by Catriona Ellis
If we are to take this as a truism, is it
possible to suggest that all of history contains elements of falseness? Can we
incite that, (and I realise that any historian anywhere would shudder to hear
me make this sweeping generalisation,) all of written history contains
incorrectness that is deliberately embedded by the author to change the opinion
of the reader? Again, if we are to then take this as truth, is it any larger a
jump to assert that fiction is no less implausible as history? Both appear to
have authors who set out to deceive their audiences, either through historical
bias or simply through fantastical invention. If they succeed in their task, is
it possible to deduce that both history and fiction are written by the victors?
“History is written by the victors.”[1]
 |
| Jorge Luis Borges |
This ‘fakeness’
and deception is a detail of written language that fascinated Jorge Luis
Borges, an Argentinian writer born in 1899. In the foreword to his most famous
collection of short stories, ‘Fictiones’[2],
it is noted that, “it is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the
madness of composing vast books- setting out in five hundred pages an idea that
can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it
is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary
on them.”[3]
Thus, a common trait of this Argentinian writer’s works is a review or
commentary on a work that is purely fantastical. Borges most notably uses these
‘literatry forgeries’ in his short story, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’[4]
when discussing “the forty volumes of The
First Encyclopedia of Tlön”[5],
a country which is itself a fabrication. The “Encyclopedia” forms a central
motif in the story, and the readers find themselves questioning whether they
were right to assume that the whole thing is nonsensical. Borges includes
footnotes, references and corrections to ‘original’ excerpts to his fictional
fictions, creating layers of deception and producing an inherent distrust in
the narrator that could easily be said to have heralded postmodernism in South
American literature. The possibilities of language seem endless when the writer
assumes that every work possible has already been written and is merely
awaiting criticism; Borges becomes the critic of imaginary works and through
his belief in the non-existent language, it arguably becomes reality.
Using narrative
to create reality in this way shows the potential of language as a means to
alter the way we perceive experience. However, it is also possible to show that
all narrative is untrue because the author, who determines what is included and
what is omitted from their written prose, ultimately constructs it. In this way
the experience that we perceive through the written word can be said to be
false. Thus, language is also incredibly limited because it can never convey
truth. Nietzsche famously and controversially proclaimed, “God is dead. […] And
we have killed him”[6] as
a means of showing that by rationally and scientifically examining the
possibility that God does not exist, we have essentially disproved and thus
‘killed’ God. By trying to explain and put words to ‘Him’, we have made God
‘untrue’, or at least less divine, because we have verbalised what is not
possible to describe. Hence, when language is used in an attempt to convey the
truth or reality, it simply represents an unreality and thus is incredibly
limited.
This is what is
meant when I proclaim that words are arbitrary; they are simply representations,
symbols, or specific collections of letters arranged in a particular order,
which represent an object. For example, the word “pebble” is just a written
symbol for the round-ish lump of rock usually found on a beach, however it is
not the same as the actual object
that you can touch and hold. As Sturrock says, “to put a name to something is
to identify it with all the other actual and possible instances of that name,
to identify the particular with the universal”[7].
Hence, to name something is to place a representation of the object in our
minds, one that is untrue to the object in reality because there are an almost
infinite number of different and individual “pebbles” on each beach, but human
languages do not have an infinite number of words to describe the infinite
number of different “pebbles”. The inability to transfer truth from reality
into words is perhaps the primary limitation of all languages, but it is
something that Borges attempts to address in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ through the language of Tlön.
Benjamin Lee
Whorf notably claimed that language has the ability to mould our perceptions of
reality, and that speakers of different languages are not able to communicate
the same world, but will have different insights into what reality shows.[8]
Borges, however, questions with the language of Tlön whether it would be possible to have in existence a language where
each speaker of said language will communicate a different reality using their
choice of words. This is because the language of Tlön has no nouns, but is instead adjective-based or verb-based
depending on which hemisphere of Tlön is the speaker’s
natural home. Thus, “for the people of Tlön, the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts”. In this way, the possibilities of
language seem endless on Tlön because each
object can be communicated in an infinite number of ways depending on what each
speaker deems more important. For example, in the northern hemisphere of Tlön (where the language is verb-based) there is no word which could
translate as the English “moon”, however there are verbs that would translate
as “to moonate”[9] or
“to enmoon”[10].
Thus, as Borges notes, if you waned to say “the moon rose above the river”[11]
on Tlön, you would have to utter words that
literally, if translated back to English, would signify, “upward, behind the
onstreaming it mooned”[12],
or anything similar that conveys the same message.
In a similar
way, in the southern hemisphere, “nouns are formed by stringing together
adjectives”[13],
and therefore “one does not say “moon”; one says “ariel-bright above
dark-round” or “soft-amberish-celestial” or any other string.”[14]
This is, for me, the greatest demonstration of the possibilities of language in
Borges’ work because it illustrates a dual-purpose; firstly, to show that it
could be possible to convey every individual’s different perceptions of reality
through language, and secondly to highlight how arbitrary our earthly languages
are: they only allow for one representation of each object per word. As
Standish summerises, Borges was “ever conscious of the restrictiveness and
arbitrariness of his linguistic medium; and his scepticism is at its most
radical in those stories that thematise the problem of defining perceptions and
conveying them through the slippery medium of language.”[15]
Conversely, in
his short story ‘The Circular Ruins’[16]
Borges questions whether there is actually a human need for language at all.
