from Borgesland, A voyage through the infinite, imaginary places, labyrinths, Buenos Aires & other psychogeographies & figments of space

When I travel through my room, I rarely follow a straight line: I go from the table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there, I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it really is my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado.

Xavier de Maistre

Who wouldn’t like to bump into an Aleph? To encounter an impossible object of pure spatiality where absolutely everything can be seen from absolutely every angle in a scopic orgy of visual excess, the ultimate voyeuristic experience where the whole universe can be peeped at without looking back at you, a miniaturised object that provides a fast, effortless, compressed, instantaneous transcendental experience in a truly awesome mind tool that simultaneously satisfies our so far unrealisable desire for transparency? If an economy of psychic excess is embodied in this impossible object that speaks about so many impossibilities, not only is the Aleph itself an object of pure spatiality, but space in its multiplicity haunts everything in ‘The Aleph’. The epigraph before the story starts takes us to Hamlet’s well known musings on mind as the most privileged of spaces, O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space, the appositeness of this quotation being at least triple: it summarises in epigrammatic form one of the readings of the story; it introduces the reader to the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm; and it comes from a play where there is an example of an imperfect mise en abîme, the Aleph being an impossible object where a vertiginously perfect mise en abîme takes place (I am referring to the play Hamlet within Hamlet, which being a play that had to be acted out could not but posit an imperfect mise en abîme, for actors cannot act infinitely in time, the imperfection arising only when the text is performed). The second epigraph, from Leviathan, refers to the incomprehensible theological affirmations about eternity as inhabiting a still instant or being located in an Infinite greatness of Place. This second quotation, which is ironic in Hobbes, is conveniently cropped, the continuation being about the philosophical problem of the One and the Many, a problem that haunts many of Borges’s stories, and which the narrator will briefly and incompletely refer to (he only offers the reader a partial genealogy of this philosophical and religious paradox), as a way of drawing historical analogies that parallel and validate his metaphysical experience when he encounters the Aleph. These initial quotations refer to the infinitude of mind and the recurrent will to invent spaces, encapsulating two of the main possible readings of ‘The Aleph’, whilst summarising its main concerns and integrating them within a literary, theological and philosophical lineage concerned with space and space-time. Indeed, in a talk called ‘My prose’, Borges referred to the Aleph as the transformation of the scholastic idea of eternity as an instant, into its spatial equivalent: ‘I had read in the theologians that eternity is not the sum of yesterday, today and tomorrow, but an instant, an infinite instant, in which all our yesterdays are assembled as Shakespeare in Macbeth says, all the present and all the incalculable future or futures. I said to myself: if somebody has prodigiously imagined an instant that embraces and enciphers the sum of time, why not do the same with that modest category called space? … Well, I simply applied to space that idea about eternity’.

Public space, the space of literature, representation as an acceptable intermediary space, the space of a woman’s body as the site of a fetishistic inscription, the space of telecommunications, house as the space of intimacy, mental space as unrepresentable, as awesome and incomprehensible as the universe, the pathological nature of cities and the therapeutical properties of the countryside, the self as constituted by all these spaces: as a story, ‘The Aleph’, offers many entrances to different ideas on space. At the beginning there is a reference to the scandalous indifference of public space to the fate of individuals. Public space, supposedly constituted by individuals, is an abstract entity ruled by economic and ideological forces whose dynamics exclude the individual, public space being identified here with a site where signs for consumption circulate. Beatriz has died, but a billboard has renewed an advertisement for cigarettes, a change that will set off a butterfly effect: ‘I noticed that a new advertisement for some cigarrettes or other (blondes, I believe they were) had been posted on the iron billboards of Plaza Constitución; the fact deeply grieved me, for I realized that the vast unceasing universe was already growing away from her, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series. The universe may change, but I shall not’. If the advert registers a collision between the continuous time of progress and the epiphanic time of death, it also suggests the idea that the individual is not merely part of an indifferent public space, a city, a country, a continent or a planet, but a minute element lost in an incomprehensible and indifferent macro-cosmos, the universe; however, a refusal to change, to flow with the landscape, is posited here as an strategy of inertia, a possibility of resistance towards change imposed from without.

From the universe, we move into that minute universe that individuals have built for themselves, a house, the house in Calle Garay, a street in an unfashionable part of Buenos Aires named after the founder Juan de Garay, which places the location of the Aleph alongside the founding of the city. The house, now inhabited by Beatriz’s cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri, is a repository of memories for the narrator (whose name we will later learn happens to be ‘Borges’, thus creating a familiar specular mirage, the splitting of identity that Borges is so fond of). These memories are triggered by the relatively new representational space of photographs: photographs that freeze meaningful time, photographs that summarise Beatriz’s life from rites of passage such as her first communion or her wedding, to a meaningful date such as her divorce and even tell us about the social status of the photographed, Beatriz Viterbo at the Turf Club . ‘Borges’ tells us that Beatriz died in 1929 and until 1941, that is to say for twelve years, he indulged in the circularity of a very precise ritual. Every thirtieth of April he visited her house around quarter past seven and stayed around twenty minutes. With time, inevitably, he arrived a bit later, stayed a bit longer. However, the ritualistic nature of his visits translates his refusal to change into the fetishisation of a time, a place and a dead woman, the anniversaries being of course vainly erotic, but having an invaluable advantage: ‘now that she was dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory—without hope, but also without humiliation’. Moreover, what is most remarkable about Beatriz is that she embodied one of Borges’s dearest obsessions, her body being the site of an inscription, a double and contradictory movement, the oxymoron, a rhetorical figure where apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction: ‘in her walk there was (if I may be pardoned the oxymoron) something of a graceful clumsiness, an incipient ecstasy’. Beatriz’s body embodies thus a paradox, an oxymoron, a double tempo, a fact that is related to ecstasy (the only compliment Beatriz gets throughout the story), like the paradoxical space of the Aleph, paradox being here fetishised as ecstatic.

