Patrick Dove

METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN BORGES'S"EL ZAHIR"

One of the most frequently cited lines from the work of Jorge Luis Borgescomes from the conclusion of the 1951 essay "The Fearful Sphere of

Pascal": "It may be that universal history is the history of the different in-tonations given a handful of metaphors" {Labyrinths 192). Over the years agood deal of critical attention has been paid to the importance of metaphor inBorges's writing. Critics have pointed to his use of figural language to suturethe rift between being and thought, lived experience and recollection. Literarymetaphor exemplifies what one critic describes as Borges's efforts to enumer-ate "sharply diverse yet somehow harmonizing parts." Bringing likeness andunity into view where we ordinary see only difference and fragmentation,Borges's writing gestures to "some larger, static whole unnamable by anyunilateral means" (Irby, Introduction to Other Inquisitions, x). While Borgesis famous for his association of metaphor with universality, I will proposethat his writing also initiates a confrontation with the limits of metaphor as ithas been defined in the Western tradition. In the text I will be discussing, theshort story "El Zahir," this limit is approached through a literary treatmentof the image.' The literary image does not allow itself to be transcribed intoa language of equivalence. It names a mode of appearing—or it may be thesecret origin of any and all appearances—that is irreducible to hermeneuticmodels of reading, or to any view of literature as containing a hidden meaningwaiting to be interpreted or revealed.

In the first part of this paper, I discuss Borges's engagement with the prob-lem of metaphor in "El Zahir." The presence of metaphor as a literary toposinitiates two related considerations in this story. First, the text is a reflection onwhat could be called the economic determination of metaphor, or metaphordefined as exchange, substitution or transfer. Under this general definition, thepassage which occurs in metaphor has been predetermined as an expenditurethat will eventually be recuperated as value or meaning. In other words, thedifference between words is conceived as a negation (of appearances) that willultimately negate itself (as the revelation of meaning). Borges's text alludes to

1. The short story "El Zahir" was first published, according to Emir RodriguezMonegal, in Los Anales de Buenos Aires in July 1947, and later republished in aslightly revised version in El Aleph (1949). See Ficcionario 458.

The Romanic Review Volume 98 Numbers 2-3 © The Trustees of Columbia University

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the central role that metaphor plays in the Western tradition. At the same time,the story is an anticipation of the end of universal history, at least insofar asit has been determined as a totality comprised of the differential intonationsof a few metaphors. It foresees—and attempts to forestall—the nightmare ofa world that has fallen entirely under the sway of the One.

The second half of my analysis looks at Borges's treatment of the literaryimage. I use the term "image" with some trepidation, as it is often associatedwith the most traditional of metaphysical distinctions: the image as the otherof "truth," "original," or "depth," and thus as a name for what is deficient inbeing. For Borges, the image tells a different story: it challenges the old associ-ation of truth with what is hidden beneath the surface (depth, essence). Begin-ning with Aristotle, theories of metaphor always come back to a hermeneuticpresupposition: the idea that the metaphoric passage sheds light on a hiddenmeaning waiting to be revealed or interpreted. The image, on the other hand,suspends the distinction between appearances and depth, and thereby com-pels us to re-examine the basic assumptions of our reading strategies. Can animage be interpreted? Can we decipher what it says and what it does not say?To what extent is the literary image readable in the sense that hermeneuticsunderstands the term? I will not attempt to answer these questions here, andwill only concern myself with establishing that they represent an importantconcern for "El Zahir" and perhaps for Borges's writing in general.

Borges approaches the relation between metaphor and image in "El Zahir"by engaging with the age-old philosophical distinction between truth andappearance. Let us be clear: Borges does not use literature as a vehicle forphilosophizing; instead, he borrows material from the philosophical traditionin order to generate literary form. Although Borges is not a philosopher, thisdoes not mean that the fabulist and essayist has nothing to say to philosophy,or that these borrowings do not refiect something back to the domain fromwhich they were taken.

A brief discussion of how the philosophical tradition has approached thequestion of metaphor will help set the stage for the first half of the essay.Aristotle defines metaphor [metaphora] as a transfer [epiphora] to onething of a name that belongs to something else.-^ This passage, as JacquesDerrida has demonstrated in "White Mythologies," proves analogous to

2. Poetics I, 57b7-b8. The common root pherein means "to carry" or "to transport."Aristotle clarifies that the operation can work either by analogy (e.g., "the evening oflife" for old age, or "The sun sows its radiant seeds," in which no proper figure existsfor the scattering of sunlight), from species to genus ("Here stands my ship," wherelying at anchor is part of the genus to stand), from genus to species ("Truly has Odys-seus done ten thousand deeds," where ten thousand is part of the genus many), or fromone species to another ("Draining his life with bronze," where to drain and bronze aresubstituted for to kill and sword respectively). For modern rhetorical theory, some ofthese would be considered catachresis or metonymy.

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the way thinking itself works. A well-wrought metaphor brings to light alikeness that is not apparent to the naked eye: a resemblance of idea, causeor purpose. "To make metaphors well is to observe what is alike" [To gareu metapherein too to homoion theorein estin] (Poetics 4.5.5, 1459a7-8)."Metaphors must be drawn . . . from things that are related to the originalthing, and yet not obviously so related—just as in philosophy also an acutemind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart" {On Rhetoric 3.2,1412a). Theoretical vision [theorein] provides an analogy for what happenswhen we use metaphors, but it is not just one analogy among many: theproduction of apt metaphors presupposes that theoretical perception is atwork ensuring that language remains the likeness [homoiosis] of being. TheAristotelian theory of metaphor thus exemplifies the ontological primacygranted to being over language in the metaphysical tradition. Homoiosis,the principle of likeness, presupposes that language comes after being andremains a mere reflection of it. It thus provides the foundation for the mod-ern concept of the sign and the determination that signification representsthe essential function of language.

