Within a few minutes, you will see the Aleph. The microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh!
– Jorge Luis Borges
Happy Speculation Day! (Oddly, this year’s entry overlaps my Imbolc series.) I’ve used Borges quotes fairly often recently in this blog, so I thought one of his short stories would work well now. I decided on his most famous one, “The Aleph.” I don’t like to summarize such well-known tales, so I’ll leave a link to the plot here and turn straight to my own observations (while trying to make the resulting narrative coherent.)
The first thing I noticed when reading this story is the obsessive-compulsive voice of the narrator. A woman who had never accepted his overtures dies, and he visits her first cousin – a man he has “always detested” – every year on her birthday for eleven years. In the most calculated way, he progressively ingratiates himself with the man until his antagonist confides in him: first about his poetry, which the narrator finds unbearably pretentious, then about the titular possession described in the above quote. The antagonist, Carlos Argentino Daneri, brings the narrator (I don’t think he ever reveals his own name, so I’ll just call him “Borges,”) to his cellar to see this wonder for himself. Borges asks:
How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain? In a similar situation, mystics have employed a wealth of emblems: to signify the deity, a Persian mystic speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alain de Lille speaks of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; Ezekiel, of an angel with four faces, facing east and west, north and south at once. (It is not for nothing that I call to mind these inconceivable analogies; they bear a relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but then this report would be polluted with literature, with falseness. And besides, the central problem – the enumeration, even partial enumeration, of infinity – is irresolvable. In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive.
Deep into the long list of things Borges records are “obscene, incredible, detailed letters that” Beatriz*, the deceased object of his obsession, had sent her cousin. The narrator, after having seen this wonder, immediately revenges himself on his host by insinuating that he had seen nothing, and he convinces Daneri to sell his home containing this treasure for (Borges implies) the sake of his own sanity. After his antagonist wins second place in the National Prize for Literature, a contest in which his own work did not place, the narrator tries to prove to us (and himself?) that what he witnessed was a “false Aleph.”
Apart from the allusion to incest and to the narrator’s obsession, I found Borges’ report on Daneri and his poetry interesting – it being strangely knowing and intimate. The report strikes me as conveying the author’s own sense of shame at (or, at least, fear of) being self-indulgent. His retelling of his antagonist’s discovery likewise suggests a closer relationship to him than his descriptions imply…
… “It’s mine, it’s mine; I discovered it in my childhood, before I ever attended school. The cellar stairway is steep, and my aunt and uncle had forbidden me to go down it, but somebody said you could go around the world with that thing down there in the basement. The person, whoever it was, was referring, I later learned, to a steamer trunk, but I thought there was some magical contraption down there. I tried to sneak down the stairs, fell head over heels, and when I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph.”
Such aspects of the text suggest to me that Daneri is either the narrator himself or at least a close relative. Wouldn’t his description of the Aleph (an accurate depiction of a religious experience,) and his reaction, therefore, be an expression of distrust in himself as an oracle?
* The name of the object of his affection, being a variant of Dante’s muse’s, is likely significant.
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