Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  In essence, the fable of Vathek is not complex. Vathek (Haroun Benal-motasim Vatiq Bila, the ninth Abbasid caliph) erects a Babylonian tower in order to decipher the planets. They foretell a succession of wonders to be brought about by a man unlike any other who will come from an unknown land. A merchant arrives at the capital of the empire; his face is so atrocious that the guards who bring him before the caliph advance with eyes closed. The merchant sells a scimitar to the caliph, then disappears. Engraved on the blade are some mysterious changing characters which pique Vathek’s curiosity. A man (who then also disappears) deciphers them; one day they mean, “I am the least of the marvels in a place where everything is marvelous and worthy of the greatest Prince of the earth”; another day, “Woe to the rash mortal who aspires to know that which he is not supposed to know.” The caliph surrenders to the magic arts; from the shadows, the voice of the merchant urges him to renounce the Muslim faith and worship the powers of darkness. If he will do that, the Palace of Subterranean Fire will be opened to him. Within its vaults he will be able to contemplate the treasures that the stars have promised him, the talismans that subdue the world, the diadems of the pre-Adamite sultans and of Suleiman Ben Daoud. The greedy caliph agrees; the merchant demands forty human sacrifices. Many bloody years pass; Vathek, his soul black from abominations, arrives at a deserted mountain. The earth opens; in terror and hope, Vathek descends to the bottom of the world. A pale and silent crowd of people who do not look at one another wanders through the magnificent galleries of an infinite palace. The merchant did not lie: the Palace of Subterranean Fire abounds in splendors and talismans, but it is also Hell. (In the congeneric story of Doctor Faustus, and in the many medieval legends that prefigured it, Hell is the punishment for the sinner who makes a pact with the gods of Evil; here, it is both the punishment and the temptation.)

  Saintsbury and Andrew Lang claim or suggest that the invention of the Palace of Subterranean Fire is Beckford’s greatest achievement. I would maintain that it is the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.46 I will venture this paradox: the most famous literary Avernus, the dolente regno of the Divine Comedy, is not an atrocious place; it is a place where atrocious things happen. The distinction is valid.

  Stevenson (“A Chapter on Dreams”) tells of being pursued in the dreams of his childhood by a certain abominable “hue” of the color brown; Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday) imagines that at the western borders of the world there is perhaps a tree that is more or less than a tree; and that at the eastern borders, there is something, perhaps a tower, whose very shape is wicked. Poe, in his “MS Found in a Bottle,” speaks of a southern sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman; Melville devotes many pages of Moby-Dick to an elucidation of the horror of the unbearable whiteness of the whale . . . I have given several examples, but perhaps it is enough to observe that Dante’s Hell magnifies the notion of a jail; Beckford’s, the tunnels of a nightmare. The Divine Comedy is the most justifiable and solid book in all literature, Vathek is a mere curiosity, “the perfume and suppliance of a minute”; yet I believe that Vathek foretells, in however rudimentary a way, the satanic splendors of Thomas De Quincey and Poe, of Charles Baudelaire and Huysmans. There is an untranslatable English epithet, “uncanny,” to denote supernatural horror; that epithet (unheimlich in German) is applicable to certain pages of Vathek, but not, as far as I recall, to any other book before it.

  Chapman notes some of the books that influenced Beckford: the Bibliotheque orientale of Barthelemy d’Herbelot; Hamilton’s Quatre Facardins; Voltaire’s La Princesse de Babylone; the always reviled and admirable Mille et une nuits of Galland. To that list I would add Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione: etchings, praised by Beckford, that depict mighty palaces which are also impenetrable labyrinths. Beckford, in the first chapter of Vathek, enumerates five palaces dedicated to the five senses; Marino, in the Adone, had already described five similar gardens.

  William Beckford needed only three days and two nights in the winter of 1782 to write the tragic history of his caliph. He wrote it in French; Henley translated it into English in 1785. The original is unfaithful to the translation; Saintsbury observes that eighteenth-century French is less suit able than English for communicating the “undefined horrors” (the phrase is Beckford’s) of this unusual story.

