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Borges and the Multiverse: Some Further Thoughts

2012; Routledge; Volume: 89; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820.2012.712326

1478-3428

Dominic Moran,

Latin American Literature Analysis

Abstract Various critics have claimed that elements of Borges’ story ‘El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan’ (1941) uncannily foreshadow contemporary cosmological theories of the ‘mulitverse’, and in particular the ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. This essay locates the source of Borges’ idea in the work of the English science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon and, by linking this unacknowledged and previously unexplored intertext with other, more explicit literary allusions in the story (especially to the Chinese novel ‘The Dream of the Red Chamber’, but also to Goethe), goes on to explore the ethical as well as aesthetic reasons behind Borges’ electing to write in apparently ‘fantastic’ fashion in two stories set during times of war (principally ‘El jardín’ but also ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’). Notes 1See especially Floyd Merrell, Unthinking Thinking: Borges, Mathematics and the New Physics (West Lafayette: Purdue U. P., 1991), 177–82; Alberto Rojo, ‘El jardín de los mundos que se ramifican: Borges y la mecánica cuántica’, in Borges en diez miradas, ed. Osvaldo Ferrari (Buenos Aires: Fundación El Libro, 1999), 185–98; and David Baulch, ‘Time, Narrative and the Multiverse: Post-Newtonian Narrative in Borges's “The Garden of Forking Paths” and William Blake's Vala or The Four Zoas’, The Comparatist, 27 (2003), 56–78. 2Steven Boldy, A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2009), 99. 3Jorge Luis Borges, ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’, in Ficciones (Madrid: Alianza, 1989), 101–16 (pp. 112, 114–15). 5Peter Byrne, ‘The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett’, Scientific American (December, 2007), 98–105 (p. 91). The Copenhagen interpretation, on the other hand, in an uncanny echo of the Esse rerum est percipi philosophy of Borges’ beloved Berkeley, stipulated that an observer was required to ‘collapse the wave function’, thereby transforming quantum probability into concrete actuality. This begs the question (initially posed by an incredulous Einstein) of how anything managed to exist before there were beings capable of observing it. In Everett's revised version of the theory, the wave function does not collapse. 4Everett's amplified doctoral thesis, together with a series of commentaries and explicatory essays, can be found in The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: A Fundamental Exposition, ed. Bruce DeWitt and Neil Graham (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1973). A less daunting introduction is provided by Peter Byrne in his recent biography of Everett, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutually Assured Destruction and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2010) (see especially Chapters 9–18 [pp. 81–177]). Everett's theory was later taken up in earnest by—amongst many others—Oxford physicist David Deutsch, and is summarized in his The Fabric of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1997) (see especially Chapter 2 [pp. 32–54]). An indication of just how seriously the theory is now taken is the recent appearance of the collection of essays on the subject by leading physicists and philosophers Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory and Reality, ed. Simon Saunders et al. (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2010). 6John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 63. 7Rojo, ‘El jardín de los mundos que se ramifican’, 197. 9Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (London: Methuen, 1937), 320. Tellingly, in his review of the novel Borges makes special mention of the worlds described by Stapledon which ‘ignoran el espacio y están sólo en el tiempo’ (Textos cautivos, 160 [my italics]). 8The reviews, published on 23 July and 20 August 1937, are collected in Jorge Luis Borges, Textos cautivos. Ensayos y reseñas en ‘El Hogar’, ed. Enrique Sacerío-Garí and Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1986), 152–53, 159–60; the ‘Prologue’ can be found in Jorge Luis Borges, Prólogos (Buenos Aires: Torres Agüero, 1975), 151–52. 10As almost all commentators note, Yu Tsun is himself a character from the Chinese novel (when we meet him in Chapter 1 of Kuhn's version, he is an impoverished student working as a copyist for the illiterate), and Ts'ui Pên may well be modelled on the novel's first author, Cao Xueqin (Tsao Hsüe Kin in Kuhn's transliteration), who is said to have retired to his ‘Nostalgia Pavilion’ for ten years in order to write the book (Ts'ui Pên spends thirteen years on his magnum opus locked away in the ‘Pabellón de la Límpida Soledad’) though, in typically tongue-in-cheek fashion, Borges may have adapted the name from the character Sïa Pan, a thuggish, predatory homosexual with no interest in either books or war (i.e. the very antithesis of Borges’ character), who, when we first encounter him at the end of Chapter 3 of Kuhn's translation, has murdered a man whose name turns out to be Fong (Albert chooses the name ‘Fang’ in his illustrative example of Ts'ui Pên's theory, which also involves variations on a murder which foreshadows his own [‘El jardín’, 112]). Here Borges turns his source on its head, since in the story it is Ts'ui Pên who is the victim of a murder which foreshadows that of Albert. The fragment of Ts'ui Pên's letter recovered by Albert is doubtless written on crimson paper in a nod towards the colour symbolism which runs throughout The Dream of the Red Chamber, variously connoting spring, youth, good fortune and prosperity (‘El jardín’, 110). The only critic to mention the fact that the synoptic biography and the review appear side by side is Haiqing Sun, in his ‘Hong Lou Meng in Jorge Luis Borges's Narrative’ (Variaciones Borges, 22 [2006], 15–33), though he says only that the juxtaposition ‘may […] suggest that Borges has read the Chinese novel solely as fantastic literature’ (16, n. 4). 11In the text he has Yu Tsun refer to the work in its original Chinese title, Hung Lu Meng (Borges’ spelling), perhaps to deflect the reader's attention from the resemblance. 12 Antología de la literatura fantástica, ed. Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1940), 89–90, 182, 276–77. In the revised and augmented 2nd edition (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1965), the passages appeared just four pages apart (pp. 397, 401–04). As the editors indicate (Antología, 89), the ‘Sueño infinito de Pao Yu’ is taken from Arthur Waley's ‘Preface’ to Chi-Chen Wang's radically truncated translation (London: Routledge, 1929), xi–xiii. It does not appear in either Wang's or Kuhn's translation of the novel. 13The amplificatio ad absurdum of this ‘scientific’ approach to Borges’ work is surely William Goldbloom Bloch's The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges's Library of Babel (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2008), in which the author treats ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ and its later reprise, ‘El libro de arena’, as if they were no more than mathematical conundra in superfluous and perversely obfuscatory literary disguise. 14Of Last and First Men Borges remarks ‘Lo puramente novelesco de esta novela—diálogos, caracteres, personalismos—es menos que mediocre’ (Textos cautivos, 153). In his ‘Prologue’ to Star Maker Stapledon himself concedes that ‘Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all’ (ix). 15See ‘El coloquio de los perros’, in Novelas ejemplares II, ed. Harry Sieber (Madrid: Cátedra, 1986), 299–359 (p. 359). 16‘La biblioteca de Babel’, ‘La muerte y la brújula’ and ‘El milagro secreto’, in Ficciones, 89–100, 147–63, 165–74; ‘Epílogo’, in El hacedor (Madrid: Alianza, 1987 [1st ed. 1960]), 155–56; ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’, in Otras inquisiciones (Madrid: Alianza, 1985 [1st ed. 1952]), 170–88 (p. 187). 17Few if any of Borges’ stories are as crammed with as much minute description and significant observed detail as ‘El jardín’ (the train journey, during which Yu Tsun recalls having seen ‘labradores, una enlutada, un joven que leía con fervor los Anales de Tácito, un soldado herido y feliz’ [105], is a good example), and these precisely recorded ephemera acquire great poignancy when viewed in the light of the story's central philosophical concerns. 18See Daniel Balderston, ‘Historical Situations in Borges’, Modern Language Notes, 105:2 (1990), 331–50 (especially pp. 333–43), and Chapter 3 of his Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1993), 39–55. Balderston makes a series of only tenuously supported assumptions about the extra-textual life of the characters (a questionable undertaking at the best of times), speculating freely as to why Yu Tsun was sent on his mission to England, why he was interested in ‘Madden's quandary’ (this, he asserts, ‘no doubt has to do with the interesting parallels between the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916’), and apparently taking it as read that he has had access to the ‘still-secret details of the court-martial of Padraic Pearse’. Balderston also claims that it is ‘obvious’ that Stephen Albert is or had been a spy, though there is no hard evidence in the story to support such a claim (Out of Context, 43–45, 48, 153, n. 29). Similarly, he can provide no proof that Borges had consulted or made use of any of the supposed sources for what he admits is a ‘whole fictive genealogy’ for Madden, who makes just three fleeting appearances in the text and to whose thoughts and speech the reader is never granted access (Out of Context, 152, n. 21). 19On the penultimate page of the novel the narrator imagines ‘the young men ranked together in thousands, exalted, possessed, saluting the flood-lit Führer’, and thinks of Italy, ‘land of memories and illusions’, where now ‘the mob's idol spell-bound the young’ (Star Maker, 330). 20Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Methuen, 1930), 276. 21Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius’, in Ficciones, 13–36 (p. 21). 