Patrick Dove METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN BORGES'S "EL ZAHIR"

ne of the most frequently cited lines from the work of Jorge Luis Borges comes from the conclusion of the 1951 essay "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal": "It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors" {Labyrinths 192). Over the years a good deal of critical attention has been paid to the importance of metaphor in Borges's writing. Critics have pointed to his use of figural language to suture the rift between being and thought, lived experience and recollection. Literary metaphor exemplifies what one critic describes as Borges's efforts to enumerate "sharply diverse yet somehow harmonizing parts." Bringing likeness and unity into view where we ordinary see only difference and fragmentation, Borges's writing gestures to "some larger, static whole unnamable by any unilateral means" (Irby, Introduction to Other Inquisitions, x). While Borges is famous for his association of metaphor with universality, I will propose that his writing also initiates a confrontation with the limits of metaphor as it has been defined in the Western tradition. In the text I will be discussing, the short story "El Zahir," this limit is approached through a literary treatment of the image.' The literary image does not allow itself to be transcribed into a language of equivalence. It names a mode of appearingor it may be the secret origin of any and all appearancesthat is irreducible to hermeneutic models of reading, or to any view of literature as containing a hidden meaning waiting to be interpreted or revealed. In the first part of this paper, I discuss Borges's engagement with the problem of metaphor in "El Zahir." The presence of metaphor as a literary topos initiates two related considerations in this story. First, the text is a reflection on what could be called the economic determination of metaphor, or metaphor defined as exchange, substitution or transfer. Under this general definition, the passage which occurs in metaphor has been predetermined as an expenditure that will eventually be recuperated as value or meaning. In other words, the difference between words is conceived as a negation (of appearances) that will ultimately negate itself (as the revelation of meaning). Borges's text alludes to 1. The short story "El Zahir" was first published, according to Emir Rodriguez Monegal, in Los Anales de Buenos Aires in July 1947, and later republished in a slightly revised version in El Aleph (1949). See Ficcionario 458.
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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 as it has been determined as a totality comprised of the differential intonations of a few metaphors. It foreseesand attempts to forestallthe nightmare of a world that has fallen entirely under the sway of the One. The second half of my analysis looks at Borges's treatment of the literary image. I use the term "image" with some trepidation, as it is often associated with the most traditional of metaphysical distinctions: the image as the other of "truth," "original," or "depth," and thus as a name for what is deficient in being. For Borges, the image tells a different story: it challenges the old association of truth with what is hidden beneath the surface (depth, essence). Beginning with Aristotle, theories of metaphor always come back to a hermeneutic presupposition: the idea that the metaphoric passage sheds light on a hidden meaning waiting to be revealed or interpreted. The image, on the other hand, suspends the distinction between appearances and depth, and thereby compels us to re-examine the basic assumptions of our reading strategies. Can an image 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 hermeneutics understands the term? I will not attempt to answer these questions here, and will only concern myself with establishing that they represent an important concern 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 and appearance. Let us be clear: Borges does not use literature as a vehicle for philosophizing; instead, he borrows material from the philosophical tradition in order to generate literary form. Although Borges is not a philosopher, this does 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 from which they were taken. A brief discussion of how the philosophical tradition has approached the question of metaphor will help set the stage for the first half of the essay. Aristotle defines metaphor [metaphora] as a transfer [epiphora] to one thing of a name that belongs to something else.-^ This passage, as Jacques Derrida 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 of life" for old age, or "The sun sows its radiant seeds," in which no proper figure exists for the scattering of sunlight), from species to genus ("Here stands my ship," where lying at anchor is part of the genus to stand), from genus to species ("Truly has Odysseus done ten thousand deeds," where ten thousand is part of the genus many), or from one species to another ("Draining his life with bronze," where to drain and bronze are substituted for to kill and sword respectively). For modern rhetorical theory, some of these would be considered catachresis or metonymy.