On the other hand, the conduit between thinking and language in Aristotle'sdiscussion can also be made to flow in the opposite direction: thinking turnsout to depend—and more than one might suspect—on the exemplary natureof metaphor. According to Aristotle, metaphor affects us by bringing the ideait aims to communicate "before the eyes" [pro ommaton poiein]. This visualanalogy supports Aristotle's claim that metaphor is most effective when itprompts the listener to "see" the thing in a new light, and when it illustratessomething in a dynamic, active state [energeia] (Rhetoric 3.10-3.11). In theRhetoric, the section on metaphor is positioned within a broader discussion ofthe relation between thinking [dianoia] and speaking [lexis], or in the wordsof Derrida, a discussion of "what one is given to think through language"("White Mythology," 232). For Aristotle, thinking is fundamentally reflexive:in order to take place it must be able to "see" itself at work. Because thinkingis unable to make itself manifest to itself on its own, it rehes on exemplifica-tion or mimesis in order to reflect on itself through analogy. Thinking seeksthe right turn of phrase that would allow it to enter the light of the logos. Wedo not truly grasp an idea (say, "old age") until we have seen it transferredinto a different form ("the evening of life").

Aristotle's text also exemplifies how easily theories of metaphor slip intoa vicious circle. In order to illuminate the event it attempts to account for,the theory of metaphor must have recourse to another metaphor. The com-mon root in Aristotle's famous definition—metaphor [meta-phora] as transfer[epi-phora]—provides a clear indication of this difficulty. The theory of meta-phor, it would seem, can only ever be a metaphor of metaphor. Derrida situ-ates this ambiguous relation between theory, event and repetition under whathe calls the law of tropic supplementarity, according to which "the extra turnof speech becomes the missing turn of speech" ("White Mythology" 220). The

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difficulty philosophy has in freeing itself from this zone of indeterminacy helpsto explain the abundance of everyday, worldly things that have at one time oranother served as stand-ins for metaphor.

In the Western tradition, numismatics has provided a rich source of analogyfor thinking about metaphor. More generally, of course, coins often serve asfigures for the word. The analogy can be pursued in a myriad of directions: likecoins, words circulate within a national context; words are likewise inheritedand transferred between generations and traditions; words are subject to bothinflation and material wear and tear; words can be classified as authentic orcounterfeit; words give access to things, and when a proper word is lacking aterm can sometimes be coined. The specific association of coin and metaphor,meanwhile, underscores the fact that the tradition has tended to classify meta-phor (or word coinage) as a genus of exchange and valuation. How is the useof one word to substitute for another analogous to the act which designatesa piece of metal as representing a specific quantum of value? In an economictransaction, the material stuff of the coin does not substitute directly for thecommodity or its use value. As Marx demonstrates, the practice of exchangeinvolves at least two orders of abstraction: (1) units of money, as representedby a piece of metal, paper or some other material, are designated as represent-ing a specific value; and (2) the commodity acquires a specific exchange valueas a reflection of the labor time that is needed for its production in any giventime and place.^ The coin constitutes the exception in such an economy ofexchange: it is the one thing that cannot be assigned a use value, and whose"thingliness" we agree to ignore. This is also what makes the defacement ofmoney scandalous: to mar a coin is to interrupt the timely withdrawal of itsmateriality from the scene of exchange.

Borges's short story "El Zahir" is both a love story and a tale of loss anddestitution. The temporal structure is fairly traditional: the narrator, who isalso the protagonist, first provides an expository statement about his presentcircumstances, followed by a longer retrospective account of how things cameto be the way they are. His recollections begin with the death of TeodelinaVillar, a fashion model with whom he was in love. He does not clarify whather feelings may have been for him, though from the little we learn it is farfrom certain that she returned his affection. The portrait he sketches is a cari-cature of a portefia debutante whose eyes were focused permanently on themetropolis. He then recounts a serendipitous occurrence following her death,an event he describes proleptically as having precipitated his imminent fallinto the abyss of madness or subjective destitution. The fatal happenstanceunfolds as follows: After paying his last respects at Villar's wake, the nar-rator departs with the intention of returning home; but no sooner does heleave the funeral parlor then, following a mysterious impulse, he enters a bar

3. See Capital, Volume I, Chapter 1 ("The Commodity").

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and orders a drink. Among the change he receives an unremarkable twenty-centavo coin whose sole unusual characteristics are the letters "N," "T" andthe number "2" which have been scratched into its surface. However, theimage of this banal coin imposes itself on the narrator and becomes an irreme-diable obsession. During the few hours he has the coin his possession, he findshimself unable to think of anything but coins, and it soon becomes evidentthat it is in fact the image of the coin that "possesses" him and not the otherway around. The day after the wake, the narrator resolves to rid himself ofthe coin in the expectation that the image would dissipate along with it. Buteven in the coin's absence his mind is unable to free itself from the strange,captivating power of the image. In the following months the narrator triesvarious remedies—devoting himself to composing a fantastic tale, meditatingon other coins, consulting with an analyst—but none of these substitutionssucceeds in dissolving the obsession.

