastly genetic makeup of men, gradually made its way to the temporal axis, finally reached its victim to strangle his throat.

"The South" was permeated with the images of time's passing: the sun changing its colors from one moment to the next, Dahlmann’s line of descent from a Johaness Dahlmann who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1871, sudden time shifts, sudden events that changed the climate of a situation from amiable to perilous. Even an edition of The Thousand and One Nights that Dahlmann acquired was trying to undermine time’s infinite regression: "To travel with this book, which was so much a part of the history of his ill-fortune, was a kind of affirmation that his ill-fortune had been annulled; it was a joyous and secret defiance of the frustrated forces of evil." Oh, if only he knew!

Dire events terminate into inevitability. The onus is on anyone found vulnerable. Twice in the story Dahlmann felt something brush his face, and in both occasions fate did not augur well. "Brushing cheeks with death," as Roberto Bolaño* would have it. In the first instance, a brush of bat (or bird) wings(?) on his cheeks, the appearance of blood, altogether harmless but which nonetheless signaled the start of a feverish lapse into sickness (septicemia, said the doctor), just a thin thread away from death. Sometimes time passes by as swift as a bat or bird brushing the face. This first premonition of death produced in Dahlmann a hypersensitivity of the senses. Sensations to external stimuli (colors, smell) were intensified. As much as it can, the body fought the disease to the last. Dahlmann recovered from this first brush, and lived another, just another, day.

The second time something brushed his cheek was when a gang of tough guys threw breadcrumbs at him. After recuperating from a near-death experience, he was dead set (no pun intended) to come down his ranch at the South to fully recover, only to fall again by the wayside. With an insult, a sneer in his direction. His life, just given a new lease, was again on the brink of extinction. Borges never told us how the knife duel ended.** Maybe it doesn’t matter. When mortals are already going down south, one escapes and survives, only to fall down the next trap.

Note: This is the third story discussed in the May reading of three Borges pieces.




*  I just learned from Nonsuch Book that Roberto Bolaño paid homage to "The South" in his own story, "The Insufferable Gaucho." How exciting! Reading Borges pays in itself, but recognizing his influences on Roberto, now that's value-adding. In 2666, Professor Amalfitano’s questions to Chucho Flores seemed to be inspired by "The Library of Babel": "That night Amalfitano asked the Mexican three questions. The first was what he thought of hexagons. The second was whether he knew how to construct a hexagon. The third was what he thought about the killings of women in Santa Teresa." Chucho didn't give satisfactory answers. The answers were perhaps locked away in one of the (infinite) hexagonal rooms.

**  In Dreamtigers, Borges sketched in "Martín Fierro" a possible ending to this short story: "...a man dreamed about a fight. A gaucho lifts a Negro off his feet with his knife, throws him down like a sack of bones, sees him agonize and die, crouches down to clean his blade, unties his horse, and mounts slowly so he will not be thought to be running away."

"The Library of Babel" (Jorge Luis Borges)

Books in themselves have no meaning.
– Jorge Luis Borges. "The Library of Babel." In The Mirror of Ink. (Pocket Penguin, 2005). Selections from Collected Fictions. (Viking Penguin, 1998).

The books signify nothing in themselves.
– Jorge Luis Borges. "The Library of Babel." In Labyrinths. Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. Story translated by James E. Irby. (New Directions, 1964 augmented edition).



Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a Rubik's Cube – a cube whose faces are made up of 3 x 3 colored squares, six colors in all distributed equally among the six faces of the cube. Imagine a solved Rubik's cube; that is, a cube where the 9 squares in one face are of the same color. Now let us add dimension to this cube and transform it into a tesseract, a geometrical figure where all the faces of the cube are laid out in a four-dimensional hypercube. (One of its orthogonal projections is shaped like a solid cross.) Imagine a Sudoku. Have you ever played one? It's one of those number games that you solve mentally. The game is composed of a grid of 9 by 9 empty square cells, some of them filled with numbers, some of them empty. Sudoku has specific rules; like for example, no number must be repeated in one horizontal series of boxes. Now imagine that each of the faces of the hypercube, unraveled from a Rubik's cube, is a game of Sudoku. That means there are 9 by 9 colored squares instead of 3 by 3. Think of Borges's Library of Babel as a Sudoku then. At least in terms of cellular architecture. And think of the dimensions as infinite instead of 9 by 9. There is thus an infinite solution to the problem. Now think of the square pixel as a hexagon. That is, cut out the tesseract faces into squares and line up the squares upright like bookshelves?