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the way thinking itself works. A well-wrought metaphor brings to light a likeness that is not apparent to the naked eye: a resemblance of idea, cause or purpose. "To make metaphors well is to observe what is alike" [To gar eu metapherein too to homoion theorein estin] (Poetics 4.5.5, 1459a7-8). "Metaphors must be drawn . . . from things that are related to the original thing, and yet not obviously so relatedjust as in philosophy also an acute mind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart" {On Rhetoric 3.2, 1412a). Theoretical vision [theorein] provides an analogy for what happens when we use metaphors, but it is not just one analogy among many: the production of apt metaphors presupposes that theoretical perception is at work ensuring that language remains the likeness [homoiosis] of being. The Aristotelian theory of metaphor thus exemplifies the ontological primacy granted to being over language in the metaphysical tradition. Homoiosis, the principle of likeness, presupposes that language comes after being and remains a mere reflection of it. It thus provides the foundation for the modern concept of the sign and the determination that signification represents the essential function of language. On the other hand, the conduit between thinking and language in Aristotle's discussion can also be made to flow in the opposite direction: thinking turns out to dependand more than one might suspecton the exemplary nature of metaphor. According to Aristotle, metaphor affects us by bringing the idea it aims to communicate "before the eyes" [pro ommaton poiein]. This visual analogy supports Aristotle's claim that metaphor is most effective when it prompts the listener to "see" the thing in a new light, and when it illustrates something in a dynamic, active state [energeia] (Rhetoric 3.10-3.11). In the Rhetoric, the section on metaphor is positioned within a broader discussion of the relation between thinking [dianoia] and speaking [lexis], or in the words of 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 thinking is unable to make itself manifest to itself on its own, it rehes on exemplification or mimesis in order to reflect on itself through analogy. Thinking seeks the right turn of phrase that would allow it to enter the light of the logos. We do not truly grasp an idea (say, "old age") until we have seen it transferred into a different form ("the evening of life"). Aristotle's text also exemplifies how easily theories of metaphor slip into a vicious circle. In order to illuminate the event it attempts to account for, the theory of metaphor must have recourse to another metaphor. The common root in Aristotle's famous definitionmetaphor [meta-phora] as transfer [epi-phora]provides a clear indication of this difficulty. The theory of metaphor, it would seem, can only ever be a metaphor of metaphor. Derrida situates this ambiguous relation between theory, event and repetition under what he calls the law of tropic supplementarity, according to which "the extra turn of 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 helps to explain the abundance of everyday, worldly things that have at one time or another served as stand-ins for metaphor. In the Western tradition, numismatics has provided a rich source of analogy for thinking about metaphor. More generally, of course, coins often serve as figures for the word. The analogy can be pursued in a myriad of directions: like coins, words circulate within a national context; words are likewise inherited and transferred between generations and traditions; words are subject to both inflation and material wear and tear; words can be classified as authentic or counterfeit; words give access to things, and when a proper word is lacking a term can sometimes be coined. The specific association of coin and metaphor, meanwhile, underscores the fact that the tradition has tended to classify metaphor (or word coinage) as a genus of exchange and valuation. How is the use of one word to substitute for another analogous to the act which designates a piece of metal as representing a specific quantum of value? In an economic transaction, the material stuff of the coin does not substitute directly for the commodity or its use value. As Marx demonstrates, the practice of exchange involves at least two orders of abstraction: (1) units of money, as represented by a piece of metal, paper or some other material, are designated as representing a specific value; and (2) the commodity acquires a specific exchange value as a reflection of the labor time that is needed for its production in any given time and place.^ The coin constitutes the exception in such an economy of exchange: 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 of money scandalous: to mar a coin is to interrupt the timely withdrawal of its materiality from the scene of exchange. Borges's short story "El Zahir" is both a love story and a tale of loss and destitution. The temporal structure is fairly traditional: the narrator, who is also the protagonist, first provides an expository statement about his present circumstances, followed by a longer retrospective account of how things came to be the way they are. His recollections begin with the death of Teodelina Villar, a fashion model with whom he was in love. He does not clarify what her feelings may have been for him, though from the little we learn it is far from certain that she returned his affection. The portrait he sketches is a caricature of a portefia debutante whose eyes were focused permanently on the metropolis. He then recounts a serendipitous occurrence following her death, an event he describes proleptically as having precipitated his imminent fall into the abyss of madness or subjective destitution. The fatal happenstance unfolds as follows: After paying his last respects at Villar's wake, the narrator departs with the intention of returning home; but no sooner does he leave 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 twentycentavo coin whose sole unusual characteristics are the letters "N," " T " and the number " 2 " which have been scratched into its surface. However, the image of this banal coin imposes itself on the narrator and becomes an irremediable obsession. During the few hours he has the coin his possession, he finds himself unable to think of anything but coins, and it soon becomes evident that it is in fact the image of the coin that "possesses" him and not the other way around. The day after the wake, the narrator resolves to rid himself of the coin in the expectation that the image would dissipate along with it. But even 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 tries various remediesdevoting himself to composing a fantastic tale, meditating on other coins, consulting with an analystbut none of these substitutions succeeds in dissolving the obsession. The narrator finally receives a diagnosis as he pages through a tome entitled Urkunden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage. According to the Urkunden, the coin was an avatar of the "Zahir," one of the ninety-nine manifest names of God in Islam, and whose Arabic meanings include "''visible" [visible] and "notorio" [notorious, clear, obvious].''According to Muhammad, anyone who enumerates the ninety-nine names consecutively would gain access to Paradise. The Urkunden relates that in certain Islamic traditions, the Zahir is regarded as an avatar which, presenting itself to its victims in the form of some ordinary object, captivates them and drives them mad. Similarly, the tome associates the Zahir with the Sufist mystical tradition, which holds that God has a secret one-hundredth name whose pronunciation would allow the mystic to lose him- or herself in divine unity. In confirmation of this strange diagnosis, we are then informed that two others in Teodelina Villar's circle have been stricken by the same obsessive symptoms, and that one of the victims has been institutionalized. Speculating that 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 a detailed account of the cultural and religious significance of the term Zahir, much but not all of which corresponds with the story. The work of identifying these connections is doubly important, as it helps shed light on several key thematic threads (Islam and mysticism) while at the same time underscoring Borges's conviction that the origin of the 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 that have perpetuated themselves through the idea that the origin is synonymous with a proper identity or a self-identical subject. Its merits notwithstanding, this kind of reading also risks reinforcing the belief that Borges's writing is primarily concerned with communicating content, meaning or message. In other words, philoiogically oriented readings often avoid posing the question of how Borges's writing engages with literary problems.