Next, we are plunged into the twentieth-century inventions that have radically transformed, and are still transforming, our concept of space: the space of telecommunications, where signs are transmitted from one place to another without a body, where sign and body are separated and distance is erased. Spirited by a few glasses of brandy, Carlos Argentino launches into a vindication of the modern man unencumbered by geographical obstacles: ‘ “I picture him”, he said with an animation that was rather unaccountable, “in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-phone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment”, (….) for a man so equipped, the act of travelling was superrogatory; this twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muhammad and the mountain—mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad’.

Carlos Argentino declares that he has already included the space that has transformed people’s lives so much during the twentieth century, in his long poem called ‘The Earth’, which is a description of the entire planet. With pride, not to say arrogance, the poet recites a few verses. If the list of technological devices he has just cited shrink time, his verses contain in four lines thirty centuries of literature, thus showing literary space to be a privileged space where time can be extremely compressed and distorted. The first line, which in a disdainful way equates worldliness with experiencing cities runs: ‘I have seen, as did the Greek, man’s cities and his fame’, the last one: ‘For the voyage I narrate is … autour de ma chambre’. Whilst the first line refers to Homer and the Odyssey, a fictional travelogue that recounts the journeys of Odysseus during his years of wandering after the sack of Troy, the last line is an homage to Xavier de Maistre’s popular A journey around my room (1790), a parody of real travelogues which wittily negates the necessity for exotic destinations, extolling instead the exploration of different itineraries around one’s room. Maistre, who is mentioned in the English translation of this story but not in the Spanish original, pioneered room-travel when he was confined to house arrest for forty-two days over a duelling incident. Travelling becomes a mental pursuit, an armchair psychogeography of sorts, which becomes an exploration of inner space. Stressing the sheer spatial matrix at the core of ‘The Aleph’, fantasy travel literature is thus aptly at the centre of Carlos Argentino’s literary concerns, some of which are uncannily close to those of Borges. From the twin lines that constitute a symmetrical space recalling baroque rhetoric, to compressing centuries and centuries in a single poem, to fictional travelogues, enumeration, allusion and the intricate vastness of the planet, Carlos Argentino seems a burlesque doppelgänger of Borges the poet at his worst, as well as what perhaps Borges was or could have been had he not realised the necessity for dissolving these concerns into conceptual stories propelled by compelling metaphors. Thus the narrator’s tedium: ‘Borges’ considers tedious Carlos Argentino’s intentions of describing the whole planet, referring in his precise erudition to a similar enterprise that he considers might be less tedious, a topographical epic, Polyolbion, by Michael Drayton, which in fifteen thousand dodecasyllables, intended to describe the whole of England. Drayton, a literary figure from Shakespeare’s circle, had first the intention of mapping in writing the whole of Britain, then settled for England, a more modest enterprise, undoubtedly, a task reminiscent of the 1:1 scale map that geographers construct in one of Borges’s stories, which constituted an actual debate for geographers of the seventeenth century.

Demolition is a suggestive theme, it erases something as definite as a building on utility grounds, it shatters a space to replace it with an alternative that better suits the interests of urban modernisation, the landlords, the state, the almighty powerful, regardless of the interests of the inhabitants of that space. If we take a house as a psychic space where personal memories, thoughts and dreams are integrated by the individual, then its demolition directly interferes with that most personal of tissues, scarring it. Carlos Argentino’s house, a space to dream, a space to write poetry, a house, the most personal and creative of spaces, belongs to some entrepreneurs who build next to it an overwhelmingly modern salon-bar, a bar so modern that Carlos Argentino compares it to the most elegant bars in Flores in an unfortunate comparison that indicates how out of touch he is with what is in vogue, for this neigbourhood was at the time a far cry from chic: ‘Much against your inclinations it must be that you recognize that this place is on a par with the most elevated heights in Flores’. Calle Garay, an unfashionable street, has a new status, lent by the new bar. It is there that Carlos Argentino will ask ‘Borges’ for a literary favour. Walking down the street, when ‘Borges’ turns a street corner, he sees this street corner as a forking path, a metaphor for the choices he has concerning this favour: ‘as I turned down Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen, I contemplated as impartially as I could the futures that were left to me’ in a line that is reminiscent of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. Later on, he will receive the news from Carlos Argentino that his landlords (what an interesting word in its feudal connotations) want to demolish his house in order to build an extension to the bar. Entrepreneurial expansionism, that is to say, the violence of capitalist modernisation, demolishes dreaming spaces without showing any consideration to its inhabitants: a private site of jouissance is going to be replaced by a space of consumption and sociability, a literary café.

