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Sir Thomas Browne in Borges's A Certain Melancholy Vanity: Sir Thomas Browne in Borges’s “El Aleph” Pablo Maurette From his youth until the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges cultivated with Sir Thomas Browne a unique form of friendship that one could label me- tempsychotic. Unlike those English friendships that first do away with in- timacy and eventually with dialogue, such as that held by Herbert Ashe and the narrator’s father in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges never ceased to converse with Browne. Impervious to the constrictions of time and space (for Borges, friendship is a bond stronger than romantic love precisely because it can dispense both with frequency and with physi- cal presence), the kinship that the Argentine writer established with the seventeenth-century English physician was based on intellectual and tem- peramental affinities, something one can appreciate in their shared wit, an exquisite sense of style, and a common love for extravagant notions. Browne, a man who in Coleridge’s words had “a little twist in the brains,” was responsible for many ingenious conceits. He speculated, for example, that just like for some ancient pagans there was a transmigration of souls, there is also a transmigration of ideas. Borges was particularly fond of this Variaciones Borges 51 » 2021 notion. In “La esfera de Pascal,” he rephrases it: “Quizá la historia univer- sal es la historia de unas cuantas metáforas” (OC 636). It is not outlandish to propose that he saw himself as a fitting vessel for Browne’s ideas to reincarnate.1 Borges first came across the work of Browne in 1919, or 1920, while he was living in Spain. That first impression was powerful, overwhelming even, to the point that many years later, toying with the trope of trans- migration, he confessed that as a young man he did his best “to be Sir 60 Thomas Browne” (Woodall 68). So too, borrowing an expression from Robert Louis Stevenson (who was also a fervent Browne admirer), he would claim that in his youth “he played the sedulous ape to Sir Thomas Browne” (Irwin 131).2 His 1925 essay on Browne, published first in the journal Proa (2.7) and later that year in the collection Inquisiciones, is most likely the first piece ever written in Spanish about the physician and writer, as well as Borges’s only prose text entirely dedicated to him.3 In it, one Pablo Maurette Pablo can appreciate the diligent pupil’s attempts to imitate the master. Baroque, abstruse and at times—to borrow a compliment that Borges would later pay to a scene in Dante’s Purgatorio—“de una complicada fealdad” (NED 89), the young writer’s prose in this early collection of essays reminds one of the end of “Tlön” and of the narrator’s project to translate Browne’s Urn Burial into Quevedo’s Spanish—a translation, he adds, that he does not intend to publish.4 In fact, Borges includes in that early essay passages 1 The interest in metempsychosis is one of many shared by Borges and Browne. For more on this see Stephens. 2 Borges elevated Urn Burial to the status of Hamlet and argued that the quality of its music had never been surpassed in any language (Rodríguez Monegal 147). See also “Fragmento sobre Joyce,” published in Sur, in 1941 (Borges en Sur 169). 3 The only other text Borges dedicated entirely to Browne is the poem “Religio Medici, 1643” included in El oro de los tigres (1972). Bioy Casares reports in a diary entry from Wednesday, September 26th 1956, that Borges “está por escribir un cuentito sobre Sir Thomas Browne y la quema de brujas” (203). Sadly, the idea did not come to fruition. The theme was inspired by an episode out of Browne’s biography. In 1664, the physi- cian was called in as an expert witness in a trial against two women accused of witchcraft in the village of Bury St. Edmonds. The women were ultimately found guilty and burned at the stake (Barbour 365 ff.). For more on Borges’s taste for biographical writing, see Fontana. 4 Interestingly, Borges never allowed Inquisiciones to be reprinted and excluded it, from the complete works. from Urn Burial and Religio Medici translated into a Golden Age redolent Spanish.5 The latinate and convoluted style reflects precisely what Borg- es claimed many years later that he was doing at this point in his career: “Quevedo and Saavedra Fajardo stood in their own stiff, arid, Spanish way for the same kind of writing as Sir Thomas Browne in Urne Buriall. I was doing my best to write Latin in Spanish” (The Aleph 160).6 In spite of its rhetorical extravagance, “Sir Thomas Browne” contains brilliant insights. First, Borges understands Browne as a “literato,” which 61 is more than simply a man of letters, or a master stylist, as he was com- monly perceived in England after the publication of Samuel