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unable to remember or think anything that is not the Zahir, and will find himself 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 the entirety of his world, suspending all meaningful relations and leaving him in a 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 images I shall pass to one; from a highly complex dream to a dream of utter simplicity. Others will dream that I am mad; I shall dream of the Zahir. When all the men on earth think, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be a dream and which a realitythe earth or the Zahir ?^ What are we to make of the narrator's warning that this peculiar fate will not be uniquely his, and that we are all sooner or later destined to share the dismal end that awaits him? He likens his fate to the world as it would look like if it had been designed by the philosophical perspective which Kant termed dogmatic idealism, for which the sensible world only exists as projection of an infinite mind (Berkeley). We will see later that philosophical idealism is only one of several possible codes in which this passage can be read. For the moment, suffice it to say that Borges's text describes history as haunted by a rationale whose full realization would place us in a world in which differences are nothing more than shadows projected by the Same. There would no longer be any significant distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, between speech (lexis) and thought (dianoia), and thus no need for metaphor itself. I reflected that every coin in the world is a symbol of those famous coins which glitter in history [la historia] and fable. I thought of Charon's obol; of the obol for which Beiisarius begged; of Judas' thirty coins; of the drachmas of Lais, the famous courtesan; of the ancient coin which one of the Seven Sleepers proffered; of the shining coins of the wizard in the 1001 Nights, that turned out to be 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 the pagination for the Dudley Fitts's English-language translation in Labyrinths, followed by the pagination in the Spanish-language El Aleph (1994).

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the doubloon which Ahab nailed to the mast; of Leopold Bloom's irreversible fiorin; of the louis whose pictured face betrayed the fugitive Louis XVI near Varennes (158-59; 108-09). I will comment on three points in this passage, each having to do with the fact that in Borges's story the Zahir assumes the form of a coin. The narrator here emphasizes that a coin is never just a coin, and thus each of these motifs will relate to a question of metaphor. First point: The coin is an aesthetic metaphor representing a compendium of the Western tradition, from Greek mythology to the modern novel, and from the Byzantine Fmpire to the French Revolution. A stand-in for all coins both real and fictive, the Zahir is both a species (twenty-centavo coin) standing for the totality of a genus (coins) and a species representing other species (as the Spanish "historia" [history or story] emphasizes, the coin mobilizes references to world history and to literary history). This presentation of universality anticipates the famous assertion in "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" that universal history is the history of tonalities imparted to a small number of metaphors. The notion of differential repetition which Borges develops in the 1951 essay suggests that metaphor plays a fundamental role for all creative activity (art, thinking, and so on), providing the "material stuff" through which new ideas, works, and projects enter the world. It is through metaphor that a particular thinker (or even a generation or an entire epoch) finds its attunement to being, its way of engaging with and asking questions about the world. But as we will see shortly, the aesthetic metaphor in "Fl Zahir" does not just recall all of history, it also announces the imminent collapse of the division between the finite and the transcendent, or between representation and the absoluteand thus the end of history itself. As was suggested earlier, Borges's strategy in writing a story about metaphor is to transform the philosophical problem of metaphor into literary form. This transposition is what drives plot development in "Fl Zahir," where the action involves a series of thematic transferences, exchanges, and repetitions, and thus formally resembles the logic of metaphor. The ill-fated scene in which the narrator first receives the coin marks the first in a series of transfers: of literary theme (love is substituted by money), of libidinal energy (emotional attachment to the beloved is displaced by obsession with the image of the Zahir), and likewise of proper names ("Zahir," whose Arabic meaning is "the visible," replaces "Teodelina," from the Greek teo- [god] and delina [delo: to make 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, in which resonates the idea of divine clemency. Dudley Fitts's English-language translation likewise refers to the beloved as "Clementina." The exchange of "Teodelina" for "Clementina" in the 1949 version has the effect of transferring the theological motif from 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 and repetitions: his first impulse is to bury it (just as Teodelina is to be buried in the cemetery) or to abandon it in a library (returning it to the order of "history and fable"), but he finally decides to send it back to its native sphere by spending it, clarifying that he does so "in order to remove [himself] from its orbit" (159). The role of urban topography likewise contributes to this structuring effect: the narrator's peripatetic wanderings on the night of the wake and the following day trace a circuit which resembles the way that a coin or a word might circulate in public. The celestial metaphor ("orbit") describing the coin's sphere of influence combines with figures of economic and libidinal investment as well as urban circumnavigation to form a multi-dimensional tropological 