Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  These considerations (implied, of course, in pantheism) could give rise to an endless debate; I invoke them now to carry out a modest plan: a history of the evolution of an idea through the diverse texts of three authors. The first, by Coleridge—I am not sure if he wrote it at the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century—says: “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Ay!—and what then?”

  I wonder what my reader thinks of such a fancy; to me it is perfect. To use it as the basis for other inventions seems quite impossible, for it has the wholeness and unity of a terminus ad quem, a final goal. Of course, it is just that: in literature as in other spheres, every act crowns an infinite series of causes and causes an infinite series of effects. Behind Coleridge’s idea is the general and age-old idea of generations of lovers who craved the gift of a flower.

  The second text I shall quote is a novel Wells drafted in 1887 and rewrote seven years later, in the summer of 1894. The first version was called The Chronic Argonauts (chronic in this rejected title is the etymological equivalent of temporal); the final version, The Time Machine. In this novel, Wells continued and renewed an ancient literary tradition: that of foreseeing future events. Isaiah sees the destruction of Babylon and the restoration of Israel; Aeneas, the military destiny of his descendants, the Romans; the prophetess of the Edda Saemundi, the return of the gods who, after the cyclical battle in which our world will be destroyed, will discover, lying on the grass of a new meadow, the same chess pieces they played with before. . . . Wells’ protagonist, unlike those prophetic spectators, travels physically to the future. He returns tired, dusty, shaken; he returns from a remote humanity that has split into species who hate each other (the idle Eloi, who live in dilapidated palaces and ruined gardens; and the subterranean and nyctalopic Morlocks, who feed on the Eloi). He returns with his hair grown grey and brings from the future a wilted flower. This is the second version of Coleridge’s image. More incredible than a celestial flower or a dream flower is a future flower, the contradictory flower whose atoms, not yet assembled, now occupy other spaces.

  The third version I shall mention, the most improbable of all, is by a writer much more complex than Wells, though less gifted with those pleasant virtues we usually call classical. I refer to the author of “The Abasement of the Northmores,” the sad, labyrinthine Henry James. When he died, he left an unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, a fantastic invention that was a variation or elaboration on The Time Machine.17 Wells’ protagonist travels to the future in an outlandish vehicle that advances or regresses in time as other vehicles do in space; James’ protagonist returns to the past, to the eighteenth century, by identifying himself with that period. (Both techniques are impossible, but James’ is less arbitrary. ) In The Sense of the Past the nexus between the real and the imaginary (between present and past) is not a flower, as in the previous stories, but an eighteenth-century portrait that mysteriously represents the protagonist. Fascinated by this canvas, he succeeds in going back to the day when it was painted. Among the persons he meets, he finds, of course, the artist, who paints him with fear and aversion, having sensed something unusual and anomalous in those future features. James thus creates an incomparable regressus in infinitum when his hero Ralph Pendrel returns to the eighteenth century because he is fascinated by an old portrait, but Pendrel needs to have returned to the eighteenth century for that portrait to exist. The cause follows the effect, or the reason for the journey is a consequence of the journey.

  Wells was probably not acquainted with Coleridge’s text; Henry James knew and admired Wells’ text. If the doctrine that all authors are one is valid, such facts are, of course, insignificant.18 Strictly speaking, it is not necessary to go that far; the pantheist who declares the plurality of authors to be illusory finds unexpected support in the classicist, to whom such a plurality barely matters. For the classical mind, literature is the essential thing, not individuals. George Moore and James Joyce incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of others; Oscar Wilde used to give plots away for others to develop; both procedures, though apparently contradictory, may reveal an identical sense of art, an ecumenical, impersonal perception. Another witness of the Word’s profound unity, another who defied the limitations of the individual, was the renowned Ben Jonson, who, upon writing his literary testament and the favorable or adverse opinions he held of his contemporaries, simply combined fragments from Seneca, Quintilian, Justus Lipsius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and the two Scaligers.

  One last observation. Those who carefully copy a writer do so impersonally, because they equate that writer with literature, because they suspect that to depart from him in the slightest is to deviate from reason and orthodoxy. For many years I thought that the almost infinite world of literature was in one man. That man was Carlyle, he was Johannes Becher, he was Whitman, he was Rafael Cansinos Assens, he was De Quincey.

  [1945] —Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

  Coleridge’s Dream

  The lyric fragment “Kubla Khan” (fifty-odd rhymed and irregular lines of exquisite prosody) was dreamed by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge on a summer day in 1797. Coleridge writes that he had retired to a farm near Exmoor; an indisposition obliged him to take a sedative; sleep overcame him a few moments after reading a passage in Purchas that describes the construction of a palace by Kublai Khan, the emperor whose fame in the West was the work of Marco Polo. In Coleridge’s dream, the text he had coincidentally read sprouted and grew; the sleeping man intuited a series of visual images and, simply, the words that expressed them. After a few hours he awoke, certain that he had composed, or received, a poem of some three hundred lines. He remembered them with particular clarity and was able to transcribe the fragment that is now part of his work. An unexpected visitor interrupted him, and it was later impossible for him to recall the rest. “To his no small surprise and mortification,” Coleridge wrote, “that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” Swinburne felt that what he had been able to recover was the supreme example of music in the English language, and that the person capable of analyzing it would be able—the metaphor is Keats’—to unravel a rainbow. Translations or summaries of poems whose principal virtue is music are useless and may be harmful; it is best simply to bear in mind, for now, that Coleridge was given a page of undisputed splendor in a dream.

