Jorge Luis Borges - The Art of Fugue

A guest essay from Mark Cohen

Exploring Life and Literature

Dear Friends,

One of my greatest joys regarding this publication is the people I have met. Readers and writers, yes, but more importantly, humans one and all. They come from all walks of life, all manner of backgrounds, and a dizzying variety of journeys to get here. They each have a story.

My guest author this week is Mark Cohen. Originally hailing from New York’s Hudson Valley, he has made his home in Cleveland, Ohio, since the early 1980s. Mark is married with six children and four grandkids. He is a Professor of Pathology & Neurology during the day. When his family isn’t keeping him busy, he enjoys playing classical guitar. His favorite novel, which he recommends, is The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

I asked Mark why reading was essential in his life and he responded with the words of Umberto Eco from an interview with the Paris Review.

What benefits have knowledge and culture afforded you in your lifetime?

ECO

An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d’Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it’s an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege.

Please enjoy Mark’s essay on Jorge Luis Borges - The Art of Fugue.

Jorge Luis Borges, from The Paris Review, Issue 40, 1967

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“The revolutionary thing about Borges’ prose is that it contains almost as many ideas as words, for his precision and conciseness are absolute.” --Mario Vargas Llosa (recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature)

Rules for reading Borges:

1. Assume he has read everything.

2. Find the fugue subject, then hold on tight.

Shortly after arriving at college (a half-century ago), my mind exploded when we received a xeroxed (or was it mimeographed?) copy of “A New Refutation of Time”, from A Personal Anthology by Jorge Luis Borges (JLB), as a reading/writing assignment. Although the distinction between fact and fiction in Borges is somewhat arbitrary, this essay is not included in “Collected Fictions”, so I will focus on the next story from that Personal Anthology, “The Circular Ruins” (TCR). Heeding Llosa’s admonition, and following my “rules for reading”, I begin with a deep dive into the opening lines in hopes of demonstrating the utility of this approach when reading JLB.

Challenges begin before the story opens, as in most translations the epigraph is either misquoted or misattributed. Andrew Hurley gets the form right (it is a question): “And if he left off dreaming about you…?” but misattributes the quote to chapter 6 of Through the Looking Glass (to be fair, it is misattributed in all but one English translation of the story). The episode (which occurs in chapter 4) introduces our fugue subject, with Tweedledum and Tweedledee asking Alice what she thinks would happen if she wakes the Red King (their answer is, “you go out – bang! – Just like a candle!”). When, a few lines later, Alice insists that if she wasn’t real, she shouldn’t be able to cry, Tweedledum, in a tone of great contempt, retorts “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?”

As a young child, Borges was introduced by his father to the idealist philosophy of Bishop Berkeley, who, along with Schopenhauer, pervades Borges’ writing. For Berkeley, objects exist only in the mind (although he did concede that objects could exist within the “mind of God”). Schopenhauer went further by eliminating not only the need for God, but also the concept of the individual subject. The idea that Alice would cease to exist if she woke the King is Borges’ nod to Berkeley, while the idea that the discussion is taking place entirely within Alice’s dream is pure Schopenhauer.

The story begins in the “unanimous night”, again invoking Schopenhauer, but rapidly becomes quite specific: “the taciturn man had come there from the South..one of those infinite villages that lie upriver, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon.”

Once again, the Hurley translation is the only one I could find that states this correctly, as the others use “Zend language” (or tongue). The Zend (or Zand) refers to translation and commentary on the Avesta (the “Bible” of Zoroastrianism, written in Old Avestan) in the vernacular of various of times and places, and is thus not a single, specific language. Allusions to contamination by Greek and leprosy suggest the time when the Greeks and Persians were first getting to “know” each other, around the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Depending on who one believes, leprosy was either a Persian thing (Herodotus) or was introduced by Alexander the Great, who brought it with him from India when he invaded Persia in 329 BC.

It is also reasonable to venture that it is not coincidental that Alexander invaded Persia by crossing the Oxus river (now called the Amu), which originates in the Pamir Mountains of modern day Tajikistan, and forms part of the “Roof of the World” along with Western Tibet, flowing northward to empty into the Aral Sea. Although Zoroastrianism permeates TCR, this suggests the taciturn man may have come from a village on Mount Kailash, which was the center of Bon religion (preceding the rise of Buddhism many centuries later).

Situating the story in time and place provides a frame from which we can approach otherwise cryptic sounding components of the story, starting with the next sentence describing the man as “gray.” Zoroastrians believe that creation occurs in two stages, a disembodied spiritual stage followed by a material stage, which enables the individual to battle with evil. At death, the individual returns to the immaterial state and is judged based on what it has done to aid the cause of goodness. Most are found worthy of paradise or plunged into hell, however, the few souls where good and evil are just in balance go to the “Place of the Mixed Ones” where they lead a gray existence, lacking both joy and sorrow.