Carlos Argentino might be a parody of a literato but his house is a bachelardian house, it is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining. It is through the threat of demolition that we find out about Carlos Argentino’s need of the house in order to dream, in order to imagine, in order to write. It is through the threat to this need that we find out about his secret world: a world that can be glimpsed from the cellar. As a child, Carlos Argentino is told there is a world in the cellar. As a child, he takes the word literally and finds a world in the cellar, the Aleph. In the darkness, the Aleph makes itself glowingly present to our consciousness. It is an object that can only be seen from a position reminiscent of deep oneiric experience: while lying down, from a very specific position, darkness and immobility being fundamental, while a glass of brandy seems to facilitate the descent into the cellar. In the contemporary picture of the universe there is no place for transcendental experience, making the experience of the Aleph akin to the experience where the mystical mind might become both a transfigured and a transfiguring mind, able to see the all in everything. If many religions use prolonged and continuous singing or screaming to attain a mental trance where psychic boundaries lose their contours, a secular society has found a faster method: alcohol. In ‘The Aleph’, brandy enables the narrator to blur the contours of mental boundaries. The Aleph affords that experience from without, but ironically brandy, darkness and physical position seem important prerequisites for an encounter with the unknown.

According to Carlos Argentino, the Aleph is: ‘the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist. (…) The microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh!’. The poet persuades the narrator to go down into the cellar with an erotic lure (thus anticipating the Aleph as a libidinised space), the erotic lure being that ‘Borges’ could engage in dialogue with all the images of Beatriz (this emphasis on images reminds us of a spectral female character in the short story ‘Ulrikke’, which ends with the possession of an image: ‘and for the first and last time, I possessed the image of Ulrikke’). How can one establish a dialogue with an image? Do images speak back? Perhaps they do, perhaps they manage to generate an imaginary dialogue, a dialogue with one's inner texture. However, this voracious possibility -the possibility of engaging in dialogue with all the images of Beatriz, as in the realisation of a portentous sexual fantasy- already entails the actual impossibility of such a task, for it is impossible to absolutely know the other, to see the other from absolutely every single angle, although the poet claims that the Aleph affords such experience. Has Carlos Argentino seen ‘Borges’ in the Aleph talking to the photographs of Beatriz? Carlos Argentino’s confession about such an impossible object confirms the narrator’s long fostered suspicion that there was something pathological about the Viterbo family, that they might be mad, allowing him not only to establish distance with the memory of Beatriz, but to dismiss the poet as insane. It is a felicitous realisation, for he harbours a tacit hatred for the poet that finds perverse satisfaction in such a possibility. He has now found a definite means of discriminating against Carlos Argentino, he can now justify his hatred on a prejudice that is socially sanctioned because it dissolves the precarious borders of reason: madness.

Cellars have long been associated with the unconscious, with irrational fears, fears that cannot be rationalised: it could be said that the criminal cellar belongs to the Western collective unconscious. If cellars should send a reader of Borges to Poe, Bachelard, a good reader of the latter, posits the cellar as a place where dark aspects of the psyche can be accessed, explored and integrated. Bachelard tells us that ‘If a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality’, that ‘thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if a house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated’. One of Bachelard’s aims was to ‘study a few ultra-cellars which prove that the cellar dream irrefutably increases reality’, since a cellar ‘is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths’. Carlos Argentino’s house contains an element of unreality. His cellar is dark. But it contains all the places in the world, thus all the lamps, all the lights that illuminate all those places. Carlos Argentino’s perfect alibi for going undisturbed into the cellar was to start up a dark-room. ‘Sr. Danieri was in the cellar, as he always was, developing photographs’. A dark room, a space where images emerge with pretences of faithfully representing the real, or where a negative can be technically constructed, re-constructed or deconstructed in infinite ways. A dark room has as a neighbouring concept that of the ‘camera obscura’, which painters have used primarily for topographical detail (the Aleph partakes of some of its qualities, seemingly a transparent surface on which images are projected in a dark room which happens to be lit by the innumerable lights that emerge from the Aleph, which in turn would lead us to representational theories of the mind conceived as a tabula rasa, or mirror as in Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, or Hume).

The environment where the Aleph is experienced is one of sensory deprivation, it is a restricted environment, there is no light, no sounds, or, as far as we know, no smell. It is a vision-inducing environment. A dark environment is also partly a repository for our fears. And it is fear, paranoid fear that ‘Borges’ feels once in the cellar, a natural fear. In a cellar, it is not all that possible to rationalise fear, nor is any rationalisation necessarily reassuring; thus the brandy becomes a poison, the Aleph story a trap, Carlos Argentino an assassin. Paranoia precedes illumination, thus stating the fine neural line between these two states. We are coming to the end of the story, we are told that the end is the centre of the story: ‘I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. (…) How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?’. The narrator gives a list of analogies drawn from the mystical tradition. The analogies speak of the problem of representing divinity, a bird that is all the birds, the analogies speak of the unrepresentable. Although these analogies might be insufficient to describe the Aleph, they inscribe it within mystical insight. Mystical problems are transmuted into literary ones. The Aleph poses an irresolvable problem, foregrounding the limitations of verbal language, as well as the inevitable gaps caused by translating images into words: How can we represent infinity, how can we comprehend it? How can we even partially enumerate an infinite grouping? And how can we describe simultaneous acts when language is successive? In History of Eternity, Borges affirms: ‘For it is true that succession is an intolerable misery, and magnanimous appetites are greedy for all the minutes of time and all the variety of space’. However, although language may be limited and successive, a poetics of the beyond may be possible through rhetoric. A double operation takes place when ‘Borges’ narrates his epiphany. You could call it ‘the rhetoric of the ineffable’, where the ‘ineffable’ stands for the limitations of language, whilst signalling an extra territory still to be mapped.