So much for thought experiments. Now on to the story, the second of three Borges pieces this May. Here is fiction, speculation. The construction of a Total Library whose smallest unit is hexagon, and whose spatial dimension is infinite. Its outer shape is a sphere. The hexagonal rooms are interlinked with each other by staircases and doors. At one time librarians manned the hexagons by threes. Now the librarians are becoming extinct. There is an ongoing war inside the Library of Babel. There is an invisible hierarchy and constant power play. It is its own world, a beehive, a colony of bibliophiles, complete with history, replete with heroes and villains. There is the Crimson Hexagon, The Vindications, the Purifiers, the latrines, the unending ladders, the Book-Man, the Total Book, and so on. It is an illustrious repository of books in all languages, with its own alphabet and writing system (orthographic symbols), 25 symbols in all.

This puzzle-story is concerned with the architecture of the library just as much as with its contents. Not unlike Sudoku with infinite solutions, the library is a condominium of conceit, a monolithic edifice. As much concerned with the layout of the library as with its internal philosophy, this story can be seen as Borges’s homage to the unlimited possibilities of imagination, imagination derived from knowledge, knowledge derived from meanings, meanings from books, books shelved in libraries, libraries encased in hexagons. An imaginary construct then, whose totality is infinite and whose solutions to any conceivable problems of the world can be found. The location of the fountain of youth, the history of Atlantis, the art and architecture of El Dorado.

The Library of Babel is a learned city with its own particularities, its own rules of the game. The story called "The Library of Babel" is a thought experiment, speculative fiction, an artist’s rendering of what is possible, the staggering diversity of information, its past history (a tautology*), its implications for the future (another tautology). Censorship, for example, is futile because all the books are replicated in one way or another. The Library of Babel celebrates the security and encryption of data storage. Think of encyclopedia, storehouse of knowledge, in a book of six faces, coded in a new language with 25 orthographic symbols. Think of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, housed in an ultra-secure physical dormitory. The Library of Babel and the story called "The Library of Babel" exist to be unraveled by the reader in his cubicle, to be searched and re-searched.

Books in themselves have no meaning – that is one of the dicta of the Total Library, in Andrew Hurley’s translation**. I agree. We must read them first, assiduously. To create meaning is not for the sake of books, nor for the writer of books. Come visit a library, rummage through the shelves, pick out a book, read. That may be the only way to stumble upon intermittent truths, find the clue to solve a mathematical conjecture, or learn about the lifestyle of a hidden god. 



*  "To speak is to commit tautologies. This pointless verbose epistle already exists … in one of the countless hexagons – as does its refutation." (p. 27, The Mirror of Ink)

** It is interesting to read this story in two translations by Irby and Hurley. One notes for example that the editor’s footnote is fictitious, written by Borges or whoever the designated editor of the story is. The identity of the narrator, who sounds like a prophet, is a mystery as well.

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (Jorge Luis Borges)

from Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby, story translated by James E. Irby (New Directions, 1964 augmented edition)


My interest in Borges I pick up from the interest in Borges of my favorite contemporary writers. Roberto Bolaño, in an interview, called him “the center of the Latin American canon.” Borges animates most of Bolaño’s writings, notably in Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666 (two books I’ve been recently rereading) where Borges’s literary patterns are evident. His influence also makes his way into The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, through references to The Book of Imaginary Beings and the story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I was also surprised to find Borges name-checked by Murakami Haruki (not my favorite writer yet) in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

So when I got wind of a weekly reading of three stories of our Argentine writer in Richard’s great blog, Caravana de Recuerdos, I couldn’t let pass the chance. Besides, I have Labyrinths languishing for more than a year now.