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 could read this as a tropological affirmation of movementsubstitution, sharing and exchangewhere previously there had been nothing but the paralyzing silence of absolute loss. Metaphor would align itself with the work of mourning understood as the possibility of symbolizing the real (loss), and thus against the deadly return of the unmediated real.''In this reading, "Fl Zahir" presents itself as a story about language as symbolization. Its many merits notwithstanding, such a reading would have problems accounting for the fact that it is the image of the coinmetaphor par excellencethat imposes an unsurpassable limit for all negation, substitution and exchange. If there is a limit for the captivating power of the image, Borges's text locates it in a passage to the hither side of language understood as signification. Second motif: immediately after the passage cited above, the narrator goes on to assert that the coin, in its abstract character as money, represents a condensation of innumerable temporal possibilities. The link between money, temporality and the infinite then serves as a springboard for a commentary on the philosophical problems of will and freedom. As general equivalent, money represents pure possibility: it can in principle be exchanged for any commodity whatsoever. It thus provides an analogy (according to the narrator) for the concept of free will. Money, before changing hands, represents the future as decision. More than the possibility of choosing between commodities, it represents the decision to decide, the possibility of deciding when and where to choose. However, there is also an important distinction which the money: will analogy glosses over a bit too quickly: whereas philosophy has always 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 time is marked by a split between a determinate future to be purchased and made actual as present time (either a night at the concert or a new book), and the future as what can never be made present nor be reduced to a matter of calculation: the future as the uncertainty that we experience whenever we face a decision, an uncertainty without which there could be no decision worthy of the name. Here we encounter the first of several indications that "Fl Zahir" is not just a eulogy to metaphor but a consideration of the limits of metaphor understood as exchange and valuation. I propose that the discussion of how the question of money leads to a thought of the future as differing from itself could easily be transcribed into a different key and posed as a question about literature as aesthetic event, or to a thought of the internal difference of all presentation. I am thinking specifically of Borges's paradoxical definition of the aesthetic act in the essay "La muralla y los libros" as "the imminence of a revelation that 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 possibility of revelation, understood as the unpresentable difference of the future and of all coming into presence? I will return to this point in the final part of this essay. The problem of time introduced here can be extended to the text's selfreflexive consideration of the relation between lived experience and narrative time. The narrative act, as Borges emphasizes in more than one of his texts, unavoidably runs into a problem associated with aesthetic temporality. This problem can be formalized as the following antinomy: whereas the nature of experience is simultaneous, continuous and chaotic, the structure of language is 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 the companion piece to "Fl Zahir": "what my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I 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 a suspect claim or a literal presentation of the problem, since it can only call attention to the problem by temporalizing it: first the experience, then the inability to capture it by writing or speaking of it. It is the very structure of language that prohibits it from making itself the likeness of the real, and the resulting aporia constitutes a fundamental preoccupation for Borges's writing: even when literature becomes aware of the structural impossibility of representing the real without losing it, this knowledge does not cancel the impulse that compels literature to return to the real, to an experience it cannot bring forth 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 diminution of size. Fach thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London). . . . ("The Aleph," 283). Time, which softens recollections, only makes the memory of the Zahir sharper. There was a time when I could visualize the obverse, and then the reverse. Now I see them simultaneously. It is not as though the Zahir were made of glass, since it is not that one face superimposes itself on the other; rather, it is as though my eyesight were spherical with the Zahir abounding at its center (163; 115, translation modified). The Aleph represents the aesthetic presentation of simultaneity as a point of universal visibility, an ideal locus from which objects occupying different locations in space become manifest together. With the Zahir, on the other hand, the absolute is the simultaneous presentation of what we ordinarily perceive as opposing sides or faces. Whereas the Aleph negates the distance between points in space, the Zahir negates time: time rendered tropologicallythat is, spatiallyas the perception of opposing sides of a coin. This account of the Zahir suggests a representation of absolute knowledge as defined by speculative philosophy: the image of the Zahir is that of mind thinking together the opposing moments or "faces" of the dialectic. The Zahir, in this reading, represents the fundamental fantasy of the dialectical tradition. It is the reconciliation of thesis and antithesis, the negation of negation, and the sensible presentation of the Idea. It should not come as a surprise, however, that the imminent triumph of metaphysical reason over its others would also be the