The Aleph opens into an impossible space. How can events occupy the same point in space without being superimposed? ‘In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fac. that all occupied the same point, without superposition or transparency’. Can an instant be gigantic? Undoubtedly it can. Intensity, resonance on an intimate level, make instants relevant and even gigantic, giving us a glimpse of that zone where boundaries collapse. The space the Aleph opens onto is a site of excess, where everything can be looked at from every possible angle, moreover everything is simultaneous without being superimposed or transparent, in a simultaneity which recalls the time-space experiments of the avant-garde. It is a vertiginous space of scopic excess. An impossible object where one can voraciously see everything in an orgy of voyeurism, where things cannot look back at you, with the sole exception of the unending watching eyes, a common hypnagogic image, which suggests a reading of the Aleph as a metaphor of mind. The space the Aleph opens into is a libidinally invested space, not only because of the presence of Beatriz, but because of the total experience it affords. Ineffable, vertiginous, trance-like, inconceivable, cosmic, the adjectives that describe both the Aleph and the Aleph as an event belong to the realm of the unrepresentable, to dizzying speed, to a zone beyond the self where the self disintegrates. The paragraph that describes what was seen in the Aleph is the longest paragraph in the story and it is exclusively made out of the exultation of enumeration, the jubilation of the listing impulse. It is a boundless space that opens up within a traditional, Aristotelian narrative (the short story had been linear so far), a space of joy and dissolution. It opens onto a space of jouissance, but jouissance is ultimately unbearable; perhaps it can only be born for a gigantic instant.

The description of the Aleph first as one of the points in space that contains all other points and then as the only place on earth where all places are, suspends the difference between space and place and makes space immanent in place. Intimate place tames and absorbs space. If for Carlos Argentino, the Aleph becomes a place from which the whole world can be seen, for ‘Borges’ this place opens onto cosmic space, it comprehends the inconceivable universe, an example of perception being moulded by expectations, two different observers observing the same object actually seeing different things, a concise exposition on the relativity of vision. Carlos Argentino (intent on describing the whole earth) only sees the earth on it. ‘Borges’ sees the inconceivable universe and thus we could say that he sees what he desires to see, vision being always acculturated, purposeful, their respective experiences of space relating to their respective positions within the narrative. Carlos Argentino’s rhetoric and vision resemble a cross between the neoclassical and the twentieth century, he sees ‘all the places of the world, seen from every angle’, that is to say, he sees the whole earth from a cubist perspective -in cubism the object is broken up, disarticulated, presented from all its possible angles. ‘Borges’ sees instead an omnitopia of ubiquity, simultaneity, doubling, simulation, a vision that speaks about different formal inflections of space, whilst positing the infinite, rather than the world, as the ultimate spatial cipher.

Specular space, a space that multiplies spaces, a mirror that becomes infinite things, thereby already multiplying the infinite space of the Aleph and generating part of the real by its simulation, is the first thing ‘Borges’ describes as seeing in the Aleph. This specular space that multiplies spaces could be seen as a spatial metaphor for literature itself and the reception it generates, or more generally, for the space of representation with its manifold reverberations. The next things ‘Borges’ recalls seeing are spaces that by their nature point to immensity and the philosophical problem of the One and the Many: he sees the sea, which in itself contains the idea of vastness, that which carries on existing beyond vision, beyond the horizon line and which cannot therefore be comprehended, an approximation perhaps being the sea as formed by an infinite number of tiny particles or drops (a similar space will be mentioned later on, the desert, another vast, sublime space, constituted by an infinite number of grains of sand, which Borges has often referred to as the ultimate labyrinth); then ‘the multitudes of the Americas’ (the idea of the anonymous crowd, that will later on become ‘the masses’ and a problematic twentieth century notion) which inevitably refers us to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a work that hovers over the whole paragraph and in a way extends it, taking the reader on to this formidable pantheistic poem where almost everything in life is celebrated and the joy of cataloguing is taken to its extreme. Then an image which brings us anachronistically to chaos theory, to the butterfly effect: ‘I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal’. Then there is a reference to the Second World War, ‘I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London)’. While ‘Borges’ often refers to London as a maze, that is to say, a space where humans are trapped, moreover a space designed in such a way that it is incomprehensible for the individual, the broken maze ‘Borges’ refers to (it is also mentioned in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’) is the London destroyed by German bombs. He will later say: ‘I saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards’, a reference to the Great War, to the fact that soldiers used to send postcards home, usually happy postcards that denied the horrors of war through a desperate optimistic rhetoric. Thus, while each space might be contradicted or complemented by an opposite, such as origins and death, the city and nature, history and histories, within these there is also the possibility of a spatial folding through a chance encounter: ‘the sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal’.

