A Dictionary of Borges

A DICTIONARY OF BORGES Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes Forewords by Mario Vargas Llosa & Anthony Burgess Duckworth i First published in 1990 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. The Old Piano Factory 43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW1 7DY © 1990 by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 0 7156 2154 8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fishburn, Evelyn A dictionary of Borges. 1. Fiction in Spanish. Argentinian writers. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986. Critical studies I. Title II. Hughes, Psiche 863 ISBN 0-7156-2154-8 Photoset in North Wales by Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd. Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Press Ltd, Melksham. ii Contents Maps Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa Foreword by Anthony Burgess Introduction Abbreviations DICTIONARY Biographical summary iii For F.J.F. & P.H. iv Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa This is a book that would have been to Borges's taste. Although he used to pride himself on never having read anything that was written about his life or his work, I am sure he would have read it from beginning to end. This is because it is a book of imaginative erudition, or erudite fantasy, an unusual combination which he used with greater originality than anyone else, so that the genre, though of the greatest antiquity, seems now almost to have been invented by him. Like the strange sect of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which wished secretly to interpolate a fictitious universe into the real one, Borges too, throughout his life as a writer, sought to distil beings, titles and events which his fantasy had forged into the history and literature of reality. Now they are part of them, as consistent and truthful as those which existed in objective time and real life. With true erudition, this dictionary organises, classifies, defines, collates the thousand and one creatures of Borges's imagination, constructing a map, in the minutest detail, of its geographies and constellations. It is an entertaining manual for exploring the vastness and cohesion of the Borgesian oeuvre, an excellent guide to prevent us from getting lost in the labyrinth and to ensure that we always find the way out. M.V.L. v Foreword by Anthony Burgess I had a strong personal affection for Jorge Luis Borges. This, I think, was reciprocated and reinforced by the fact that we both had the same surname. At a party in the Argentine Embassy in Washington DC, when he was dogged by spies listening for words of disaffection, he and I spoke in Anglo-Saxon. This baffled completely the polyglot agents of a repressive state; it was very Borgesian. His life and his work tended to overlap: his work was magic and he had the face of a magician. His blindness only made him see more. Compared with the blockbusting novelists of our age, Borges must seem to have written practically nothing. But his ficciones, delicate, enigmatic, metaphysical, represent some of the most exquisite probing into the reality that twentieth-century literature has seen. He has created a whole world, and this dictionary serves to indicate how large this world is: we need a gazetteer to find our way round it. It is primarily an intellectual world, and it is built on the oldest of all intellectual dichotomies - the clash between nominalism and idealism. If we are nominalists, we have to say that only particulars are real, and that the universals are no more than words. A nominalist fiction-writer would have to have separate words for all the tigers, oranges, dishwashers and prostitutes in the world, but such a situation could never be handled. Fiction-writers have to use generalities, and this makes them, in the philosophical sense of the term, idealists. Borges is all too aware of his idealism, and a good deal of his work is a slap in the face of the nominalists. Thus when he constructs the Great Library of Babel, it has to be coextensive with the universe, since it contains every possible book, and the books are made, regardless of meaning, out of every possible combination of letters of the alphabet. Take also the character with total recall who wants to write but cannot, since to create logarithms for memories is beyond any man's power. To write his autobiography would require another life. These are some of the metaphysical tricks that Borges plays. The eponym of Doctor Brodie's Report meets a tribe whose language has no words for artefacts. They call a hut a tree and they would have to call a book 'tree' too. Then there is the imaginary planet called Tlön which seems to have been designed by Bishop Berkeley: there is no space or time in it, only succession, and the language has no nouns, since speakers have no conception of matter independent of their perceptions. Evidently such tricks could not be played in a ficción the length of Ulysses or Foreword Middlemarch, and Borges's limitation of form is, by an anomaly, an index of the width of his speculative power. His short stories are not the product of short-windedness, in the manner of the composer Anton Webern, but examples of a wholly original genre whose bulk and resonance depend, by that anomaly again, on an elected brevity. The range of the ficciones, as of the poems, is wide enough not merely to justify the making of a lexicographical guide to them but to render it a necessity. Borges knew the world of the pampas and had read Martin Fierro, but he was a librarian by profession, unashamedly bookish, and had read more widely than any of his contemporaries, even his senior James Joyce. The reading he did nourished his fiction, and some of it was very abstruse. We need a dictionary to get the logarithms of it, and this is the dictionary we need. I welcome it. The last time I saw Borges was in 1982, when we were both guests of the city of Dublin at the Joyce centennial celebrations. He gave a little talk about Joyce's importance after a banquet which was, in the Irish manner, highly bibulous, and most of its guests, who did not know who the hell he was, talked throughout his discourse. That, we may say, was the response of the great philistine world. Borges remains a taste to be cultivated, a name known and even feared but not destined to be popular. But he was no hermetic man. I drank Irish whiskey with him in the rowdy bar of the Ormonde Hotel and he said: 'What a beautiful word is mist.' I forbore to say that in German it meant manure. He would have reconciled the disparities without trouble and, if his writing days had not been done, made a ficción out of it. He was all magic. Let us not pretend that Borges, for all his personal approachability, was ever easy to approach as a writer. Even when we think that we fully understand, we are often led astray by our failure to identify a reference, an allusion, a carefully planted ambiguity. That is where this dictionary comes in. We have needed it for a long time, and new readers of the master as well as old will bless its compilers. It is also, vi apart from its value as an aid, compulsively readable in itself. The blind Borges would have loved to have had it read out to him. That is, alas, one chance our lexicographers have missed. But they certainly help the rest of us. A.B. vii Introduction ‘He was dissuaded from this by two considerations: his awareness that the task was interminable, his awarenes that it was useless.’ J.L. Borges, ‘Funes the Memorious’ ‘One may envision some decades hence a Borges encyclopaedia ...the work of a group of people devoted to the annihilation of the external universe and its replacement with a universe made by a human being, with its own inevitable logic and order. That human being will in time recede as a physical being and achieve the status of an idea. Then those future generations of scholars will forget the existence of English or Argentine or Latin literatures. The world will be Borges.’ D. Balderston, The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges The work of Jorge Luis Borges is intensely erudite, and its wealth of allusions may at times baffle and even discourage readers. The aim of this Dictionary is to provide comprehensive information on these allusions that may assist the general reader, and also the specialist. The references, real and imaginary, with which Borges’s fiction is interwoven form an echoing subtext, supporting and enriching the surface plots of his stories. Rarely gratuitous or merely ornamental, they reveal not only deliberate choice, but a remarkable degree of appositeness: in almost every case the allusion can be seen either to go with the grain of the story or to stand in parodic confrontation with it. The Dictionary, which was undertaken after consulting Borges and with his encouragement, is concerned primarily with the fictions that comprise the original collections published as Ficciones (1942), El Aleph (1949) and El informe de Brodie (1970), known as the canonical stories. The references explained include names of, or allusions to, personal or fictional characters, places, titles, quotations, and philosophical and religious movements. As well as factual information, the entries inevitably involve a certain amount of critical interpretation, but no attempt has been made to impose 'solutions' - the idea is to offer a range of the possible meanings that are suggested through the interaction of each allusion with the overall structure of the text.

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