end of all reason, its plunge into the infantilizing space of undifferentiated sameness. Third motif: The inclusion of the infamous "louis" in the narrator's description of the coin points to an important, albeit somewhat ambiguous connection 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 King Louis XVI was imprisoned shortly after the storming of the Bastille. He escaped briefly in 1791, but was soon recaptured, and was later put on trial and executed. According to one version of the story (to which Borges is here referring), the King's short-lived escape was foiled in the most ironic manner: when the fleeing monarch tried to make a purchase in a store, an unsympathetic clerk recognized him by his likeness to the visage on the coin with which he paid, and the clerk promptly turned him in. Louis XVI's trial and beheading in 1793, of course, represent a rupture in the classical concept of sovereignty, 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 is that 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 vision of a world that has been entirely subsumed within a certain logic of equivalence, it is also an attempt to think the limit of exchange and to awake from the 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 the ninety-nine divine names, until they become meaningless. I long to travel that path. Perhaps I shall conclude by wearing away [gastar] the Zahir simply through thinking it again and again" (164; 116). Borges's story concludes with this thought of quiet perseverance in the face of imminent loss of world. The notion that repetition could somehow dissolve the absolute tyranny of the One is underscored by the Spanish verb gastar, which can mean both "to wear away" and "to spend." What would this "wearing away" or "exhaustion" of the absolute look like? The perseverance to which the narrator appeals is by no means a vision of heroic defiance. Perseverance is allied, through the tedium of repetition, with thinking and language; and Borges appears to be suggesting that this description might apply to literature itself at times. Literature would hasten the exhaustion of the word's signifying power and thereby enable the emergence of another force latent in the wordone which, unlike the power of signification, does not sacrifice itself for the sake of meaning. In thefinalpart of this study, I discuss two ways in which Borges's text sheds light on this alternative notion of sovereignty beyond signification. The first instance involves a kind of metaphor, the kenning, which Borges describes as both belonging to the Western tradition and as irreducibly foreign to the presuppositions of classical rhetorical and aesthetic theories. The second case refers to the literary portrait of Teodelina Villar. I will discuss the literary image as a question of what is excluded or foreclosed in tropological language and signification. Farlier it was mentioned that writing represents one of the substitute activities to which the narrator turns after the death of Villar and in an attempt to dissolve the obsession with the Zahir. Let us now look briefiy at the description of the "tale of fantasy" and the peculiar figure of thought mentioned there. The plot of this story within the story resembles an episode found in both Norse mythology and the Volsunga saga, a thirteenth-century Icelandic epic poem. It tells of a prince, Fafnir, who kills his father in order to steal his gold, after which he is transformed into a dragon before being slain by a certain Sigurd. Of particular interest is the meta-textual reference to the kenning, a figure commonly used in Old Norse, Old Fnglish and Skaldic poetryof which Borges was an avid reader and occasional translator. While there is no clarification in "Fl Zahir" of what significance the kenning might hold in this context, Borges does comment more extensively on these figures elsewhere. On the basis of those remarks we can surmise that Borges has in mind a literary experience of the exhaustion of meaning, through which language would become 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 and Celtic poetic traditions. Akin to compound metaphors, they are formed through the combination of two or more unrelated nouns to replace a single noun. For instance, "sea" becomes "whale-road" or "blood" becomes "sword-water."^*' In one of his poems, Borges alludes to the kenning as a "coining of laborious names."" The kenning constitutes a sovereign act of naming which, as we will now see, also marks a limit for the Aristotelian determination of metaphor as signification. In his relatively early essay "Las kenningar" (1933), Borges draws a clear distinction between the kenningwhich he calls "savage metaphors"and the concept of metaphor as it is developed in Aristotle's Poetics. According to Borges, the proliferation of kenning in the Skaldic poetic tradition cannot be explained by Aristotle's theory of metaphor, which is grounded in the distinction between hidden truth and appearances. By the same token, Borges asserts that the kenning did not intend to produce specific emotions in the listener, and he thereby rejects the possibility of accounting for this aesthetic event in terms of the Aristotelian economy of catharsis. "Kennings . . . are or seem to be the result of a mental process which seeks fortuitous resemblances. They do not correspond to any emotion. They come from a laborious game of combinations, not from a sudden perception of intimate likeness. Mere logic can justify them, but sentiment cannot" (Nueva Antologia Personal 223; my translation). For Aristotle, metaphor names an analogy among ideas. The difference between words brings the invisible unity of meaning to the light of day; and in view of this unity, the material difference of the word silently withdraws. The kenning, on the other hand, comprises an analogy strictly among words, a juxtaposition of signifiers which aims at no idea; what it puts on display is nothing more than the intimate contact between phonemes (in the Skaldic poetic tradition) or graphemes (for Borges's