22Perhaps significantly, Borges singles out the sections of Star Maker which deal with a world governed by the sense of taste in his review (Textos cautivos, 160). As Humberto Núñez-Faraco points out, the purely linguistic hypotheses in these passages are traceable to the philosophy of George Santayana, almost certainly via Borges’ friend, the painter Xul Solar (who makes an appearance as translator just after the passage cited). However, the idea of another planet or ‘counter-world’ governed by different modes of perception and cognition may well owe more to Stapledon. See Núñez-Faraco, ‘A Note on the Sources of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius” by J. L. Borges’, BSS, 88:1 (2011), 83–99 (pp. 86–87). 23That the ending takes the form of a ‘Postdata’ dated 1947 but penned along with the rest of the story in 1940 may itself owe something to Stapledon. Both Last and First Men and Last Men in London (London: Methuen, 1932) are narrated in chastened retrospect from a distant future, long after humankind has vanished from the face of the earth. ‘Tlön’ was the first of Borges’ fictions to make use of such a narrative device. 24Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 239. 25Boldy, A Companion to Borges, 86. Boldy provides compelling supporting references here to the essays ‘Dos libros’ and ‘Valéry como símbolo’ (Otras inquisiciones, 76–78, 125–29), in the latter of which Borges praises the French writer for championing ‘lucidez’ in ‘la era melancólica del nazismo y del materialismo dialéctico’ (86–87, notes 38 and 39). 26D. L Shaw, Borges: Ficciones (London: Grant & Cutler, 1993), 17; Balderston, ‘Historical Situations in Borges’, 332 (my italics). 27‘Prólogo’ to El informe de Brodie (Madrid: Alianza, 1990 [1970]), 10. This is despite the fact that in the ‘Prólogo’ to El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (the first part of what later became Ficciones) he refers to the story only as a piece of detective fiction with what he clearly thinks is an ingenious twist in the tail (Ficciones, 12). 28Baulch, ‘Time, Narrative and the Multiverse’, 64. As Balderston argues, in ‘our’ universe the error is more likely to be a consequence of discrepancies between both different editions of the Liddell Hart and those of Ficciones itself (Out of Context, 151, n. 5). 29Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Los teólogos’, in El aleph (Madrid: Alianza, 1989 [1st ed. 1949]), 37–48. In the story religious fanatics embrace a doctrine which Plato was only preaching ‘para poder mejor confutarla’, something they would have known had the text reached them intact (37). 30For a summary of the editorial history, see the ‘Introduction’ to the first volume of David Hawkes’ English translation of The Story of the Stone (London: Penguin, 1973), 15–46. 31In fact, the much simplified German translation of the novel which Borges reviewed in 1937 has a broadly circular structure, ending with the hermit Schi Yin, whom we first encounter in Chapter 1 (where in a dream he overhears a Taoist and a Buddhist priest discussing the story that is about to unfold), offering to tell Yu Tsun the story of the stone (Der Traum der Roten Kammer [Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1932], 776). Interestingly, when pondering the question of how Ts'ui Pên's novel might be ‘estrictamente infinito’, Stephen Albert considers the possibility of a ‘volumen cíclico, circular’, but then rejects it (‘El jardín’, 110–11). 34 Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford, revised ed. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1909), 211–13 (my italics). Goethe's tutelary presence is also suggested by other details, such as the references to the moon throughout the story (Goethe commented on the fact that there is ‘much talk of the moon’ in the novel in question [Conversations, 211], as indeed there is in The Dream of the Red Chamber) and the fact that when Yu Tsun enters Albert's study he sees a ‘biblioteca de libros occidentales y orientales’ (‘El jardín’, 108) (Goethe published the complete, twelve-book version of his Westöstlicher Divan [the title is surely echoed in Borges’ text], his last great poetic cycle, in 1827). 32For an excellent introduction to the concept of eutrapelia, see Colin Thompson, ‘Eutrapelia and Exemplarity in the Novelas ejemplares’, in A Companion to Cervantes's ‘Novelas ejemplares’, ed. Stephen Boyd (London: Tamesis, 2005), 261–81. Many of Borges’ ‘postmodern’ narrative techniques (stories within stories, missing pages, unreliable narrators, questionable editorial intrusions etc.) are, of course, Cervantine in origin. 33Balderston, Out of Context, 152, n. 17. 35The reference is taken from the ‘Prólogo’ to El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, where Borges outlines his famous aesthetic stratagem of avoiding writing cumbersome tomes of ‘quinientas páginas’ by pretending that those books already exist and offering instead ‘un resumen, un comentario’ (Ficciones, 12). ‘El jardín’ is a perfect illustration of the technique. 36Manuel Ferrer (later cited by Balderston) is wrong to suggest that Yu Tsun is a ‘personaje importante’ who ‘está detrás de todo el desarrollo y la urdimbre de la novela’ (Borges y la nada [London: Tamesis, 1971], 181). True, he appears at the beginning and the end, but he barely figures in the rest of the narrative. The (humorous) significance of his name is more important than the role which he plays in the work. 37 A Dream of Red Mansions, trans. Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang, 3 vols (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), III, 585–86.