If what ‘Borges’ sees in a gigantic instant is the universe, the universe becomes a spiral that contains its simulation via a mirror where concepts fetishised by Borges criss-cross one another creating new and circular proliferations of meaning. Moreover, a conscientious and literal reading of what ‘Borges’ saw (aided by the Dictionary of Borges), while it cannot absolutely exhaust or trace the meaning of the images seen, certainly places most of the images seen by the narrator in the Aleph as images of a very small part of the universe: to wit, the earth. Moreover, searching for the numerous places and streets mentioned, they reveal a unique meeting point, a private, subjective space: Jorge Luis Borges’s biography. These places refer to places where he lived as a child, to favourite exotic spots, to his preoccupation with mirrors and duplications which here become an image referring to the seventeenth-century Dutch affair with geography, mapping and optical illusion: ‘I saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly’. ‘Borges’ sees the past, ‘the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo’ and in Inverness he sees a woman and a landscape where sexuality, illness and infertility are conflated: ‘I saw a woman in Inverness who I shall nerver forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body. Saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there had once been a tree’. The only two images of women seen in the Aleph speak of death, trauma and perhaps even sexual impotence. Invierno means ‘winter’ in Spanish. Inverness as a place signals a space of winter, decline, death. It could be said that for an Anglo-Hispanic mind, the word ‘Inverness’ has the inevitable association of winter while making it into an absolute by the suffix ‘ness’. In fact this proper name would be translated, in that intermediary zone which merges different languages thus creating possible words and new associations, as something more severe than winter, something like ‘invernidad’, but which for Borges might also connote a term coined by Bishop Wilkins, ‘neverness’, which the writer translates as ‘nunquidad’ and sees as the most terrible of words since it cancels out everything, that is to say, it is even more awesome than eternity, it is eternity in negative form.

From the macrocosmic –which is referred to by the term ‘universe’ but not by its actual description- ‘Borges’ retreats into the microcosmic that inhabits the body, his own body: ‘saw the circulation of my dark blood (…), saw the alterations of death’. The Aleph gives way to a mise en abîme, a visual paradox within a visual paradox, for if everything can be seen in the Aleph, another Aleph can be seen in it, from which everything can be seen in turn, and so on ad infinitum. This experience is followed by ‘Borges’ seeing his own face and then Beatriz’s face, ‘saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept’. It is not just Beatriz, but the whole event which produces an emotive discharge. Perhaps infinity is a synonym of intensity, of jouissance, where trauma is a constitutive part. Perhaps the whole universe is invoked, so that a face can be seen in it, perhaps the universe, the infinite, becomes the most adequate of displacements to signify a monumentally libidinal sublime where a collapse of borders can only be represented by hyperbolic language: ‘the wide and ceaseless universe’, ‘endless series’, ‘an incipient ecstasy’, ‘a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly’, ‘the pure and boundless godhead’, ‘each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things’, ‘I saw all things’, ‘I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity’.

The inconceivable universe is named. The contents described are Borges the writer’s life-long memories, life-long passions. The verb repeated rhythmically, obsessively throughout the whole paragraph in an epiphany which becomes an incantation is the verb ‘to see’ (I saw … I saw … I saw … I saw ... I saw …), which given Borges’s increasing blindness - although these images are ‘developed’ in the end into writing- lends the experience of the Aleph a different reading: not only can the scopic drive be satisfied in the most orgiastic of ways, by seeing absolutely everything, but the scopic drive of a blind man with all that entails of desiring what has become impossible, the act of seeing, a man who has suffered such sensory deprivation that he needs to build a point in space from which to see everything and not just the act of seeing, but the act of seeing everything at once, now, simultaneously, instantaneously, in a gigantic instant, in case (or before) blindness comes back, the Aleph being an impossible object that is also an anxious object, a doubly anxious object. However, this absolute eye could also be seen in relationship to the history of perspectival space. Here, Lefebvre’s words concerning the Renaissance are apposite: ‘Space remained symbolic of the body and the universe, while at the same time becoming measured and visual. The transformation of space towards visualisation and the visual is a phenomenon of the utmost importance … Perspectival space recaptures nature by measuring it and subordinating it to the exigencies of society, under the domination of the eye and no longer of the body as a whole’. The Aleph converts its user into an all-seeing eye, all the other senses being translated or displaced into the visual, the eye caressing what the hand cannot touch, while also rendering it passive, reducing it to mere image. Perhaps the Aleph could also be seen as a hyperbole of the moment of erotic projection in vision, a projection that St Augustine anxiously condemned as ‘ocular desire’, although it seems that the gaze would not be able to contain the contents of the Aleph: if vision bounds physical space, how can the unbounded be seen at once? The Aleph goes beyond the perspectival eye and is indeed a turbulent spatiality. What seems to be at stake in the story, though, is the possibility and impossibility of such a site of intensity, that is to say, the momentary possibility of the impossible as a site of orgasmic jouissance, where if vision can be seen as understanding, ‘Borges’ is the privileged guest to absolute revelation.