The story tells of a man who comes to rest in a set of circular ruins which
form an ancient temple, and who is driven by his ultimate goal: “to dream a
man.”[17]
Borges details how each night the man dreams of a beating heart, firstly just
observing it in his dream, then eventually touching it and inspecting it until
he is satisfied. Next he sets about dreaming of the other major organs, then
the skeleton, then the skin and finally the hair. Eventually, the man “had
dreamed a fully fleshed man- a stripling- but this youth did not stand up or
speak, nor could it open its eyes.”[18]
Soon the God of the temple becomes involved and helps the man to bring the
dreamed man into the world. Borges explains how slowly, “the man accustomed the
youth to reality”[19],
causing the reader to question whether the dream state has ended or whether it
continues.
In this tale,
Borges heavily questions the necessity for language as a human communicator:
the man is able to create life without any utterances or writings and his
creation, once bought into the world, is equally mute. Is language necessary to
portray reality? Would it be possible to live without language by simply
observing experience, rather than attempting to represent it with words? After
all, it is entirely possible that the man in the story would not have been able
to “dream a man” if he had been confined to use arbitrary language, and that it
was only possible because he was able to see and to touch the dreamed organs,
which thus matched their true counterparts in reality. Hence, I think it is
possible that Borges is suggesting that although language is a phenomenon
developed uniquely by humans which can aid life and communication, in order to
truly experiencing reality, the base human instincts are able to convey true
reality to a greater degree than words, something that he may have discovered
from personal experience after loosing one of his senses, his sight, at the age
of 55.
Finally, Borges
explores the notion of dual realities and the possibility or inability of
language to accurately document them in his short story, ‘The Garden of Forking
Paths’[20].
The dominant motif in the story is that of an infinite labyrinth which, as the
narrator discovers, is contained within a book. Although it is possible to
wonder, as Albert does in the story, “how a book could be infinite”[21],
Borges seems to be reinforcing that language has the ability to represent both
past and future, whilst also posing the question of whether it is possible to
convey both simultaneously. We learn that in the story every time a character
meets a forking of paths- a chance to make a decision that will affect his
future, he “simultaneously [chooses] all of them”[22],
creating a novel in which every possible future is presented concurrently. This
is the labyrinth Borges speaks of; an infinite documentation of every human decision
possible and its outcome, or, as the narrator of the story imagines, “a
labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening
labyrinth that contained both past and future”[23].
In this way, Borges presents the possibilities of language: it is a medium that
is capable of detailing every possible human decision and so could also be said
to hold every fate of those destined to make those decisions.
Whilst a book
such as the one described would be, in reality, impossible to create, Borges
seems to revel in the notion that it could
exist, something that is also echoed in his short story, ‘The Library of Babel’[24].
In this story the universe is described as a library that “contain[s] all
possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols”[25]
and yet in which “there are no two
identical books.”[26]
The idea of either a labyrinth or a library containing all the possibilities of
something, be they human decisions or arrangements of letters, fascinates
Borges who, although was said by Standish to be “on the adequacy of language to
the task, […] an out and out sceptic,”[27]
was also “resigned to the constraint of using it”[28].
Thus, I can
conclude that for Borges, language was an intriguing and enthralling aspect to
human communication, full of possibilities and limitations. Working through the
Latin American Boom in South America, his works not only encapsulate elements
of the bizarre and abstract common to Absurdist literature, but also demonstrate
the Magical Realism inherent to the artistic movement occurring in his own
native country. This genre allowed Borges to produce works such as ‘Fictiones’,
which contains short stories such as those I have discussed, exploring how
humans can use and manipulate language to influence the reader. From these
tales it is possible to see the extent to which Borges has challenged the
written word, pushing it to its ultimate capacity in order to highlight both
the extent of what is possible to express with written language, but also to
show the boundaries and constraints that oppose the writer. Hence, I agree
fully that Borges “was meticulous in his writing but ever conscious of the
restrictiveness and arbitrariness of his linguistics medium”[29].
He explored multiple topics through the written word but was ever conscious of
“the problem of defining perceptions and conveying them through the slippery
medium of language.”[30]
[1] Attributed to Winston Churchill but of unknown origin
[2] Borges, Jorge Luis. Fictiones.
First published in England by Allan Lane The Penguin Press 1999 (later referred
to as Fictiones)
[3] foreward, p.5 Fictiones,
[4] As included in the collection of works, Fictiones
[5] Fictiones, p.23
[6] Nietzsche,
The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann
[7] Sturrock, John. Paper Tigers:
The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Oxford, 1977 p.65
[8] http://www.icr.org/article/benjamin-lee-whorf-early-supporter/
accessed 8/8/15
[9] Fictiones. p.13
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.
[12] ibid.
[13] ibid.
[14] ibid.
[15] Standish, Peter. Borges and
the Limits of Language. http://www.borges.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/Standish%20Borges%20and%20the%20Limits.pdf
accessed 10/8/15
[16] As included in the collection of works, Fictiones
[17] Fictiones. p.45
[18] Fictiones. p.47
[19] Fictiones. p.48
[20] As included in the collection of works, Fictiones
[21] Fictiones. p.82
[22] Fictiones. p.83
[23] Fictiones. p.79
[24] As included in the collection of works, Fictiones
[25] Fictiones. p.69
[26] ibid.
[27] Standish, Peter. Borges and
the Limits of Language. http://www.borges.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/Standish%20Borges%20and%20the%20Limits.pdf
accessed 10/8/15
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
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