The narrator finally receives a diagnosis as he pages through a tome entitledUrkunden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage. According to the Urkunden, the coinwas an avatar of the "Zahir," one of the ninety-nine manifest names of Godin Islam, and whose Arabic meanings include "''visible" [visible] and "notorio"[notorious, clear, obvious].''According to Muhammad, anyone who enumer-ates the ninety-nine names consecutively would gain access to Paradise. TheUrkunden relates that in certain Islamic traditions, the Zahir is regarded asan avatar which, presenting itself to its victims in the form of some ordinaryobject, captivates them and drives them mad. Similarly, the tome associatesthe Zahir with the Sufist mystical tradition, which holds that God has a secretone-hundredth name whose pronunciation would allow the mystic to losehim- or herself in divine unity.

In confirmation of this strange diagnosis, we are then informed that twoothers in Teodelina Villar's circle have been stricken by the same obsessivesymptoms, and that one of the victims has been institutionalized. Speculatingthat the same fate awaits him, the narrator foresees that soon he will soon be

4. In her essay "Borges, or the Mystique of Silence," Luce Lopez-Baralt provides adetailed account of the cultural and religious significance of the term Zahir, much butnot all of which corresponds with the story. The work of identifying these connectionsis doubly important, as it helps shed light on several key thematic threads (Islam andmysticism) while at the same time underscoring Borges's conviction that the origin ofthe Western tradition is multiple and divided. Like many of Borges's stories, "El 'Zahir"must be read against a long history of Eurocentric and nationalist essentialisms thathave perpetuated themselves through the idea that the origin is synonymous with aproper identity or a self-identical subject. Its merits notwithstanding, this kind of read-ing also risks reinforcing the belief that Borges's writing is primarily concerned withcommunicating content, meaning or message. In other words, philoiogically orientedreadings often avoid posing the question of how Borges's writing engages with literaryproblems.

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unable to remember or think anything that is not the Zahir, and will find him-self incapable of performing even the most basic and fundamental of routines:attending to his daily necessities and being able to state who he is. The Zahir,whose diameter measures only a few centimeters, will soon have eclipsed theentirety of his world, suspending all meaningful relations and leaving him ina space of undifferentiated sameness.

I shall no longer perceive the universe: I shall perceive the Zahir.According to the teaching of the Idealists, the words 'live' and'dream' are rigorously synonymous. From thousands of imagesI shall pass to one; from a highly complex dream to a dream ofutter simplicity. Others will dream that I am mad; I shall dreamof the Zahir. When all the men on earth think, day and night, ofthe Zahir, which will be a dream and which a reality—the earthor the Zahir ?̂

What are we to make of the narrator's warning that this peculiar fate willnot be uniquely his, and that we are all sooner or later destined to share thedismal end that awaits him? He likens his fate to the world as it would looklike if it had been designed by the philosophical perspective which Kanttermed dogmatic idealism, for which the sensible world only exists as pro-jection of an infinite mind (Berkeley). We will see later that philosophicalidealism is only one of several possible codes in which this passage can beread. For the moment, suffice it to say that Borges's text describes historyas haunted by a rationale whose full realization would place us in a worldin which differences are nothing more than shadows projected by the Same.There would no longer be any significant distinction between the sensibleand the intelligible, between speech (lexis) and thought (dianoia), and thusno need for metaphor itself.

I reflected that every coin in the world is a symbol of those famouscoins which glitter in history [la historia] and fable. I thought ofCharon's obol; of the obol for which Beiisarius begged; of Judas'thirty coins; of the drachmas of Lais, the famous courtesan; ofthe ancient coin which one of the Seven Sleepers proffered; of theshining coins of the wizard in the 1001 Nights, that turned out tobe bits of paper; of the inexhaustible penny of Isaac Laquedem;of the sixty thousand pieces of silver, one for each line of an epic,which Firdusi sent back to a king because they were not of gold; of

5. Labyrinths 164; El Aleph 116. All citations taken from "El Zahir" will give thepagination for the Dudley Fitts's English-language translation in Labyrinths, followedby the pagination in the Spanish-language El Aleph (1994).

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the doubloon which Ahab nailed to the mast; of Leopold Bloom'sirreversible fiorin; of the louis whose pictured face betrayed thefugitive Louis XVI near Varennes (158-59; 108-09).

I will comment on three points in this passage, each having to do with thefact that in Borges's story the Zahir assumes the form of a coin. The narratorhere emphasizes that a coin is never just a coin, and thus each of these motifswill relate to a question of metaphor. First point: The coin is an aestheticmetaphor representing a compendium of the Western tradition, from Greekmythology to the modern novel, and from the Byzantine Fmpire to the FrenchRevolution. A stand-in for all coins both real and fictive, the Zahir is both aspecies (twenty-centavo coin) standing for the totality of a genus (coins) and aspecies representing other species (as the Spanish "historia" [history or story]emphasizes, the coin mobilizes references to world history and to literaryhistory). This presentation of universality anticipates the famous assertion in"The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" that universal history is the history of tonalitiesimparted to a small number of metaphors. The notion of differential repeti-tion which Borges develops in the 1951 essay suggests that metaphor plays afundamental role for all creative activity (art, thinking, and so on), providingthe "material stuff" through which new ideas, works, and projects enter theworld. It is through metaphor that a particular thinker (or even a generationor an entire epoch) finds its attunement to being, its way of engaging withand asking questions about the world. But as we will see shortly, the aestheticmetaphor in "Fl Zahir" does not just recall all of history, it also announces theimminent collapse of the division between the finite and the transcendent, orbetween representation and the absolute—and thus the end of history itself.