The encounter with the Aleph also leads to the discovery of the narrator's own jealousy, as if self-discovery were only possible through an encounter with the other's space. Revenge, a recurrent Borgesian theme, becomes in this story a denying of the other’s space due to envy and prejudice, a categorising of the other’s space as ‘mad’, as a way of denying their reality- a reality that has been shared, but does not properly belong, according to the now jealous narrator, to the realities that can be shared. ‘Borges’ denies the existence of the Aleph, this denial putting an end to the relationship with Carlos Argentino and the Aleph. The space that could be tolerated in representation, in the poem called ‘The Earth’ where all the places on the earth are sung, cannot be accepted as existing in the real world. A boundary has been overstepped. Although Carlos Argentino’s sharing of the Aleph could be seen as his revenge, he might have made the mistake of sharing the unsharable, the most intimate of spaces, a space that can only be shared through the intermediary space of representation. Concerning this intermediary space, Winnicott writes that if an adult presses us to accept the objectivity of his subjective phenomena, we discern or diagnose madness. ‘If however, the adult can manage to enjoy the personal intermediate area without making claims, then we can acknowledge our own corresponding areas, and are pleased to find a degree of overlapping, that is to say, a common experience between members of a group in art or religion or philosophy’. Western society has convened that madness cannot be accepted in real time, it can only be accepted obliquely through the intermediary space of representation; the Medusa’s head (in the sense of devouring chaos, rather than in the sense of castration that it takes on in psychoanalytical readings) can only be looked at in its reflection, devouring chaos has to be made into an intermediary object, it cannot be shared directly. In ‘The Aleph’, the intermediary space shared is the space of literature and given the protagonists’ different literary visions and fortunes, it is riddled with mockery, jealousy, rivalry and envy. Even if it is only through contact with Carlos Argentino that ‘Borges’ has access to the Aleph, he will deny the existence of this object of pure spatiality due to jealousy, the epiphanic experience failing to override human meanness.

‘Borges’, jealous through the images he has seen in the Aleph of Beatriz sending perverse letters to Carlos Argentino which reveal an incestuous relationship and a transgression of boundaries, as well as disliking the latter’s pompous poetry, decides to deny the existence of the Aleph by encouraging Danieri to have the house demolished ‘to remove himself from the pernicious influences of the metropolis, which no one—believe me, no one!—can be immune to. I refused, with gentle firmness, to discuss the Aleph; I clasped him by both shoulders as I took my leave and told him again that the country—peace and quiet, you know—was the very best medicine one could take’. Although the reference to nature is here ironic, nature as healer of the urban wound is a constant cliché in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and literature, the city being seen as repository for both mental alienation and mental illness, while the countryside becomes invested with healing properties. The house is demolished. ‘Borges’ informs us that Carlos Daneri has won the Second National Literature Prize and that he is preparing another book, now, according to the ironic narrator, unencumbered by the Aleph (and therefore by the presence of Beatriz). The implication is not only that writing requires economy, but that in a dreaming house, the house of childhood and imagining, too many memories might encumber literary output; that that house was perhaps too final, that the Aleph was not only an impossible and anxious object and an object of joy, but also an object of confusion. We might add that the demolished house will forever inhabit the individual, that the individual is constituted by the houses she/he has inhabited, that its physical existence is no longer necessary for it is now an indelible part of the circuit of memories.

The Aleph can also be read as a pantheist symbol that translates a divinity that comprehends in microcosm the totality of the universe, the postscript reflecting on the possible meanings (while omitting others) of the term Aleph: ‘as we all know, ‘aleph’ is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. (…) In the Kabbala, that letter signifies the En Soph, the pure and unlimited godhead; it has also been said that its shape is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher’. As we have already seen, during the Middle Ages, God and space were synonymous, thus making the Aleph, which also signifies God, a perfect candidate for the sacred encounter the story narrates. Represented as a man who points to, and is traversed by, a virtual space and its supposed original, the Aleph presents the world as a representation of mind, a map, a mirror, both an inversion and a simplification of what the narrator saw down in the cellar, the self being constituted by static flashes, fragments of space, which are actually space-time, a sort of angel of the past, the present and the future. If the virtual and the concrete are posited as inextricably linked in a continuum represented by the man who points to the earth and the sky, the Aleph also represents the ultimate space of spaces. In George Cantor’s theory of sets, where the whole is not larger than its parts, it is the symbol of the transfinite numbers, which are a system of cardinal and ordinal numbers used to compare infinite sets, to which several types of infinity can be allocated simultaneously: in fact, Cantor, who went mad towards the end of his life through the combination of the insidiousness of the infinite and lack of recognition, proposed the existence of infinites of infinites.

The postscript also puts forth an hypothesis that undoes the central experience of the story: ‘Borges’ speculates that perhaps the Aleph he saw in Calle Garay was a false Aleph, his suspicion being based on an apocryphal manuscript about mirrors left by Captain Burton. It is a movement that reminds us of the texts written in Tlön, where a book that does not consider its counterbook is considered incomplete. It is paradoxical that an ontological experience of such importance as revelation should be dismissed so quickly, that the narrator should be anxious to forget it and embark upon another impossible search. However, the ultimate rejection of the authenticity of the Aleph in calle Garay, functions as a baroque narrative trompe-l’oeil of sorts, since it makes the experience related appear real. As we enter a dizzying spiral of conclusions and counter-conclusions, we are again treated to the cataloguing impulse in a summarised ‘historical’ enumeration about mirrors that contained the whole of the universe. It is no accident that mirrors should figure at the end of ‘The Aleph’, though. A Borgesian favourite as we have seen, the mirror is not only an object that speaks about space by reproducing it and complicates it by reversing it inexplicably, but its fabulous history as a container of the world and the universe can be found in numerous literary works both from the Orient and the West, making it a mythical object that prefigures the Aleph. However, Captain Burton’s conclusion is that the mirrors he enumerates did not exist and that the universe lies in fact inside one of the columns in the Amr mosque, Cairo, which is made out of columns from other pre-Islamic temples. This Aleph cannot be seen, for it is an auditory Aleph, whose busy humming can be heard when the ear is applied closely to the stone.