  The case, although extraordinary, is not unique. In his psychological study, The World of Dreams, Havelock Ellis has compared it with that of the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini, who dreamed that the Devil (his slave) was playing a marvelous sonata on the violin; when he awoke, the dreamer deduced, from his imperfect memory, the “Trillo del Diavolo.” Another classic example of unconscious cerebration is that of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom—as he himself described it in his “Chapter on Dreams”—one dream gave the plot of Olalla and another, in 1884, the plot of Jekyll and Hyde. Tartini, waking, wanted to imitate the music he had heard in a dream; Stevenson received outlines of stories—forms in general—in his. Closer to Coleridge’s verbal inspiration is the one attributed by the Venerable Bede to Caedmon (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum IV, 24). The case occurred at the end of the seventh century in the missionary and warring England of the Saxon kingdoms. Caedmon was an uneducated shepherd and was no longer young; one night he slipped away from some festivity because he knew that the harp would be passed to him and he didn’t know how to sing. He fell asleep in a stable, among the horses, and in a dream someone called him by his name and ordered him to sing. Caedmon replied that he did not know how, but the voice said, “S
ing about the origin of created things.” Then Caedmon recited verses he had never heard. He did not forget them when he awoke, and was able to repeat them to the monks at the nearby monastery of Hild. Although he couldn’t read, the monks explained passages of sacred history to him and he,

  as it were, chewing the cud, converted the same into most harmonious verse; and sweetly repeating the same made his masters in their turn his hearers. He sang the creation of the world, the origin of man, and all the history of Genesis: and made many verses on the departure of the children of Israel out of Egypt, and their entering into the land of promise, with many other histories from holy writ; the incarnation, passion, resurrection of our Lord, and his ascension into heaven; the coming of the Holy Ghost, and the preaching of the apostles; also the terror of future judgment, the horror of the pains of hell, and the delights of heaven; besides many more about the Divine benefits and judgments . . .

  He was the first sacred poet of the English nation. “None could ever compare with him,” Bede wrote, “for he did not learn the art of poetry from men, but from God.” Years later, he foretold the hour of his death and awaited it in sleep. Let us hope that he met his angel again.

  At first glance, Coleridge’s dream may seem less astonishing than that of his precursor. “Kubla Khan” is a remarkable composition, and the nine-line hymn dreamed by Caedmon barely displays any virtues beyond its oneiric origin; but Coleridge was already a poet while Caedmon’s vocation was revealed to him. There is, however, a later event, which turns the marvel of the dream that engendered “Kubla Khan” into something nearly unfathomable. If it is true, the story of Coleridge’s dream began many centuries before Coleridge and has not yet ended.

  The poet’s dream occurred in 1797 (some say 1798), and he published his account of the dream in 1816 as a gloss or justification of the unfinished poem. Twenty years later, in Paris, the first Western version of one of those universal histories that are so abundant in Persian literature appeared in fragmentary form: the Compendium of Histories by Rashid al-Din, which dates from the fourteenth century. One line reads as follows: “East of Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory.” The one who wrote this was a vizier of Ghazan Mahmud, a descendant of Kublai.

  A Mongolian emperor, in the thirteenth century, dreams a palace and builds it according to his vision; in the eighteenth century, an English poet, who could not have known that this construction was derived from a dream, dreams a poem about the palace. Compared with this symmetry of souls of sleeping men who span continents and centuries, the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books seem to me quite little, or nothing at all.

  How is it to be explained? Those who automatically reject the supernatural (I try always to belong to this group) will claim that the story of the two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds. Others will argue that the poet somehow knew that the Emperor had dreamed the palace, and then claimed he had dreamed the poem in order to create a splendid fiction that would palliate or justify the truncated and rhapsodic quality of the verses.19 This seems reasonable, but it forces us to arbitrarily postulate a text un known to Sinologists in which Coleridge was able to read, before 1816, about Kublai’s dream.20 More appealing are the hypotheses that transcend reason: for example, that after the palace was destroyed, the soul of the Emperor penetrated Coleridge’s soul in order that the poet could rebuild it in words, which are more lasting than metal and marble.

  The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace; the similarity of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman executor. To speculate on the intentions of that immortal or long-lived being would be as foolish as it is fruitless, but it is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal. In 1691, Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of Kublai Khan’s palace; of the poem, we know that barely fifty lines were salvaged. Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or of music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one will be the key.

  After writing this, I glimpsed or thought I glimpsed another explanation. Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object (to use Whitehead’s term), is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation was the palace; its second, the poem. Whoever compares them will see that they are essentially the same.