This week’s story is the much-anthologized, much-celebrated story of Pierre Menard and how he came to “rewrite” chapters of the epic Don Quixote. I do think that my appreciation of this story will be enhanced by a reading of the epic, but I don’t think I can cram the tome in the span of a few days, unless I get the unrealistic idea from Menard that a reading of a book consists of the “will” to reproduce its ghost in the realm of imagination-illusion-delusion. But Menard does more than will it, he actually suffered for it.

The story starts with a kind of catalog of Menard’s “visible” literary outputs, before turning to the other “unfinished” work—“the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless.” Reading as a form of writing is what I see the story is about. That the readers write their own version of the story as they go along. Menard has this dream of replicating sections of the Quixote verbatim, and so he willed himself to this endeavor and, from the convenient point of view of the fanboy-narrator, Menard succeeded. Does this mean that everyone who reads the Quixote can be a Pierre Menard, just like everyone who reads “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” can be a Jorge Luis Borges? Perhaps we’ll know only if the real Pierre Menard stand up. But what if I say that I can match Borges’s story word for word? :)

If I can borrow Gregory Rabassa’s idea (in his memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents) that a good translation is essentially a good reading, then another reading of this story pertains not only to the “reading” of a book, but to “translating” it:

[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

Is that not the same as saying that Menard may be (just may be) translating the Quixote? If so, Borges may really be ahead of his time, as is often declared. When he published the story, there are already several versions of the epic in the English language alone. With the latest developments in Cervantes scholarship, the years saw the appearance of multiple translations of the Spanish novel by, among others, Samuel Putnam and Burton Raffel, and in the past decade alone, by John Rutherford, Edith Grossman, and Tom Lathrop. Do these translators, by their close readings of the text, form a band of Pierre Menards themselves? Do we not regard them as “co-creators” of the Quixote, if not literally (word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence translation) then contextually (context-by-context) through their interpretation of the epic’s Spanish into their own language, the coinciding of one language into another? In the same way that there are always individual (unique) readings of a book from different readers, then the individual efforts of the translators create a new book that is the same book and also not the same book. The only difference with Menard is that they have something, a concrete product, to show for it: the published translations. Menard apparently destroyed the manuscript of his “translation” in a bonfire.

There is no definitive reading; there is no definitive translation. Individual readings will not arrive at the same feeling, the feeling of completeness or incompleteness, of closure or open-endedness. Every reading is a new reading, just as there is no definitive writing. The author himself, Cervantes himself, does not fully know his own work because it created for itself a life of its own the moment he put down pen and paper, and the moment the presses printed the pages and bound the epic between the spine and covers. Writing may have given breath to books, but it is reading through the ages that gives life to books through the ages. That enables for it to survive oblivion, become a classic. The narrator of Borges’s Menard did the reverse: he elevated a translated version of a classic that only exists in oblivion, or in any case, that is consigned to it.

The Rings of Saturn: Silk

X


The final chapter of The Rings of Saturn began with our narrator describing the various subjects that Sir Thomas Browne wrote about in his papers. They included the "Musæum Clausum," a catalog of curiosities that were likely products of Browne’s imagination. Sebald proceeded to itemize some of the objects mentioned in this "register of marvels." The last item he mentioned was a bamboo cane containing silkworm eggs that two Persian friars smuggled from China during the reign of Emperor Justinianus in Byzantium.

From this moment on, Sebald began to describe the science of sericulture: the anatomical and biological traits of Bombyx mori, the species of moth responsible for spinning the fine silk thread; the white mulberry tree that harbors the silkworm; the propagation of silkworms and the art of silk-making in China during the time of Emperor Huang Ti; the spread of silkworm culture from Greece, the Aegean islands, Sicily, Naples, Piedmont, Savoy, and Lombardy. It later spread to France through the initiative of Olivier de Serres who became the counsellor of Henry IV.