As was suggested earlier, Borges's strategy in writing a story about metaphoris to transform the philosophical problem of metaphor into literary form. Thistransposition is what drives plot development in "Fl Zahir," where the actioninvolves a series of thematic transferences, exchanges, and repetitions, andthus formally resembles the logic of metaphor. The ill-fated scene in whichthe narrator first receives the coin marks the first in a series of transfers: ofliterary theme (love is substituted by money), of libidinal energy (emotionalattachment to the beloved is displaced by obsession with the image of theZahir), and likewise of proper names ("Zahir," whose Arabic meaning is "thevisible," replaces "Teodelina," from the Greek teo- [god] and delina [delo: tomake visible]).^ When the narrator begins to intuit the coin's sinister nature.

6. In the 1947 version of the story, the beloved's name was Clementina Villar, inwhich resonates the idea of divine clemency. Dudley Fitts's English-language transla-tion likewise refers to the beloved as "Clementina." The exchange of "Teodelina" for"Clementina" in the 1949 version has the effect of transferring the theological motiffrom a Latin to a Greek register, and perhaps masking it in the process.

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his efforts to rid himself of it set in motion another series of substitutions andrepetitions: his first impulse is to bury it (just as Teodelina is to be buried inthe cemetery) or to abandon it in a library (returning it to the order of "his-tory and fable"), but he finally decides to send it back to its native sphere byspending it, clarifying that he does so "in order to remove [himself] from itsorbit" (159). The role of urban topography likewise contributes to this struc-turing effect: the narrator's peripatetic wanderings on the night of the wakeand the following day trace a circuit which resembles the way that a coin ora word might circulate in public. The celestial metaphor ("orbit") describingthe coin's sphere of influence combines with figures of economic and libidinalinvestment as well as urban circumnavigation to form a multi-dimensionaltropological network of exchange and transference.

How should we understand these meta-tropological turns in Borges's text,these movements which produce figures of metaphor? No doubt one couldread this as a tropological affirmation of movement—substitution, sharingand exchange—where previously there had been nothing but the paralyz-ing silence of absolute loss. Metaphor would align itself with the work ofmourning understood as the possibility of symbolizing the real (loss), and thusagainst the deadly return of the unmediated real.''In this reading, "Fl Zahir"presents itself as a story about language as symbolization. Its many meritsnotwithstanding, such a reading would have problems accounting for the factthat it is the image of the coin—metaphor par excellence—that imposes anunsurpassable limit for all negation, substitution and exchange. If there is alimit for the captivating power of the image, Borges's text locates it in a pas-sage to the hither side of language understood as signification.

Second motif: immediately after the passage cited above, the narrator goeson to assert that the coin, in its abstract character as money, represents acondensation of innumerable temporal possibilities. The link between money,temporality and the infinite then serves as a springboard for a commentaryon the philosophical problems of will and freedom. As general equivalent,money represents pure possibility: it can in principle be exchanged for anycommodity whatsoever. It thus provides an analogy (according to the narra-tor) for the concept of free will. Money, before changing hands, represents thefuture as decision. More than the possibility of choosing between commodi-ties, it represents the decision to decide, the possibility of deciding when andwhere to choose. However, there is also an important distinction which themoney: will analogy glosses over a bit too quickly: whereas philosophy hasalways conceived of the will as the self-agreement or saying-yes of a subject(the will to power is first and foremost the will to will, as Heidegger says),in Borges's text the coin appears to sustain a thought of the future as divided

7. Rodriguez Monegal, "Toda una teoria del amor, y de la catarsis que es la escritura,esta implicita en este cuento" (Ficcionario, 458).

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from itself and thus irreducible to any philosophical decisionism. Future timeis marked by a split between a determinate future to be purchased and madeactual as present time (either a night at the concert or a new book), and thefuture as what can never be made present nor be reduced to a matter of cal-culation: the future as the uncertainty that we experience whenever we facea decision, an uncertainty without which there could be no decision worthyof the name.

Here we encounter the first of several indications that "Fl Zahir" is not justa eulogy to metaphor but a consideration of the limits of metaphor understoodas exchange and valuation. I propose that the discussion of how the questionof money leads to a thought of the future as differing from itself could easilybe transcribed into a different key and posed as a question about literature asaesthetic event, or to a thought of the internal difference of all presentation.I am thinking specifically of Borges's paradoxical definition of the aestheticact in the essay "La muralla y los libros" as "the imminence of a revelationthat does not take place" [la inminencia de una revelacion que no se produce].What is always still to come in revelation and therefore does not take place:could this impossible object be anything other than the very condition of pos-sibility of revelation, understood as the unpresentable difference of the futureand of all coming into presence? I will return to this point in the final part ofthis essay.

The problem of time introduced here can be extended to the text's self-reflexive consideration of the relation between lived experience and narrativetime. The narrative act, as Borges emphasizes in more than one of his texts,unavoidably runs into a problem associated with aesthetic temporality. Thisproblem can be formalized as the following antinomy: whereas the nature ofexperience is simultaneous, continuous and chaotic, the structure of languageis chronological and divides its subject matter according to causes and effects.*This confiict is stated explicitly in the short story "Fl Aleph," often seen as thecompanion piece to "Fl Zahir": "what my eyes saw was simultaneous; whatI will now write is successive, because language is successive" ("The Aleph,"283). The text's declaration of its inability to do justice to the real is either asuspect claim or a literal presentation of the problem, since it can only callattention to the problem by temporalizing it: first the experience, then theinability to capture it by writing or speaking of it. It is the very structure oflanguage that prohibits it from making itself the likeness of the real, and theresulting aporia constitutes a fundamental preoccupation for Borges's writing:even when literature becomes aware of the structural impossibility of repre-senting the real without losing it, this knowledge does not cancel the impulsethat compels literature to return to the real, to an experience it cannot bringforth into the light and time of the day.

