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Abstract
This paper explores the role of the imagination in our understanding of the nature of knowledge, through the synchronic interaction of the works of Luis de Góngora and Jorge Luis Borges, respectively. We discuss the supposed ‘world of écriture’ and ‘blinding’ metaphors of the former, and the spatial shift between self and universe that metaphor entails, in the latter. We also highlight some of the ways in which the two bodies of work relate to each other, and speak to us about how imagination relates to understanding, particularly through the short story ‘El Aleph’ and Borges’ later reappraisal of Gongorine methods. The lesson that Góngora and Borges teach us about such explanations is twofold: firstly, that any explanation is only every partial, and secondly, that explanations can only ever be indirect and are always mediated by the imagination. Ultimately, the irony is that, for these authors, a large element of the ‘truth’ that we achieve is an understanding about the limited nature of understanding itself.
Notes
1 Luis de Góngora, Soledad Segunda, v. 48. See Poems of Góngora, selected, introduced & annotated by R. O. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1966). All subsequent references to Góngora are to this edition of his work unless stated otherwise.
2 Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 4 vols (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2011), I, 743. All subsequent references to Borges are to this edition of his work unless stated otherwise; volume and page numbers will be given parenthetically.
3 The critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal complained that, when he came across Derrida's work on deconstruction, it sounded tautological after having read Borges: ‘I could not understand why he [Derrida] took so long in arriving at the same luminous perspectives which Borges had opened up years earlier. His famed “deconstruction” impressed me for its technical precision and the infinite seduction of its textual sleights-of-hand, but it was all too familiar to me: I had experienced it in Borges avant la lettre’ (see Emir Rodríguez Monegal, ‘Borges and Derrida: Apothecaries’, in Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts, ed. Edna Aizenberg [Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1990], 128–38 [p. 128]).
4 ‘The monstrous quality that runs through Borges's enumeration consists [ … ] in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible’ (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [London: Routledge, 1970], xvi).
5 Ingrid Vindel Pérez, ‘La construcción del sujeto en Borges: Góngora’, Espéculo, 42 (2009), <http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero42/gongora.html> (accessed 3 October 2015).
6 For a good recent overview of Borges' interest in Góngora, see Jairo Antonio Hoyos, ‘ “Conservo estas impertinencias”: las lecturas gongorinas de Borges', Variaciones Borges, 39 (2015), 103–23.
7 Jorge Luis Borges & Osvaldo Ferrari, En diálogo II (México D.F.: Siglo XXI, 2005), 133.
8 In relation to this issue, see the discussion below of uncertainty and indeterminacy.
9 Cristina Ortiz Ceberio, La recontextualización de la poética del siglo XVII en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 42.
10 Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, Diálogos con Quetzatcóatl: humanismo, etnografía y ciencia (1492–1577) (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2014).
11 Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Poems of Góngora, ed. Jones, 1–38 (pp. 9–10).
12 Critics have been more inclined to identify Borges with the ‘conceptista’ tradition rather than with culteranismo, and, in particular, with the work of Francisco de Quevedo, rather than with Góngora's. Borges wrote admiringly of Quevedo in Inquisiciones (1925), El idioma de los argentinos (1928) and Otras Inquisiciones (1952), as well as in a Prologue to Quevedo's Verso y prosa (1949), among other works. As Paola Marín puts it: ‘Francisco de Quevedo es una presencia constante a lo largo de la obra de Jorge Luis Borges'; see ‘Francisco de Quevedo y Jorge Luis Borges: la magia secreta del escrito’, Cincinnati Romance Review, 32 (2011), 55–69 (p. 55). See also Blas Matamoro, ‘Borges en el espejo de Quevedo’, Variaciones Borges, 10 (2000), 139–44. On the more general issue of Borges' relations with the intellectual currents of the Baroque period, see especially Loreto Busquets, ‘Borges y el Barroco’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 505–507 (1992), 299–319.