prose writing). "It makes no difference what they try to transmit; they suggest nothing. They do not invite us to dream, and do not provoke images or passions in us. They are not points of departure: these terms are ends in themselves. The pleasurethe sufficient and minimal pleasureis found in their variety, in the heterogeneous contact of the words" (221). Neither beautiful nor sublime, the kenning is language asserting itself as sovereign. Before designating any 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 a thing in terms of another." Old English and Old Norse both encourage the formation of compound nouns, whereas in Spanish and other Romance languages, compounds are far less common. And thus one could surmise that translation or reproduction of kenning in Spanish would yield an entirely differentand much strangerresonance for a Spanish ear, and that the "savage" character of these metaphors is entirely an effect of translation. 11. "Para cantar memorias o alabanzas / Amonedaba laboriosos nombres; / La guerra era 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 significantly 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 or permanence. The portrait of Villar undoubtedly mobilizes a traditional view of the image, but only to a certain point. Beyond this point, the image begins to call into question the metaphysical distinction between appearance and being. In order to clarify what is at stake in the distinction between metaphor and image, I will comment on the narrator's recollections of Teodelina Villar and of her death. The first two passages represent a literary portrait of her as a sign of her time and place: of bourgeois snobbery in the periphery, and of the ascendancy of capitalist mass production in competition with the values of the 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 irreproachable correctness in every action; but her zeal was more admirable and more exigent than theirs because the tenets of her creed were not eternal, but submitted to the shifting caprices [azares] of Paris or Hollywood. Teodelina Villar appeared at the correct places, at the correct hour, with the correct adornments and the correct boredom; but the boredom, the adornments, the hour and the place would almost immediately become passe and would provide Teodelina Villar with the material for a definition of bad taste (157; 106, translation modified). At first glance this portrait reads as a light-hearted social critique in which the dictates of fashion have assumed the status of a secular religion. Villar represents a certain bourgeois imaginary in a peripheral city which has always wanted to be seen as the "Paris of the South." But the irony running through this satire also makes room for posing new questions about authority, mimesis and modernity. The absurd claim about the social order existing in order to facilitate the codification of taste does not find itself refuted in the way one might expect: i.e., through the counter affirmation that taste is in fact either frivolous or the highest of pursuits, and in either case irreducible to the domain of politics. Villar's position precisely invertsand thereby inadvertently exposesthe ideological function of "taste" in modernity. By sustaining that taste represents the goal of social organization, she touches on the fact that "taste" has served both to consolidate and naturalize class difference (under monarchy, good taste is reflected "naturally" in the actions and choices of the nobility) and as an instrument of discipline under the modern State (beginning in the nineteenth century, taste comes to be seen as a faculty available to all in principle, thought it must be cultivated through education; good taste is thus synonymous 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 of a Subject who is attuned to a universal code: the rights of the nobility or the egahtarian values of the humanist and Fnlightenment traditions. Villar's own life, however, attests to a rupture in the continuity of this history, a moment when the codification of social relations has begun to waver and fluctuate. Borges's text underscores this discontinuity when it refers to the distinction between the eternal tenets of theology and humanism and the whimsical vicissitudes of fashion. The time of mass production defines the difference between modernity and its others in terms of speed. The allusion to Flollywoodcapital of the twentieth centurythus involves more than just a historical modification of the old image of Paris as capital of the nineteenth century. It marks a transformation of the very determination of modernity: from a spatial and geopolitical model (Paris/Buenos Aires, center/periphery) to a temporal and technological one (Hollywood is not so much a place as it is the reproduction and dissemination of certain images). In view of the massive reconfiguration of planetary relations initiated through technologies of mass production, it could be said that "Hollywood," as name for the cinematographic dissemination of the image, presents itself as the promise of overcoming distance itself. Whatever is currently showing in Paris or New York can now be consumed (viewed or worn) simultaneously in Buenos Aires. If taste still functions as a sign of the subject within the order of capitalist mass production, it is because it attests to her ability to keep up with the speed of modernity, to match its increasingly frenetic pace and its incalculable whims [azares: literally, "chances"]. In conjunction with modernity experienced as speed, taste is the projection of a subject able to remain identical with itself in time. And thus we have gone from the old idea of a subject whose changing appearances refiect the being of wbat does not change (the rights of the nobility or the universal values of the humanist tradition) to a new subject whose appearances do not refiect anything at all except the fact of appearing. The war gave her much to think about: with Paris occupied by the Germans, how could one follow the fashions? A foreigner whom