8. See Paul de Man, "A Modern Master.''

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The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter,but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminutionof size. Fach thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) wasinfinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point inthe cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw themultitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the centerof a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London). . . .("The Aleph," 283).

Time, which softens recollections, only makes the memory of theZahir sharper. There was a time when I could visualize the obverse,and then the reverse. Now I see them simultaneously. It is not asthough the Zahir were made of glass, since it is not that one facesuperimposes itself on the other; rather, it is as though my eyesightwere spherical with the Zahir abounding at its center (163; 115,translation modified).

The Aleph represents the aesthetic presentation of simultaneity as a pointof universal visibility, an ideal locus from which objects occupying differentlocations in space become manifest together. With the Zahir, on the other hand,the absolute is the simultaneous presentation of what we ordinarily perceiveas opposing sides or faces. Whereas the Aleph negates the distance betweenpoints in space, the Zahir negates time: time rendered tropologically—that is,spatially—as the perception of opposing sides of a coin. This account of theZahir suggests a representation of absolute knowledge as defined by speculativephilosophy: the image of the Zahir is that of mind thinking together the oppos-ing moments or "faces" of the dialectic. The Zahir, in this reading, representsthe fundamental fantasy of the dialectical tradition. It is the reconciliation ofthesis and antithesis, the negation of negation, and the sensible presentation ofthe Idea. It should not come as a surprise, however, that the imminent triumphof metaphysical reason over its others would also be the end of all reason, itsplunge into the infantilizing space of undifferentiated sameness.

Third motif: The inclusion of the infamous "louis" in the narrator's descrip-tion of the coin points to an important, albeit somewhat ambiguous connec-tion between aesthetic metaphor, literature and the question of sovereignty.'

9. The events to which Borges's text alludes are as follows: in 1789 the French KingLouis XVI was imprisoned shortly after the storming of the Bastille. He escaped brieflyin 1791, but was soon recaptured, and was later put on trial and executed. Accordingto one version of the story (to which Borges is here referring), the King's short-livedescape was foiled in the most ironic manner: when the fleeing monarch tried to makea purchase in a store, an unsympathetic clerk recognized him by his likeness to the vis-age on the coin with which he paid, and the clerk promptly turned him in. Louis XVI'strial and beheading in 1793, of course, represent a rupture in the classical concept ofsovereignty, for which the King is God's representative on earth.

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While the question of sovereignty is only implicit in "El Zahir," my view isthat Borges considers that language itself is the true sovereign. If "Fl Zahir"can be read as an extended metaphor of metaphor itself, as well as the visionof a world that has been entirely subsumed within a certain logic of equiva-lence, it is also an attempt to think the limit of exchange and to awake fromthe nightmare of a world that has fallen entirely under the shadow of the One."In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis recite their own names, or theninety-nine divine names, until they become meaningless. I long to travel thatpath. Perhaps I shall conclude by wearing away [gastar] the Zahir simplythrough thinking it again and again" (164; 116). Borges's story concludeswith this thought of quiet perseverance in the face of imminent loss of world.The notion that repetition could somehow dissolve the absolute tyranny of theOne is underscored by the Spanish verb gastar, which can mean both "to wearaway" and "to spend." What would this "wearing away" or "exhaustion"of the absolute look like? The perseverance to which the narrator appeals isby no means a vision of heroic defiance. Perseverance is allied, through thetedium of repetition, with thinking and language; and Borges appears to besuggesting that this description might apply to literature itself at times. Litera-ture would hasten the exhaustion of the word's signifying power and therebyenable the emergence of another force latent in the word—one which, unlikethe power of signification, does not sacrifice itself for the sake of meaning.

In the final part of this study, I discuss two ways in which Borges's text shedslight on this alternative notion of sovereignty beyond signification. The firstinstance involves a kind of metaphor, the kenning, which Borges describesas both belonging to the Western tradition and as irreducibly foreign to thepresuppositions of classical rhetorical and aesthetic theories. The second caserefers to the literary portrait of Teodelina Villar. I will discuss the literaryimage as a question of what is excluded or foreclosed in tropological languageand signification.

Farlier it was mentioned that writing represents one of the substitute activi-ties to which the narrator turns after the death of Villar and in an attempt todissolve the obsession with the Zahir. Let us now look briefiy at the descrip-tion of the "tale of fantasy" and the peculiar figure of thought mentionedthere. The plot of this story within the story resembles an episode found inboth Norse mythology and the Volsunga saga, a thirteenth-century Icelandicepic poem. It tells of a prince, Fafnir, who kills his father in order to steal hisgold, after which he is transformed into a dragon before being slain by a cer-tain Sigurd. Of particular interest is the meta-textual reference to the kenning,a figure commonly used in Old Norse, Old Fnglish and Skaldic poetry—ofwhich Borges was an avid reader and occasional translator. While there is noclarification in "Fl Zahir" of what significance the kenning might hold in thiscontext, Borges does comment more extensively on these figures elsewhere.On the basis of those remarks we can surmise that Borges has in mind a liter-ary experience of the exhaustion of meaning, through which language wouldbecome image, or the trace of what falls out of signification.