  [1951] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger

  The Enigma Of

  Edward FitzGerald

  A man, Umar ben Ibrahim, is born in Persia in the eleventh century of the Christian era (for him, the fifth century of the Mohammedan Hegira), and learns the Koran and Tradition from Hassan ben Sabbah, future founder of the sect of Hashishin or Assassins, and from Nizam ul-Mulk, who is to become vizier of Alp Arslan, and conqueror of the Caucasus. Half-seriously, half in jest, the three friends swear that if some day good fortune favors one of them, the lucky one will not forget the others. In his crowning years, Nizam achieves the rank of vizier. Umar asks him for nothing more than a corner in the shade of his good fortune from which to pray for the well-being of his friend and to meditate on mathematics. (Hassan asks for and obtains a high post and, at last, has the vizier stabbed to death.) Umar receives from the treasury of Nishapur an annual pension of ten thousand dinars and is able to devote himself to his studies. He forswears astrology, but takes up astronomy, collaborating in the reform of the calendar sponsored by the sultan and composing a famous treatise on algebra which provides numerical solutions for equations of the first and second degree, and geometrical solutions, by means of intersecting cones, for those of the third. The mysteries of number and the stars do not exhaust his attention; he reads, in the solitude of his library, the texts of Plotinus, who, in the vocabulary of Islam, is the Egyptian Plato or the Greek Master, and the fifty-odd epistles of the heretical and mystical Encyclopedia of the Brothers of Purity, in which it is reasoned that the universe is an emanation of Unity, and will return to Unity. . . . He is regarded as a proselyte of Alfarabi, who believed that universal forms do not exist apart from things, and of Avicenna, who taught that the world is everlasting. One account of him informs us that he believes, or makes a show of believing, in the transmigrations of the soul, from human to animal body, and on one occasion spoke with an ass, as Pythagoras spoke with a dog. He is an atheist, but is well able to interpret in the orthodox manner the most exacting passages of the Koran, since every cultured man is a theologian, and since, in order to be one, faith is not indispensable. In the intervals between astronomy, algebra, and apologetics, Umar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyami works on verse compositions of four lines, of which the first, the second, and the last are rhymed; the most extensive manuscript attributes to him five hundred of these quatrains, a number scant enough to do disservice to his fame, since in Persia (as in the Spain of Lope and Calderon), the poet must be prolific. In the year 517 of the Hegira, Umar is reading a treatise entitled The One and the Many; a malaise or a premonition interrupts him. He gets up, marks the page which his eyes will not see again, and makes his peace with God, with that God which may or may not exist and whose favor he has asked for in the difficult pages of his algebra. He dies that same day, at the hour of the setting of the sun. Around that time, on an occidental island to the north, unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who has defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.

  Seven centuries flow past, with their lusters
, their agonies and their mutations; and in England, a man, FitzGerald, is born, less of an intellect than Umar, but perhaps more sensitive, more wistful. FitzGerald is aware that literature is his true destiny, and pursues it with indolence and tenacity. Over and over again he reads Don Quixote, which seems to him almost the greatest of books (he does not wish to be unjust to Shakespeare and “dear old Virgil”) and his passion embraces the dictionary in which he looks up words. He realizes that every man who has some music in his soul can make verses ten or a dozen times in his life if the stars are propitious, but he does not propose to abuse this modest gift. He is the friend of famous people (Tennyson, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray), and feels himself in no way inferior to them, despite his modesty and courtesy. He has published a gracefully written dialogue, Euphranor, and indifferent versions of Calderon and the great Greek tragedies. From the study of Spanish, he has gone on to Persian, and has begun a translation of Mantiq al-Tayr, that mystical epic about the birds who search for their king, Simurg, and finally arrive at his palace, which is across the seven seas, to discover that they are Simurg and that Simurg is each and every one of them. Around 1854, he is lent a manuscript collection of Umar’s compositions, the verses put together with no other organization than the alphabetical order of their rhymes; FitzGerald puts some of them into Latin, and glimpses the possibility of turning them into a continuous, organically coherent book, beginning with the images of morning, the rose and the nightingale, and ending with those of night and the tomb. To this improbable and farfetched end, FitzGerald dedicates his life, that of an indolent, solitary, and monomaniacal man. In 1859, he publishes a first version of the Rubáiyát, which is followed by others, rich in variations and refinements. A miracle happens: from the lucky conjunction of a Persian astronomer who ventures into poetry and an English eccentric who explores Spanish and Oriental texts, without understanding them entirely, emerges an extraordinary poet who resembles neither of them. Swinburne writes that FitzGerald “has given to Omar Khayyam a permanent place among the major English poets,” and Chesterton, aware of the mixture of romanticism and classicism in this extraordinary work, observes that it possesses at the same time “an elusive melody and a lasting message.” Some critics take FitzGerald’s Omar as an English poem with Persian allusions; FitzGerald interpolated, refined and invented, but his Rubáiyát seems, to us readers, to be both ancient and Persian.