  Henley’s English version is volume 856 of the Everyman’s Library; Perrin, in Paris, has published the original text, revised and prologued by Mallarmé. It is strange that Chapman’s laborious bibliography does not mention that revision and that prologue.

  [1943] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger

  About The Purple Land

  This novel, Hudson’s first, is reducible to a formula so ancient that it can almost comprise the Odyssey; so fundamental that the name formula subtly defames and degrades it. The hero begins his wandering, and his adventures encounter him along the way. The Golden Ass and the fragments of the Satyricon belong to this nomadic, random genre, as do Pickwick and Don Quixote, Kim of Lahore and Segundo Sombra of Areco. I do not believe there is any justification for calling those books picaresque novels: first, because of the unfavorable connotation of the term; second, because of its local and temporal limitations (Spain, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Further, the genre is complex. Disorder, incoherence, and variety are not inaccessible, but they must be governed by a secret order, which is revealed by degrees. I have recalled several famous examples; perhaps all show obvious defects.

  Cervantes utilizes two types of characters: an emaciated, tall, ascetic, mad, and grandiloquent nobleman; a corpulent, short, gluttonous, sane, and colloquial peasant. That very symmetrical and persistent disharmony finally deprives them of reality, lowers them to the stature of circus figures. (In the seventh chapter of El Payador our own Lugones already insinuated that reproach.) Kipling invents Kim, the little friend of the whole world, who is completely free: a few chapters later, impelled by some sort of patriotic perversion, he gives him the horrible occupation of a spy. (In his literary autobiography, written about thirty-five years later, Kipling shows that he is impenitent and even unaware of the implications.) I note those defects without animadversion; I do it to judge The Purple Land with equal sincerity.

  The most elementary of the sort of novels I am considering aim at a mere succession of adventures, mere variety: the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor are perhaps the best example, for the hero is just an underling, as impersonal and passive as the reader. In other novels (which are scarcely more complex) the function of the events is to reveal the hero’s character, and even his absurdities and manias; that is the case in the first part of Don Quixote. In others (which correspond to a later stage) the movement is dual, reciprocal; the hero changes the circumstances, the circumstances change the hero’s character. That is the case with the second part of the Quixote, with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, with The Purple Land. The latter actually has two plots. The first, the visible one: the adventures of the young Englishman Richard Lamb in the Banda Oriental. The second, the intimate, invisible one: the assimilation of Lamb, his gradual conversion to a barbarous morality that reminds one of Rousseau a little and anticipates Nietzsche a little. His Wanderjahre are also Lehrjahre. Hudson was personally acquainted with the rigors of a semibarbarous, pastoral life; Rousseau and Nietzsche knew such a life only through the sedentary volumes of the Histoire Generate des Voyages and the Homeric epics. The foregoing statement does not mean that The Purple Land is flawless. It surfers from an obvious defect, which may logically be attributed to the hazards of improvisation: the vain and tedious complexity of certain adventures. I am thinking of the ones near the end of the book: they are so complicated that they weary the attention, but do not hold it. In those onerous chapters Hudson appears not to understand that the book is successive (almost as purely successive as the Satyricon or the Buscón) and benumbs it with useless artifices. This is a common mistake; for example, Dickens tends toward similar
prolixities in all his novels.

  The Purple Land is perhaps unexcelled by any work of Gaucho literature. It would be deplorable if we let a certain topographical confusion and three or four errors or errata (Camelones for Canelones, Aria for Arias, Gumesinda for Gumersinda) conceal that truth from us. The Purple Land is essentially Creole, native to South America. The fact that the narrator is an Englishman justifies certain explanations and certain emphases required by his readers, which would be anomalous in a Gaucho accustomed to such things. In Number 31 of Sur, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada wrote:

  Never before has there been a poet, a painter, or an interpreter of things Argentine like Hudson, nor will there ever be again. Hernandez is one part of the cosmorama of our life that Hudson sang, described, and explained. . . The final pages of The Purple Land express the maximum philosophy and the supreme justification of America in the face of Western civilization and the refinements of culture.