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Kennings were a common rhetorical figure in the Old Norse, Anglo Saxon andCeltic poetic traditions. Akin to compound metaphors, they are formed throughthe combination of two or more unrelated nouns to replace a single noun. Forinstance, "sea" becomes "whale-road" or "blood" becomes "sword-water."^*'In one of his poems, Borges alludes to the kenning as a "coining of laboriousnames."" The kenning constitutes a sovereign act of naming which, as we willnow see, also marks a limit for the Aristotelian determination of metaphor assignification. In his relatively early essay "Las kenningar" (1933), Borges draws aclear distinction between the kenning—which he calls "savage metaphors"—andthe concept of metaphor as it is developed in Aristotle's Poetics. According toBorges, the proliferation of kenning in the Skaldic poetic tradition cannot beexplained by Aristotle's theory of metaphor, which is grounded in the distinctionbetween hidden truth and appearances. By the same token, Borges asserts thatthe kenning did not intend to produce specific emotions in the listener, and hethereby rejects the possibility of accounting for this aesthetic event in terms of theAristotelian economy of catharsis. "Kennings . . . are or seem to be the result ofa mental process which seeks fortuitous resemblances. They do not correspondto any emotion. They come from a laborious game of combinations, not froma sudden perception of intimate likeness. Mere logic can justify them, but senti-ment cannot" (Nueva Antologia Personal 223; my translation). For Aristotle,metaphor names an analogy among ideas. The difference between words bringsthe invisible unity of meaning to the light of day; and in view of this unity, thematerial difference of the word silently withdraws. The kenning, on the otherhand, comprises an analogy strictly among words, a juxtaposition of signifierswhich aims at no idea; what it puts on display is nothing more than the intimatecontact between phonemes (in the Skaldic poetic tradition) or graphemes (forBorges's prose writing). "It makes no difference what they try to transmit; theysuggest nothing. They do not invite us to dream, and do not provoke imagesor passions in us. They are not points of departure: these terms are ends inthemselves. The pleasure—the sufficient and minimal pleasure—is found in theirvariety, in the heterogeneous contact of the words" (221). Neither beautiful norsublime, the kenning is language asserting itself as sovereign. Before designatingany real object in the world, it points to language itself taking place.

10. The term is said to come from the Old Norse kenna eitt vid, or "to express athing in terms of another." Old English and Old Norse both encourage the formationof compound nouns, whereas in Spanish and other Romance languages, compoundsare far less common. And thus one could surmise that translation or reproduction ofkenning in Spanish would yield an entirely different—and much stranger—resonancefor a Spanish ear, and that the "savage" character of these metaphors is entirely aneffect of translation.11. "Para cantar memorias o alabanzas / Amonedaba laboriosos nombres; / La guerraera el encuentro de los hombres / Y tambien el encuentro de las lanzas" ["Un Sajon(449 A.D.)"].

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From here I turn to the literary image. Borges's consideration differs signifi-cantly from the treatment the image typically receives in the Western tradition,where it is often equated with mere appearance as opposed to substance,depth or truth, and is thus seen as lacking what these latter possess: being orpermanence. The portrait of Villar undoubtedly mobilizes a traditional viewof the image, but only to a certain point. Beyond this point, the image beginsto call into question the metaphysical distinction between appearance andbeing. In order to clarify what is at stake in the distinction between metaphorand image, I will comment on the narrator's recollections of Teodelina Villarand of her death. The first two passages represent a literary portrait of her asa sign of her time and place: of bourgeois snobbery in the periphery, and ofthe ascendancy of capitalist mass production in competition with the values ofthe humanistic and Fnlightenment traditions. The third passage, meanwhile,presents a striking reflection on the image in relation to a corpse.

Like any Confucian adept or Talmudist, [Villar] strove for irre-proachable correctness in every action; but her zeal was moreadmirable and more exigent than theirs because the tenets ofher creed were not eternal, but submitted to the shifting caprices[azares] of Paris or Hollywood. Teodelina Villar appeared at thecorrect places, at the correct hour, with the correct adornments andthe correct boredom; but the boredom, the adornments, the hourand the place would almost immediately become passe and wouldprovide Teodelina Villar with the material for a definition of badtaste (157; 106, translation modified).

At first glance this portrait reads as a light-hearted social critique in whichthe dictates of fashion have assumed the status of a secular religion. Villarrepresents a certain bourgeois imaginary in a peripheral city which has alwayswanted to be seen as the "Paris of the South." But the irony running throughthis satire also makes room for posing new questions about authority, mimesisand modernity. The absurd claim about the social order existing in order tofacilitate the codification of taste does not find itself refuted in the way onemight expect: i.e., through the counter affirmation that taste is in fact eitherfrivolous or the highest of pursuits, and in either case irreducible to the do-main of politics. Villar's position precisely inverts—and thereby inadvertentlyexposes—the ideological function of "taste" in modernity. By sustaining thattaste represents the goal of social organization, she touches on the fact that"taste" has served both to consolidate and naturalize class difference (undermonarchy, good taste is reflected "naturally" in the actions and choices of thenobility) and as an instrument of discipline under the modern State (beginningin the nineteenth century, taste comes to be seen as a faculty available to all inprinciple, thought it must be cultivated through education; good taste is thussynonymous with the pedagogical formation of modern subjects under the