The dictatorship of the eye, the all-surveying eye is thus left behind. A different sensory economy is indicated, one that leaves vision behind as the predominant Western sense, the sense privileged by the coloniser. We are reminded of the theological debate around the use of graven images between iconophiliacs, iconoclasts and iconophobes, and of how Muslims and Jews, practising faithfully the prohibition against graven images, could not but conceive of the universe as a sonic entity. The debate around the representation of divinity (and therefore eternity) was moreover articulated precisely in those terms, in terms of the truthful and the false (Clement of Alexandria claimed that the true image of God is the word of God), of the precedence of utterance, song and speech over the visual. The narrator’s musings on fraudulent and truthful Alephs embody this theological debate about origins, while putting forward the fact that if divinity has been and is represented through song in other cultures, the world could be mapped with a different sensory economy. However, only two senses in isolation are foregrounded as capable of representing the universe, other sensory experiences such as tactile logic being completely omitted. Rather than a dialogue between vision and sound, these senses are represented in monologue form, as though incompatible, thus alluding to the historical struggle for prominence between visual sign and verbal sound, rather than attempting to transcend or reorganise it. This sensory divide that the Aleph as an object posits is, however, ultimately transcended by the textual experience related in the story, which embodies all the other senses.

But if that sonic Aleph inside a column could have been seen in the first Aleph, ‘Borges’, who lives in a predominantly visual culture, must have forgotten it (or repressed it, as the Other is repressed, or disavowed it, or perhaps these musings on the Orient could also be read as marking the writer’s increasing reliance on sound over image to map the world) when he saw everything inside the Aleph at Calle Garay: ‘Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness’. Or if we accept that the gaze is partly an acculturated act, he could not have possibly seen it, for it would be within the blind-spot of Western vision. Moreover, if the Aleph in Calle Garay was a false Aleph, how could he have perceived an authentic Aleph through a false Aleph, that is to say, how could he perceive it through a false system of representation that excludes such possibilities? ‘Borges’ remembers a false Aleph. True, false, are not these categories partly ideological fabrications, partly convenient delusions, partly reversible and suspect, aren’t they often inextricably linked, inhabiting a twilight zone where things don’t belong to one category or another? The doubt as to the veracity of the Aleph introduced at the end, where an Aleph could be anything, that is to say, where anything might become a door to revelation, connects us with ideas from the Cabbala where God, or the meaning of the universe, can be found everywhere and in everything, an idea which is also present in ‘The Writing of the God’, where a jaguar's spots, the tiger's writing, reveal the intimate meaning of the universe to the priest Tzinacán. An interesting detail that throws light on this oscillation between true and false is that the study of the Aleph manuscript reveals that initially the object containing the inconceivable universe had a different name. It was called ‘mihrab’. A mihrab is a niche in a mosque, as well as the position of the person leading the congregation in prayer and most Muslims consider this niche the most holy place in the mosque. Thus space and the sacred, in this case a sacred space in Muslim religion, were at the centre of the story's conception from the beginning.

A note on the name Garay, which as we have already seen refers to the founder of Buenos Aires: Calle Garay becomes Plaza Garay in ‘The Zahir’, where an impossible and haunting coin of the same name could be seen as the underside of the Aleph. If the name Garay becomes a privileged site for revelation in ‘The Aleph’, which closes the book of the same title, in ‘The Zahir’, a piece occurring halfway through the book, it is the place where an unresolved pernicious obsession closes the open-ended story: ‘Dawn often surprises me upon a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinking (or trying to think) about the passage in the Asrar Nama where it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil’.

To return to the mind’s permeability to forgetfulness that closes ‘The Aleph’, the narrator’s initial enumeration of what he saw in the iridescent disk is incomplete, not only because to enumerate an infinite grouping is an impossible task and the simultaneous nature of the Alephic experience exposes the limitations of language and common perception, but also because forgetfulness is necessary in order to remember. It is a necessary property of mind, that delimits memory. Mind is seen as a porous border where gaps signal the impossibility of completely and utterly recoverable objects. If all borders have gaps and there is no such thing as a pure border, through an involuntarily incomplete enumeration of the universe, Borges insists on the interstitial as part of the ultimate hybridity of everything. Throughout his oeuvre, everything is inextricably interrelated, nothing is homogenous, pure, uniform, everything exists in relationship to everything else. Rather than signalling an intermediary zone between binary oppositions, Borges pierces concepts from within giving way to constellations of meaning that inhabit the gaps within borders overflowing and negating them, all borders being constructions, fictions, all borders being ultimately discontinuous, porous. Instead of a collapse, an implosion, there is a vertiginous chain reaction of meanings; instead of meaninglessness, we get fuzzy logic, infinite complexity.