she had always distrusted presumed so far upon her good faith as to sell her a number of cylindrical hats; a year later it was divulged that those absurd creations had never been worn in Paris at all!consequently they were not hats, but arbitrary, unauthorized whims (157; 107, translation modified). The war is experienced as the interruption of fashion and its projected simultaneity. These ills displace from Villar's horizons the rise of fascism, the technological routinization of genocide, and the imminent threat to the selfunderstanding of the West. Once again, however, we see satire generating its own profound insight. What should we make of the fact that Villar turns out to 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 imaginary that has presided during much of the history of Argentine modernity (an imaginary which arose in response to the spatial differentiation of the planet into center and periphery), it also begins to shed light on another way of seeing the image. The hats, signifiers par excellence of social status, turn out to be simulacra. The true scandal perpetrated in this scene is the laying bare of language itself as structured by the law of iterability. According to structural necessity, a sign must be repeatable and recognizable a priori in order to be a sign. Unlike the symbol, the sign is "arbitrary" and "unautborized" from its very conception. The sign must be produced in such a way that it can be repeated; but in making it repeatable one thereby relinquishes control over the future of its reception. What enables a sign to be communicated is also what interrupts any possibility of determining in advance how it will be repeated and understood. The law of iterability is thus an inscription of finitude which establishes the radical absence of the producer and his or her authority from any communicative act. In opening the possibility of communication, the sign also exposes itself to the incalculable risks of errancy: of being taken out of context, misunderstood, distorted, etc.^^ Let us now look at the description of Villar's corpse as it lies in wake. Despite what the text might at first glance seem to be saying, here it is no longer possible to associate tbe image with an idea of falsity, artifice or superficiality that could be opposed by something truer or more essential. The image is no longer 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 reassume its earlier faces. At some point during that confusing night of the sixth, Teodelina Villar was magically what she had been twenty years before: her features recovered that authority which is conferred by pride, by money, by youth, by the awareness of heading

12. On the notion of iterability see Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context." This is also the place to note that Villar's situation represents a mirror image of Borges's views on what it means to write from a peripheral space such as Argentina (see in particular the essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition"). What Villar takes to be a fraud, Borges views as the secret resource of the peripheral writer, who is able to work with the material of the Western tradition while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from the history of its valuation. Metropolitan writers, on the other hand, 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 writer is 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 traditionsuch as the sign and the properare 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 that face which so unsettled me would be as memorable as this one; it is 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 of death. In fact, the figure is doubly ironic, as the representation of rigor mortis echoes those calculating self-transformations that characterized the personal and professional life of Teodelina Villar (she was a model for cold creams and the like). Nothing could be stranger and more out of placeand thus nothing more memorablethan a corpse. It presents a corporeal excess for any accounting procedure (the counting of the members of a community, the counting of the objects in a room, etc.). Indeed, even the term "corporeal" is inaccurate, as it belongs to a conceptual network of oppositesof soma and pneuma, matter and spirit, body and mind or soulin which every finite term is mirrored and negated by an ideal term. The cadaver's mute presence in the room does not point to the beyond, as it would in a theologically oriented representation: it attests only to the fact that it no longer has a place, having withdrawn from the world of meaningful relations. In the words of Maurice Blanchot, the cadaver "establishes a relation between here and nowhere."'^ And yet nothing in this scene is truly new. This nameless remainder that has no place has always been there, even if we are not ordinarily troubled by its presence. What becomes apparent here and now is that the radiant image, which had until now been regarded as something belonging solely to life and its vanityin other words, something fleeting that would vanish at the end of lifeis in fact a resilient part of life, resilient because it receives its support from 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 had ever seen of hera perverse rendering of the cliche of love at first sight? Or "first" in the ontological sense that Villar herself sought to define: as exemplar of the beautiful and the contemporaneous, and in relation to which all other appearances would be relegated to the poverty of mere appearances out of sync with their time? Or, then again, there may be a third way of hearing this phrase: if what comes last, after everything is said and done, could also have been first, is it not because the image now shows itself to be a copy and reflection 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 do not use this term lightly) between this passage in "El Zabir" and Blanchot's meditations on the corpse, the image and mimesis, and my reading of "El Zahir" has thus been strongly influenced by Blanchot's text.