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tutelage of the State). Taste is defined in both of these orders as the faculty ofa Subject who is attuned to a universal code: the rights of the nobility or theegahtarian values of the humanist and Fnlightenment traditions. Villar's ownlife, however, attests to a rupture in the continuity of this history, a momentwhen the codification of social relations has begun to waver and fluctuate.Borges's text underscores this discontinuity when it refers to the distinctionbetween the eternal tenets of theology and humanism and the whimsical vicis-situdes of fashion. The time of mass production defines the difference betweenmodernity and its others in terms of speed. The allusion to Flollywood—capitalof the twentieth century—thus involves more than just a historical modifica-tion of the old image of Paris as capital of the nineteenth century. It marksa transformation of the very determination of modernity: from a spatial andgeopolitical model (Paris/Buenos Aires, center/periphery) to a temporal andtechnological one (Hollywood is not so much a place as it is the reproductionand dissemination of certain images). In view of the massive reconfiguration ofplanetary relations initiated through technologies of mass production, it couldbe said that "Hollywood," as name for the cinematographic dissemination ofthe image, presents itself as the promise of overcoming distance itself. What-ever is currently showing in Paris or New York can now be consumed (viewedor worn) simultaneously in Buenos Aires. If taste still functions as a sign of thesubject within the order of capitalist mass production, it is because it atteststo her ability to keep up with the speed of modernity, to match its increas-ingly frenetic pace and its incalculable whims [azares: literally, "chances"]. Inconjunction with modernity experienced as speed, taste is the projection ofa subject able to remain identical with itself in time. And thus we have gonefrom the old idea of a subject whose changing appearances refiect the beingof wbat does not change (the rights of the nobility or the universal values ofthe humanist tradition) to a new subject whose appearances do not refiectanything at all except the fact of appearing.

The war gave her much to think about: with Paris occupied bythe Germans, how could one follow the fashions? A foreignerwhom she had always distrusted presumed so far upon her goodfaith as to sell her a number of cylindrical hats; a year later it wasdivulged that those absurd creations had never been worn in Parisat all!—consequently they were not hats, but arbitrary, unauthor-ized whims (157; 107, translation modified).

The war is experienced as the interruption of fashion and its projectedsimultaneity. These ills displace from Villar's horizons the rise of fascism, thetechnological routinization of genocide, and the imminent threat to the self-understanding of the West. Once again, however, we see satire generating itsown profound insight. What should we make of the fact that Villar turns outto have been emulating an image which was never there in the first place? If

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this "scandal" sets the tone for Borges's mocking of the powerful imaginarythat has presided during much of the history of Argentine modernity (animaginary which arose in response to the spatial differentiation of the planetinto center and periphery), it also begins to shed light on another way of see-ing the image. The hats, signifiers par excellence of social status, turn out tobe simulacra. The true scandal perpetrated in this scene is the laying bare oflanguage itself as structured by the law of iterability. According to structuralnecessity, a sign must be repeatable and recognizable a priori in order to bea sign. Unlike the symbol, the sign is "arbitrary" and "unautborized" fromits very conception. The sign must be produced in such a way that it can berepeated; but in making it repeatable one thereby relinquishes control over thefuture of its reception. What enables a sign to be communicated is also whatinterrupts any possibility of determining in advance how it will be repeatedand understood. The law of iterability is thus an inscription of finitude whichestablishes the radical absence of the producer and his or her authority fromany communicative act. In opening the possibility of communication, the signalso exposes itself to the incalculable risks of errancy: of being taken out ofcontext, misunderstood, distorted, etc.^^

Let us now look at the description of Villar's corpse as it lies in wake. De-spite what the text might at first glance seem to be saying, here it is no longerpossible to associate tbe image with an idea of falsity, artifice or superficialitythat could be opposed by something truer or more essential. The image is nolonger the negative which negates itself as meaning. This passage takes us from"make up" (cosmetics but also fiction) to tbe appearing of mimesis itself.

At a wake, the advancing corruption causes the corpse to reassumeits earlier faces. At some point during that confusing night of thesixth, Teodelina Villar was magically what she had been twentyyears before: her features recovered that authority which is con-ferred by pride, by money, by youth, by the awareness of heading

12. On the notion of iterability see Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context." Thisis also the place to note that Villar's situation represents a mirror image of Borges'sviews on what it means to write from a peripheral space such as Argentina (see inparticular the essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition"). What Villar takes to bea fraud, Borges views as the secret resource of the peripheral writer, who is able towork with the material of the Western tradition while at the same time maintaining acritical distance from the history of its valuation. Metropolitan writers, on the otherhand, are more likely to over-identify with established understandings of this material.To put this in terms closer to Villar's context, we could say that the peripheral writeris the one who calls our attention to the finitude of the sign, or to the fact that a "hat"is not a hat, and that certain sacred philosophemes of the Western tradition—such asthe sign and the proper—are in fact based on the forgetting of convention, iterability,materiality and arbitrariness.

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a hierarchy [coronar una jerarquia], by the lack of imagination,by hmitations, by stolidity. Somehow, I thought, no version of thatface which so unsettled me would be as memorable as this one; itis fitting that it should be the last, since it could have been the first(158; 107-08, translation modified).