Sully, Henry IV’s prime minister, saw a competition in ascendancy from de Serres, so he opposed the idea of silk worm cultivation in France and published his arguments in his memoirs of 1788, a volume of which was acquired by Sebald at an auction. Sully’s objections were ignored and silk cultivation progressed in France, in part because of the Edict of Nantes (1598), which promoted tolerance of Huguenots, the people mainly responsible for the cultivation of silkworms.

England copied France’s example. James I began to establish the rearing of silkworms by planting mulberry trees in Buckingham Palace. The silkworm industry in England reached it peak following Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when Huguenots fled France and settled in England to continue their work on silk-making. Sebald reflected on how silk weavers, with their backbreaking work over the complex patterns they create, resembled scholars and writers in that they are all prone to melancholy and the evils associated with it. He also observed that, notwithstanding the despair and mental illnesses of the weavers, the beauty and variety of materials that they produce were truly incredible, "like the plumage of birds."

The Germans also attempted their hand at silk husbandry. By 1822, however, Seybolt(!) – a master dyer and employed as "Keeper of the Silkworms and Superintendent of Carding and Filature") – told the Director of the Royal Gardens that in spite of the thousands of mulberry trees planted, only two survived, the reason being the "despotic manner in which German rulers attempted to force [silk cultivation] along." The compulsory measures and stiff penalties of the silk laws were eventually revoked upon the death of the duke of Bavaria, Karl Theodor.

In 1811, silkworm cultivation in the German borders also failed due to environmental conditions. Despite this discouraging state of the industry, the Bavarian Counsellor of State Joseph von Hazzi campaigned for the continuation of sericulture. In his book (1826) he emphasized the lessons learned from past mistakes, the inculcation of "virtues of order and cleanliness" to the lower classes by way of silk cultivation, and thus the imperative to continue sericulture as the thing that would eventually lead to the "moral transformation of the nation."

It will be one hundred years more before German fascists put into effect Hazzi’s vision. Sebald knew this from a film on German silk industry: "In contrast to the dark, almost midnight tonalities of the herring [fisheries] film, the film on sericulture was of a truly dazzling brightness. Men and women in white coats, in whitewashed rooms flooded with light, were busy at snow-white spinning frames, snow-white sheets of paper, snow-white protective gauze, snow-white cocoons and snow-white canvas mailing sacks. The whole film promised the best and cleanest of all possible worlds." According to a pamphlet on the film, Hitler announced at a party rally that the nation must strive for self-sufficiency in all material aspects. Thus, silk cultivation was taken as a matter of policy for economic reasons and also to usher in the "dawning era of aerial warfare."

The pamphlet further contained several strategies to involve young students with silk cultivation. It outlined the steps involved in planting mulberry trees and the rearing of silkworms. According to the pamphlet: The silkworms "could be used to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and essential measures … to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to pre-empt racial degeneration."

The film demonstrated the systematic hatching and feeding of caterpillars, the cleaning of frames, the spinning of silk, and lastly the killing by suspending cocoons over boiling cauldron: "The cocoons, spread out in shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is complete."

The book ended on Maundy Thursday, April 13, 1995, with Sebald contemplating the events that coincided on that day from previous years. It was the day, for example, that the Edict of Nantes was approved by Henry IV, 397 years ago. On the same day, 253 years ago, was the first performance of Handel’s Messiah. It was also the very same day that the father of Clara, Sebald’s companion, died in hospital. It occurred to him that black silk was previously worn by the upper classes to mourn for the dead. And there was once a practice in Holland, according to Sir Thomas Browne, of draping black ribbons over mirrors and canvases to enable the soul to travel peacefully on its final journey.