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we understand a relation to a hidden essence. It shines at a moment when there 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 the site of a corpse which has withdrawn from all significant relations, the image describes the unsettling presentation of mimesis itself, of the very possibility of appearing before and affecting others. "Her life was exemplary, yet she was ravaged unremittingly by an inner despair. She was forever experimenting with new metamorphoses, as though trying to get away from herself" (157). In retrospect, Villar's restless selftransformations offer themselves to be read as symptoms of a primordial wound which never saw the light of day. Her frenetic pursuit of the moment seems to suggest that she was haunted by a liminal awareness that the realm of appearances was not hers to master. If the image does not hide or reflect anything, this also means that it cannot be negated as if it were a stepping stone toward a secret essence. The cadaver as its own image is the inability of negation to negate itself in the end. What cannot be grasped or negated is also what cannot 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 support from death. Let me try to clarify this further. The image recalls that cut or mark which, while possessing no meaning in itself, provides the speaking subject with the means to produce meaning while at the same time depriving him or her of the plenitude of being. Language grants the possibility of recalling a thing in its absence, but also imposes an absolute limit on our access to the immediacy of the thing's being. Language is both the memory of being and the death of the thing as plenitude. Turning once again to the portrait of Teodelina Villar, however, we can see that language in fact deprives us of nothing, or at least nothing that could be brought forth into the light of day. There is no such thing as a true hat (the ideal or authentic hat) before the emergence of the errant hat (the signifier "hat," which can just as easily be assigned to a fake as to 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 within earshot), is only retroactively inscribed into the scene with the advent of the word. What lies behind the word, what the word both recalls and prevents from 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 from death; 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 that was raised earher. To repeat, Borges defines the aesthetic act as "the imminence of a revelation that does not take place." The significance of the image for Borgesian literary aesthetics is that it marks a rupture within the ontotheological concept of revelation, as well as a limit for metaphor understood as transfer and signification. The literary image does not belong to the logic of revelation, which is grounded in the distinction between appearances and truth. 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 the imminence of what does not take place in presentation, this is because it is the taking place of place itself. But lest we think that Borges is simply generating another opposition here, it must be noted that the literary image does not manage to break away completely from metaphor and signification. In approaching the image as a trace of what signification cannot grasp, literature is unable to avoid the gesture of indicating that there is something there which exceeds any relation of equivalence. To postulate the existence of the unpresentable is still a form of signification, even if it understands a different relation to its limit. Earlier I described Borges's tendency to borrow ideas and problems from the philosophical tradition while turning this material into literary form. This tendency could be summarized as the conversion of the concept into figure or trope. However, the ensuing discussion has opened up a competing account of the literary in Borges: as language becoming image. This association of the image with the literary does not represent a new definition, since the image is not a stable object or state over and against which literature could constitute itself. This alternative view leaves us with two tendencies or trajectoriesin a word, metaphor and imagewhich are at odds with one another and seemingly irreconcilable. Perhaps most intriguing of all is that, while Borges's writing does not offer a resolution of this conflict in favor of one tendency or the other, neither does the conflict loses its edge through reiteration. It does not allow itself to be transformed into the stable terrain of a recognizable difference. Just as the tropological production of metaphor is always on the verge of becoming imagefor better or for worseso the literary vindication of the image as what signification excludes is always subject to being captured and reinscribed as metaphor. Indiana University Works Cited Aristotle. On Rhetoric, trans. George Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. . Poetics, trans. Richard Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. De Man, Paul. "A Modern Master." In Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Jaime Alazraki. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Aleph." In Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998. . "Las Kenningar." In Nueva Antologia Personal. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1999. . "La esfera de Pascal." In Otras Inquisiciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1952. . "La muralla y los libros." In Otras Inquisiciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1952.

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. "Un Sajon (449 A.D.)." El otro, el mismo. Obras Completas, v.2. Barcelona: Emece, 1989. . "El Zahir." In El Aleph. Madrid: Alianza, 1994. "The Zahir," trans. Dudley Eitts. In Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964. Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. . "White Mythology." In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Irby, James. "Introduction." In Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. Lopez-Baralt, Luce. "Borges, or the Mystique of Silence: What was on the Other Side of the Zahir." In Jorge Luis Borges: Thought and Knowledge in the XXth Century. Eds. Alfonso and Eernando de Toro. Erankfurt am Maim: Verveuert, 1999. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Eowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977. Rodriguez Monegal, Emir. Jorge Luis Borges: Ficcionario: Una antologia de sus textos. Mexico: Eondo de Cultura Economica, 1985.