The central theme (both to the story and to Zoroastrianism) of fire is also introduced in this second sentence, again harkening back to Herodotus who speaks of fire veneration by Persians, which came to have an enhanced part in the devotional lives of Zoroastrians (so much so that cremation was forbidden, as it would despoil the purity of fire). The sun and the moon, which also figure prominently within TCR, are manifestations of this sacred fire.

The second paragraph begins with the man awakening and seeing “without astonishment” that his wounds had healed. Dreams, which form the core of TCR, are revered in Zoroastrianism, where they were believed to come from God, engendering the practice of sleeping in temples to recover from injuries or disease (“enkoimesis”).

We now learn the man’s purpose is that of dreaming into existence another man which, I think, draws us away from Zoroastrianism and towards Tibetan Bon. Bon was precursor to Tibetan Buddhism and shares the belief that with enough power of concentration, one can produce emanations known as “tulkus” (which has been used as the basis of establishing successor Dalai Lamas) or less lasting and materialized “tulpas”, the difference depending on the strength of concentration and quality of mind.

Borges now develops the fugue with motivic fragmentation, which can be quite confusing if one loses sight of the original fugue subject. For instance, about midway through the story comes a digression regarding the cosmologies of the Gnostics, which has inspired a fair amount of speculation on the Golem legend as the foundation for TCR, especially as Borges was known to be a fan of Jewish mysticism (along, I might add, with a multitude of other mystical disciplines). In one of his many interviews, which I believe Borges relished as opportunities to embellish his fugue subjects still further, he remarks: "I'll not forget the one who pointed out in class that my story ‘The Golem’ was a reworking of ‘The Circular Ruins.’ I was amazed! ‘My God,’ I said, ‘you're right! I've never thought of it, but it's true. Well, I only wrote it—once. You've probably read both stories many times.’"

For me, the parenthetical statement that the man would have been better off if he had destroyed his creation is ripe with possibilities, and that it is tossed off as an “aside” quintessentially Borgesian. A simple interpretation could be that the man would never have become aware of his own contingency had he done so. However, another fascinating possibility is that Borges is invoking the Persian legend of Sohrab and Rostam from the Shahnameh of Abol-Quasem Ferdowsi. Even if Borges did not have access to a suitable translation of the entire epic, there is no doubt that he would’ve been familiar with Matthew Arnold’s 1853 poem recounting this famous episode relating how the great warrior Rustum unknowingly slew his long-lost son Sohrab in single combat, which (in fact) takes place alongside the Oxus river.

In desperation, the man begs the statue for aid, which then appears in his dreams along with “a bull, a rose, and a tempest, and reveals that its earthly name was Fire”. In Zoroastrianism, the gods created the world in seven stages, of which the animate creations of stages four through six were a plant, a bull, and a man, followed by the final creation of fire, including the sun. The gods then crushed the plant and slew the bull and man to bring more plants, animals, and men into existence, setting the cycle of being in motion.

The story progresses inexorably to its conclusion, recapitulating the fugue subject introduced by the epigraph, as the man experiences his realization “with relief, with humiliation, with terror,” bringing us back (full circle ?!?) to Berkeley and Schopenhauer.

Allow me to finish by situating TCR within the greater fugue we know as Borges by circling back to famous concluding paragraph of “A New Refutation of Time”, which immediately precedes TCR in the “Personal Anthology”.

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Endnotes:

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous by George Berkeley is a brilliant explication of western philosophical idealism. For those who prefer audiobooks, I highly recommend narrators Jonathan Keeble & Peter Kenny

Borges claims to have learned German so he could read Schopenhauer in the original. I’m not Borges, so I’ll defer to Professor Woods. I consulted The Essential Schopenhauer: Key Selections from the World as Will and Representation and Other Writings, for what it’s worth.

Mary Boyce was the undisputed expert on Zoroastrianism in our time, and wrote an affordable text for the general reader: Zoroastrians Their Religious Beliefs and Practices

Alexandra David-Néel was a Belgian–French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer. She is best known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet, when it was forbidden to foreigners. David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels, including Magic and Mystery in Tibet, which was published in 1929, and is an enjoyable introduction to Tibetan mysticism, including Bon religion and tulpas.

The Shahnameh is the national epic of Iran written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE recounting the mythical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. One of the most famous stories in the Shahnameh is The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam, which is available in this stand-alone translation by Jerome W. Clinton. For those who prefer contemporary fiction The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk is “is fearless in its reading of canonical texts like Oedipus Rex and Rostam and Sohrab and in tackling the question of patricide and paternal filicide”.

Finally, for those interested in pursuing Dzogchen meditation, which was one of the four pillars of the Bon religion, Sam Harris has both a substack and an app (Waking-up), dedicated to the practice. You can listen to a brief introduction on the Ten Percent Happier podcast.

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Mark also recommends the Literature and History podcast, particularly their episodes on Homer, the first of which is linked below.

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Until next time,