  As we see, Martinez Estrada did not hesitate to prefer Hudson’s total output to the most notable of the canonical books of our Gaucho literature. Incomparably more vast is the scope of The Purple Land. The Martín Fierro (notwithstanding the proposed by Lugones) is less the epic of our origins—in 1872!—than the autobiography of a cutthroat, adulterated by bravado and lamentation that seem to prophesy the tango. Ascasubi’s work is more vivid, it has more joy, more passion, but those traits are fragmentary and secret in three incidental volumes of four hundred pages each. In spite of the variety of its dialogues, Don Segundo Sombra is marred by the propensity to exaggerate the most innocent tasks. No one is unaware that the narrator is a Gaucho; and therefore to indulge in the kind of dramatic hyperbole that converts the herding of bulls into an exploit of war is doubly unjustified. Güìraldes assumes an air of solemnity when he relates the everyday work of the country. Hudson (like Ascasubi, like Hernandez, like Eduardo Gutiérrez) describes with complete naturalness events that may even be atrocious.

  Someone will observe that in The Purple Land the Gaucho has only a lateral, secondary role. So much the better for the accuracy of the portrayal, we reply. The Gaucho is a taciturn man, the Gaucho does not know, or he scorns, the complex delights of memory and introspection. To depict him as autobiographical and effusive is to deform him.

  Another of Hudson’s adroit strokes is his treatment of geography. Born in the Province of Buenos Aires in the magic circle of the pampa, he nonetheless chooses to write about the purple land where the revolutionary horsemen used their first and last lances: the Banda Oriental. Gauchos from the Province of Buenos Aires are the rule in Argentine literature: the paradoxical reason for that is the existence of a large city, Buenos Aires, the point of origin of famous writers of Gaucho literature. If we look to history instead of to literature, we shall see that the glorification of the Gaucho has had but little influence on the destinies of their province, and none on the destinies of their country. The typical organism of Gaucho warfare, the revolutionary horseman, appears in Buenos Aires only sporadically. The authority falls to the city, to the leaders of the city. Only rarely does some individual—Hormiga Negra in legal documents, Martin Fierro in literature—attain, with the rebellion of a fugitive, a certain notoriety with the police.

  As I have said, Hudson selects the Banda Oriental as the setting for his hero’s escapades. That propitious choice permits him to enlist chance and the diversification of war to enrich Richard Lamb’s destiny—and chance favors the opportunities for vagabound love. Macaulay, in the article about Bunyan, marveled that one man’s imaginings would become, years later, the personal memories of many other men. Hudson’s imaginings remain in the memory: British bullets that resound in the Paysandu night; the oblivious Gaucho who enjoys his smoke of strong tobacco before the battle: the girl who surrenders to a stranger on the secret shore of a river.

  Improving the perfection of a phrase divulged by Boswell, Hudson says that many times in his life he undertook the study of metaphysics, but happiness always interrupted him. That sentence (one of the most memorable I have encountered in literature) is typical of the man and the book. In spite of the bloodshed and the separations, The Purple Land is one of the very few happy books in the world. (Another, which also is about America, also nearly paradisaic in tone, is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.) I am not thinking of the chaotic debate between pessimists and optimists; I am not thinking of the doctrinal happiness the pathetic Whitman inexorably imposed on himself; I am thinking of the happy disposition of Richard Lamb, of the hospitality with which he welcomed every vicissitude of life, whether bitter or sweet.

  One last observation. To perceive or not to perceive the Creole nuances may be quite unimportant, but the fact is that of all the foreigners (not, of course, excluding the Spaniards) no one perceives them like the Englishman—Miller, Robertson, Burton, Cunninghame Graham, Hudson.