The reference to "earlier faces" is an ironic figuration which lends a proper,human face to what is absolutely improper: the physiological mechanics ofdeath. In fact, the figure is doubly ironic, as the representation of rigor mortisechoes those calculating self-transformations that characterized the personaland professional life of Teodelina Villar (she was a model for cold creamsand the like). Nothing could be stranger and more out of place—and thusnothing more memorable—than a corpse. It presents a corporeal excess forany accounting procedure (the counting of the members of a community, thecounting of the objects in a room, etc.). Indeed, even the term "corporeal" isinaccurate, as it belongs to a conceptual network of opposites—of soma andpneuma, matter and spirit, body and mind or soul—in which every finite termis mirrored and negated by an ideal term. The cadaver's mute presence in theroom does not point to the beyond, as it would in a theologically orientedrepresentation: it attests only to the fact that it no longer has a place, havingwithdrawn from the world of meaningful relations. In the words of MauriceBlanchot, the cadaver "establishes a relation between here and nowhere."'^

And yet nothing in this scene is truly new. This nameless remainder thathas no place has always been there, even if we are not ordinarily troubled byits presence. What becomes apparent here and now is that the radiant image,which had until now been regarded as something belonging solely to life andits vanity—in other words, something fleeting that would vanish at the endof life—is in fact a resilient part of life, resilient because it receives its supportfrom death. The somewhat enigmatic phrase "it could have been the first"may be the key to this passage. The first in relation to what? The first he hadever seen of her—a perverse rendering of the cliche of love at first sight? Or"first" in the ontological sense that Villar herself sought to define: as exem-plar of the beautiful and the contemporaneous, and in relation to which allother appearances would be relegated to the poverty of mere appearances outof sync with their time? Or, then again, there may be a third way of hearingthis phrase: if what comes last, after everything is said and done, could alsohave been first, is it not because the image now shows itself to be a copy andreflection of nothing? Strictly speaking the image does not appear, if by that

13. "Two Versions of the Imaginary," 256. There are a number of resemblances (I donot use this term lightly) between this passage in "El Zabir" and Blanchot's meditationson the corpse, the image and mimesis, and my reading of "El Zahir" has thus beenstrongly influenced by Blanchot's text.

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we understand a relation to a hidden essence. It shines at a moment whenthere is no longer anything that could support the idea of depth or substance.The image is relational but it is not a relation to anything. Appearing at thesite of a corpse which has withdrawn from all significant relations, the imagedescribes the unsettling presentation of mimesis itself, of the very possibilityof appearing before and affecting others.

"Her life was exemplary, yet she was ravaged unremittingly by an innerdespair. She was forever experimenting with new metamorphoses, as thoughtrying to get away from herself" (157). In retrospect, Villar's restless self-transformations offer themselves to be read as symptoms of a primordialwound which never saw the light of day. Her frenetic pursuit of the momentseems to suggest that she was haunted by a liminal awareness that the realmof appearances was not hers to master. If the image does not hide or reflectanything, this also means that it cannot be negated as if it were a stepping stonetoward a secret essence. The cadaver as its own image is the inability of nega-tion to negate itself in the end. What cannot be grasped or negated is also whatcannot be avoided, and thus it returns incessantly like a ghost or a bad coin.

I said earlier that the image is that part of life which receives its supportfrom death. Let me try to clarify this further. The image recalls that cut ormark which, while possessing no meaning in itself, provides the speaking sub-ject with the means to produce meaning while at the same time depriving himor her of the plenitude of being. Language grants the possibility of recallinga thing in its absence, but also imposes an absolute limit on our access to theimmediacy of the thing's being. Language is both the memory of being and thedeath of the thing as plenitude. Turning once again to the portrait of TeodelinaVillar, however, we can see that language in fact deprives us of nothing, orat least nothing that could be brought forth into the light of day. There is nosuch thing as a true hat (the ideal or authentic hat) before the emergence of theerrant hat (the signifier "hat," which can just as easily be assigned to a fake asto the real thing). The notion of a plenitude that was there before language,and from which language would keep us at arm's length (but always withinearshot), is only retroactively inscribed into the scene with the advent of theword. What lies behind the word, what the word both recalls and preventsfrom coming into the light of day, is not being as plenitude but being as void.The image, then, represents a part of life which receives its support fromdeath; it is life giving itself to language and thereby exposed to the void.

By way of conclusion, let us return to the question of literary aesthetics thatwas raised earher. To repeat, Borges defines the aesthetic act as "the immi-nence of a revelation that does not take place." The significance of the imagefor Borgesian literary aesthetics is that it marks a rupture within the onto-theological concept of revelation, as well as a limit for metaphor understoodas transfer and signification. The literary image does not belong to the logicof revelation, which is grounded in the distinction between appearances andtruth. The image gestures toward what metaphor can only foreclose when it

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introduces the idea of hidden meaning. If the image can be described as theimminence of what does not take place in presentation, this is because it isthe taking place of place itself. But lest we think that Borges is simply gener-ating another opposition here, it must be noted that the literary image doesnot manage to break away completely from metaphor and signification. Inapproaching the image as a trace of what signification cannot grasp, litera-ture is unable to avoid the gesture of indicating that there is something therewhich exceeds any relation of equivalence. To postulate the existence of theunpresentable is still a form of signification, even if it understands a differentrelation to its limit.

Earlier I described Borges's tendency to borrow ideas and problems fromthe philosophical tradition while turning this material into literary form. Thistendency could be summarized as the conversion of the concept into figure ortrope. However, the ensuing discussion has opened up a competing accountof the literary in Borges: as language becoming image. This association of theimage with the literary does not represent a new definition, since the image isnot a stable object or state over and against which literature could constituteitself. This alternative view leaves us with two tendencies or trajectories—in aword, metaphor and image—which are at odds with one another and seem-ingly irreconcilable. Perhaps most intriguing of all is that, while Borges's writ-ing does not offer a resolution of this conflict in favor of one tendency or theother, neither does the conflict loses its edge through reiteration. It does notallow itself to be transformed into the stable terrain of a recognizable differ-ence. Just as the tropological production of metaphor is always on the vergeof becoming image—for better or for worse—so the literary vindication of theimage as what signification excludes is always subject to being captured andreinscribed as metaphor.

Indiana University

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