Johnson’s bi- ography. A “literato” is a man who makes literature. Browne wrote a small number of unclassifiable works that have elements of the essay and the treatise, the letter and the diary, the commonplace book and the spiritual exercise. On occasion, he wrote poetry (Religio Medici includes a few of his poems), he was quite fond of lists and enumerations, and he penned a catalogue for an imaginary collection. Interestingly, the English adjective “literary” is one of Browne’s many coinages. Borges’s enthusiastic but not for that less sharp reading of Browne also leads him to label the physician a “mystic”—a word that, as far as I know, only one other reader of Browne (seventeenth-century French physician Guy Patin) had previously used to refer to him. Finally, and more importantly, Borges argues that Browne’s style, famously obscure with its labyrinthine syntax and its abundance of Greek, Latin, and newly coined terms, was actually the reflection of an ef- “El Aleph” in Borge’s Browne Sir Thomas fort to achieve perspicuity. We should bear in mind that in the mid-17th century, Latin (and, to a lesser degree, Greek) was still the educated lan- guage, so this latinate English allows him to reach wider audiences in the Continent and engage in dialogue with his peers with a lexicon that pre- vented misunderstandings. The young Borges took note of this lesson in the importance of clarity as he elaborated his own style. As Andrew Hurley has shown in his examination of Borges’s enduring engagement with ele- 5 Rosenstein compares some of these fragments with the translation of chapters 4 and 5 of Urn Burial that Borges and Bioy Casares published in Sur (111), in 1944. For more on the connections between “Tlön” and the Sur translation see Weed (38-42), Gar- cía, Blanco (38), and Johnson (175). For the Javier Marías fiasco of the fake attribution see Marías, Rosenstein (301-302), and García. 6 For more on Borges’s latinate Spanish and its baroque origins see Blanco (45) and Hurley (75). ments from the Baroque style of his early writings, throughout his career the argentine writer continued to use these etymologized adjectives (“Na- die lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche” is perhaps the most famous example), and never lost that taste for “Baroque shocks” which he had acquired from Browne and Quevedo (Hurley 78-79).7 Even though he never again dedicated a whole prose piece to Browne, the English physician makes periodic appearances in Borges’s work. Whereas oftentimes he is referenced and cited, just as often he is not; his 62 notions and conceits, his elaborate syntax, and his taste for all kinds of ex- travagances showing up without attribution, appropriated by Borges and incorporated into his own literary imagination.8 In the words of Rosato and Álvarez, “la lectura de Browne fue tan profundamente asimilada por Borges que formaba parte de su repertorio personal” (71). While critics who studied Borges’s engagement with Sir Thomas Browne have almost invariably centered their attention on these explicit references (and over- Pablo Maurette Pablo whelmingly on the one at the ending of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”),9 I would like to draw attention to lesser known moments in Borges that evoke Browne. Let us begin with an idea that plays a key role in the Argentine writer’s literary imagination, “the fallacy in duration.” First expressed by Browne in Urn Burial (1658), this notion describes the vanity that throughout history has driven certain, usually powerful, men to have funerary monu- ments built for them in the hopes of persisting after death. This delusion rests upon what Browne calls the “fallacy in duration” (308), a self-serving, vain, and misleading logic that overlooks the fact that everything is per- ishable and that nothing is eternal but eternity itself; in Browne’s words, 7 Ronald Christ examined this habit of etymologizing adjectives in his 1968 mono- graph The Narrow Act (35). This is the first full-length analysis of Borges’s work pub- lished in English, after a handful of doctoral dissertations from the 1960s that remain unpublished. For more on the early reception of Borges in the Anglo-Saxon world, see Caballero (64-82). 8 Christ argues that the most valuable lesson Borges learns from Browne is methodi- cal, “the construction of a literary work with purely, or almost purely, literary elements” (Christ 159). 9 The most brilliant reading of Browne’s role at the ending of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” remains that by Kaplan, who argues that the story itself is the actual translation referenced by the narrator. Building up on this notion of translation as rewriting, John- son argues that translation for Borges is the ultimate form of imitatio (175).
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