As an object from the past, the Aleph bears traces of the future (traces of the future?). Like an oxymoron, the Aleph both negates and affirms, while embodying a simultaneity that shatters linear time, as if prefiguring a future that had always existed and was just waiting for the right moment to reveal itself. If the Aleph has been compared to a naked singularity, it could also be imagined as a fibre-optic point where a simultaneous network of information flows gather. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, the patron saint of cyberpunk lit William Gibson writes about an Aleph which is a huge biochip that can store vast amounts of data, a neuralgic centre in consciousness, or a self-terminal where our most intimate memories are projected. Mental space is a subject that belongs to the arts, psychology, epistemology, psychoanalysis, mysticism, neuroscience. Neuroscience is currently trying to map the human brain, so as to identify a physical substrate of mind where mind emerges from brain function. Although mind and brain are still seen as incommensurable, we now tend to conflate them. Chemical descriptions of the brain as having a dozen billion neurons each splitting into thousands of dendrites and their myriad interconnections via innumerable neurotransmitters, are as dazzling in their complexity as their potentially astounding emerging function. Mind-brain is described as awe-inspiring, as unrepresentable and unfathomable as infinity and the universe (Gerald Edelman has called it ‘the most complicated material object in the known universe’). Analogies drawn from astrophysics comparing mental space with the universe or galaxies abound; the endless activity contained in one second of consciousness is impossible to conceive for the lay person.

Borges conflates brain and mental space, omitting in the story a vital reference to the resemblance of the letter aleph to the brain. According to the Bahir, alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ‘looks like the brain, and symbolizes the continuity between human thought and God’s thought, human thought having no end, for as man thinks he descends to the end of the world’. In this sense the alef implies ‘following thought to ultimate infinity’. Borges was well aware of the Aleph’s equation with the brain. In ‘History of the Angels’, in The Extent of my Hope (1926) published more than twenty years before, he had written: ‘The letter aleph corresponds to the brain, the First Commandment, the sky of fire, the divine name “I am that I am,” and the seraphim known as the Sacred Beasts’. As a metaphor of mind, mind as the nutshell that contains the awesome and dynamic record of life-long neural activity, the world of mind being indeed a vast world which like the universe is still being mapped, the Aleph points to the infinitude of mind, which is ultimately unrepresentable.

Another omitted reference is that the letter alef symbolises the ‘I’, the ‘self’. In ‘The Nothingness of Personality’ the author already postulated his ideas about the self. In ‘Time and J. W. Dunne’, Borges’s words rejoice in a possible mise en abîme of the self: ‘The seventh of India’s many philosophical systems recorded by Paul Deussen denies the self as an immediate object of knowledge, “because if our soul were knowable, a second sould would be required to know the first and a third to know the second” ’. And: ‘Schopenhauer (…) and Herbart played similar ontological multiplication games: before he was twenty he had reasoned that the self must be infinite, because knowing oneself postulates another self that knows itself, a self that in turn postulates another self’.

As a self-terminal, the fragments of space seen in the Aleph would be subjective constructions determined by personal experience, the social, history, the body, DNA (as in chemical predispositions, as in ‘the viscera and the blood, the cancer in the breast’ that ‘Borges’ alludes to), positing the fact that mental space is a social product filled with history and cultural representations, while leaving room for the personal, as well as biological determinants. An image that radiates, an unforgettable poetic metaphor, an unbearable totalising image despite its impossibility, the Aleph is a poetic image of great ontological significance, a concentration of the whole psyche, its power as a poetic image residing in its awesome semiotic density. Working as an oneiric image in its ability to condense a multiplicity of meanings in a single gesture, whilst singing the unrepresentable in a libidinised incantation, it is a paradoxical space we are contemplating (‘contemplating a paradox has been compared to meditating on a Zen Koan, gazing at a mandala, entering momentarily into the realm of the infinite’), a hypnotic gathering of all the fragments where the necessity for bringing the personal and therefore social unconscious into consciousness might imply, amongst other things, the necessity for deconstructing vision as a personal and social project, the need to be aware of how readily we deny the other’s vision (for vision often has an agenda, indeed the narrator's agenda is clearly put forward in the story) due to social prejudice, ignorance, envy, rivalry, transference.

‘The Aleph’ denotes and connotes a multiplicity of spaces, whether abstract or real, mental or social. As an impossible and ultimately undecidable, polymorphous object, the Aleph problematises mental space in its thirst for a sovereignty that might mirror the violence of abstract space. However, it ultimately celebrates an order of complexity beyond comprehension. It opens up a gigantic plenum where the sheer irreducibility of a part to the whole and viceversa, and the complexity of a world made out of so many brains, that is to say, so many infinites struggling against each other, comprising a body with a multiplicity of organs that is the map of history, each one inhabiting a more or less illuminated Aleph, each one inhabiting infinity, is a cause of rejoicing and perplexity in its unlimited lush texture.

But this is just one reading amongst so many possible readings. The Aleph is the matrix of a lineage of impossible objects, squared circles that become all objects, all places and all moments. It is an impossible object that is created and recreated throughout Borges’s work. Imaginary all-encompassing objects, places, persons and moments that concentrate everything possible and impossible, recur in his work like a chorus (that is the case of the unforgettable zahir, the book of sand, Shakespeare). Perhaps they are lesser inventions, feeble Alephs that appear in his writing through a morphic resonance that produces fading objects. If ‘The Library of Babel’ deals with space and infinity in such a way that they ultimately become unhinging ciphers of the unbearable complexity of the world, ‘The Aleph’ posits a benign and transcendental infinite in a story permeated by implicit reflections on different types of spaces, which are smoothly integrated into what in effect is a space odyssey in the midst of a love story and a story of literary rivalry.