13 Translated by Jones and quoted in his ‘Introduction’, in Poems of Góngora, ed. Jones, 10.
14 Translated by Jones and quoted in his ‘Introduction’, in Poems of Góngora, ed. Jones, 10.
15 ‘No soy ni filósofo ni metafísico; lo que he hecho es explotar, o explorar—es una palabra más noble—las posibilidades literarias de la filosofía. Creo que eso es lícito’ (Borges, quoted in María Esther Vázquez, Borges: imágenes, memorias, diálogos [Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1977], 106–07).
16 For a full discussion of this key sentence, see Daniel Balderston, ‘The Universe in a Nutshell: The Long Sentence in Borges's “El Aleph” ’, Variaciones Borges, 33 (2012), 53–72.
17 Paul de Man, ‘A Modern Master’, in Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 21–27 (p. 26).
18 ‘Perhaps the most striking feature of man's spatialization of his world is the fact that it never appears to be exclusively limited to the pragmatic level of action and perceptual experience [ … ] The small worlds of direct experience are fringed with much broader fields known indirectly through symbolic means’ (Irving Hallowell, quoted in Fi-Yu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1977], 87).
19 Naomi Lindstrom, Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 26.
20 Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1998), 163.
21 Lindstrom, Jorge Luis Borges, 27.
22 George Steiner, ‘Tigers in the Mirror’, in Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Jaime Alazraki (Waterville: Thorndike Press, 1987), 116–24 (p. 122).
23 Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine & Eliot Weinberger (London: Penguin, 2001), 221.
24 Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 4 vols (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2006), I, 660.
25 María Rosa Menocal, Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1991), 103.
26 Borges, The Total Library, 14.
27 Sofie Kluge, ‘The World in a Poem? Góngora versus Quevedo in Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph’, Orbis Litterarum, 60:4 (2005), 293–312 (p. 308).
28 Kluge, ‘The World in a Poem?’, 295.
29 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process As Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, Critical Enquiry, 5:1 (1978), 143–59 (p. 147).
30 Elias Rivers, ‘Dámaso Alonso between Góngora and Quevedo’, Books Abroad, 48:2 (1974), 241–46 (p. 243).
31 Jon Thiem, ‘Borges, Dante, and the Poetics of Total Vision’, Comparative Literature, 40:2 (1988), 97–121 (p. 108).
32 Crystal Anne Chemris, Góngora's ‘Soledades' and the Problem of Modernity (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008), 76.
33 Peter Pesic, Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature (Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2002), 118.
34 Pesic, Seeing Double, 104.
35 George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber, 2001), 5.
36 Kluge, ‘The World in a Poem?’, 304.
37 Kluge's complete statement reads: ‘Góngora indirectly expressed the view that literature should, through the renovation of literary form and language, aim at—and possibly accomplish—representation of the infinite beyond the perspectivism imposed on human consciousness and language by temporality’ (‘The World in a Poem?’, 304).
38 Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), 54.
39 Ken Baake, Metaphor and Knowledge: The Challenges of Writing Science (New York: State Univ. of New York Press, 2003), 7.
40 Kluge, ‘The World in a Poem?’, 299.
41 Rafael Montano, ‘El Aleph: Dante y los dos Borges', Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 27:2 (2003), 307–25 (p. 316).
42 Francisco de Quevedo, Obra poética, ed. José Manuel Blecua, 4 vols (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1971), III, 227–28. The revised version of line one reads, ‘Quien quisiere ser culto en sólo un día’, and in the final line ‘Soledades’ becomes ‘cultedades’.
43 Umberto Eco, ‘Between La Mancha and Babel’, Variaciones Borges, 4 (1997), 51–62 (p. 59).
44 Eco, ‘Between La Mancha and Babel’, 61.
45 Menocal, Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth, 3.
46 Umberto Eco, Baudolino, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 2003), 141–42.
47 As noted above, Vindel Pérez, commenting on how Borges articulated his relationship with Góngora in the ‘Góngora’ poem, suggests that:
Lo íntimo y esencial se pierde [ … ] en aras de lo ideal extremándolo incluso hasta su último término posible: el de una imagen sutil y ascendente en eternas y universales ideas que la poesía debe permitir entrever:
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.