The Rings of Saturn: Very the last stop

In the penultimate chapter of The Rings of Saturn, our traveller is at the last stop of his journey.

IX

After Orford, Sebald travelled by bus to Yoxford and then walked along a Roman road until he arrived at Chestnut Tree Farm. This is the residence of Thomas Abrams, a farmer and lay preacher who had been working for twenty years on a scale model of the Temple of Jerusalem. Abrams became obsessed with recreating a Jerusalem as it had looked at the beginning of time. His endless work on the replica, which was nowhere near completion, was later acknowledged when he received visitors from all over the world, including historians, archaeologists, religious men, and even Lord Rothschild. This acknowledgement assuaged his neighbor’s, and even his own family’s doubts, about the sanity of his mind since he became immersed in his work. After their conversation Abrams drove Sebald to his next destination, Harleston, where he stayed in Saracen’s Head.

In the morning Sebald walked from Saracen’s Head to some hamlets in 'The Saints' – so-called because they were named after patron saints of churches. He arrived at a cemetery of the parish church of Ilketshall St Margaret, where in the Middle Ages a certain Reverend Ives was vicar living with his wife and daughter in Bungay. In 1795 they were visited daily by an exiled French nobleman, the Vicomte François-René Chateaubriand. The Vicomte became the tutor of the daughter, Charlotte. (The narrative Sebald was recounting at this point mostly came from the memoirs of Chateaubriand, which he began writing in 1807.) Charlotte became very close to Chateaubriand so much so that during his farewell dinner with the family, the mother asked him to marry Charlotte. It turned out that Chateaubriand was already married and so cannot accept the offer. He left the house immediately.

Twenty-seven years later, when Chateaubriand was now ambassador of the French king, he was visited by one Lady Sutton, accompanied by her two sons. This was actually Charlotte Ives, who married Admiral Sutton three years after Chateaubriand left her. After this encounter, Chateaubriand visited her in Kensington four times; during his last visit Charlotte asked her to put in a good word with the Governor-General of India, for her elder son who planned to serve in Bombay.

After Charlotte left, Chateaubriand relived and wrote about their "unhappy story," questioning himself whether in writing he would not again betray and lose Charlotte. But no, for him writing is the only way he can cope with the overwhelming memories that beset him. Later he asked in his memoir: "What would we be without memory?"

At this point, Sebald shared several events in Chateaubriand’s life: momentous wars and conflicts, military spectacles, "the highlights of history which staggers blindly from one disaster to the next," his death in 1848, his childhood in Combourg, and the day he left his family at age 17 to strike into the world.

Sebald’s walk took him to Ditchingham Lodge where Charlotte Sutton lived with her husband. From there he went to the last stop of his travels, to the Ditchingham churchyard where Charlotte’s elder son, the one who went to Bombay, is buried. Beside his tomb is another monument of heavy stone which had an urn on top of it and had several air-holes on the upper edges. Sebald presumed that the woman buried on it was an acquaintance of Charlotte Sutton.

Sebald then went to the Mermaid in Hedenham to phone and wait for Clara (Sebald’s wife?) who will pick him up and drive him home. Contemplating the surrounding Ditchingham Park, Sebald assumed that it must have been built at the time Chateaubriand was in Suffolk. (Sebald noted that the building of park landscapes in England must sometimes have led to class conflicts owing to the displacement of entire villages at the pleasure of the ruling elite.) Chateaubriand himself undertook the planting of trees in a summer house he brought in 1807. Sebald’s identification with Chateaubriand is evident from a reproduction of his photograph where he posed under a large Lebanese cedar, more like demonstrating Chateaubriand's close affinity to trees.

Much like in the collapse of herring fisheries, Sebald enumerated several causes of decline in the population of trees in England beginning in the mid-1970s. These include the spread of Dutch elm disease, mutations, old age, and long droughts. The devastation culminated in the autumn of 1987 when a powerful hurricane landed and felled 14 million mature hard-leaf trees, turning literally everything "upside down."