  Buenos Aires. 1941

  From Someone

  To No One

  In the beginning, God was the Gods (Elohim), a plural which some call the plural of majesty and others the plural of plenitude; some have thought they noted an echo of earlier polytheisms or a premonition of the doctrine, declared at Nicaea, that God is One and is Three. Elohim takes a single verb: the first verse of the Old Testament says literally: In the beginning the Gods created (singular) the heaven and the earth. Despite the vagueness suggested by the plural, Elohim is concrete and is called the God Jehovah, and we read that He walked in the garden in the cool of the day. Human traits define Him; and in one place in Scripture we read It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart, and in another place for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, and in another In the fire of my wrath have I spoken. The subject of such locutions is indisputably Someone, a corporal Someone whom the centuries will magnify out of all focus. His titles are various: the Mighty One of Jacob, the Rock of Israel, I Am That I Am, God of Hosts, King of Kings. The last mentioned—which doubtless inspired, by antithesis, Gregory the Great’s Serf of the Serfs of God— is, in the original, a superlative of king. “It is a property of the Hebrew tongue,” says Fray Luis de Leon, “to thus double some same words, when an intensifier is wanted, either for good or ill. So that to say Song of Songs is the same as to say, in Castilian, Song among Songs, or Man among Men, that is, notable and eminent among all others and more excellent than many others.” In the first centuries of our era, the theologians renovated the prefix omni, formerly reserved for adjectives concerned with nature or with Jupiter, and supplied the words omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, which make God into a respectable chaos of unimaginable superlatives. This nomenclature, like the others, seems to limit the divinity: toward the end of the fifth century, the unrevealed author of the Corpus Dionysiacum declares that no affirmative predicate is seemly for God. Nothing should be affirmed about Him, everything can be denied. Schopenhauer dryly notes: “This theology is the only true one, but it has no content.” Composed in Greek, the treatises and letters which made up the Corpus Dionysiacum come to the attention of a ninth-century reader who turns them into Latin: he was Johannes Erigena or Scotus, that is, John Irish, whose name in history is Scotus Erigena, which is to say Irish Irish. Erigena formulates a doctrine of pantheistic cast: particular things are theophanies (revelations or apparitions of the divine) and behind them is God, the only reality, ‘‘but Who does not know what He is, because He is not a what, and is incomprehensible to Himself and to all intelligence.” He is not wise. He is more than wise; He is not good. He is more than good; inscrutably He exceeds and rejects all attributes. John the Irishman, by way of defining God, has recourse to the word nihilum, which is nothingness; God is the primordial nothingness of the creatio ex nihilo, the abyss in which first the archetypes and then concrete beings were engendered. He is Nothing and No One. Those who conceived of Him in this way did so with the feeling that this condition is more than to be a Who or a What. Analogically, Shankara teaches that men, in deep sleep, are the universe of God.
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br />   The process I have just illustrated is not, certainly, fortuitous. Magnification to the point of nothingness comes about or tends to come about in all cults. We see it, unequivocally, in the case of Shakespeare. His contemporary, Ben Jonson, loves him “on this side Idolatry”; Dryden calls him the Homer of England’s dramatic poets, but admits that he tends to be bombastic and vapid; the discursive eighteenth century strives to assay his virtues and censure his faults; in 1774, Maurice Morgan asserts that King Lear and Falstaff are no more than modifications of their creator’s mind; at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this judgment is refurbished by Coleridge, for whom Shakespeare is no longer a man but a literary variant of the infinite God of Spinoza: “. . . his own nature as an individual person,” he writes, “. . . was itself but a natura naturata —an effect, a product, not a power. It was Shakespeare’s prerogative to have the universal, which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him, not as abstracted from the observation of a variety of men, but as the substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal existence was but one. . . .” Hazlitt corroborates or confirms that Shakespeare resembled all men. In himself he was nothing, but he was everything that all others are, or what they can be. Hugo, later, compared him with the ocean, which is a seedbed of possible forms.47