“According to Forster, Borges saw childhood reading as the only form of reading in which the reader fully forms part of what he reads. Adult reading, in contrast, is mediated; it is a reading of distances and involvements that establish a difference between what is written and the act of reading.”
I. Reading and Writing in the Age of Potemkin
Somewhere in his voluminous body of work, George Steiner draws our attention to the elegant architecture and and splendid façades of European cities that were ferociously bombed during the Second World War (Warsaw, Berlin, Bratislava, and Hamburg, among many others), and that nonetheless, in our present day, appear as if the flames of History had never burned them to the ground. In said cities’ streets, especially in their historical districts, it would appear time has stood still. Of course, there is traffic, people walking about, businesses that open and close at pre-established hours. But every little square, every ancient structure’s façade, every rooftop, every space we can see seems to have been pulled out of a warehouse, giving off a strange sensation of artifice. Their supposed immediacy comes across as false or insufficient. The perfection and exacting detail of every millimeter restored, reordered, and rebuilt after the war becomes phantasmagoric: in every corner of these cities, an unfeeling asepsis plays its hand, inhuman but nonetheless smiling, empathetic, and coldly relevant. Rendered enormous, grotesque modern versions of the “Potemkin villages” that the ministers of Catherine the Great of Russia presented to their mistress, built with idyllic haste as she traveled to inspect her domains, it is likely that a good measure of our immediate experience is now ever more displaced toward the fictitious figuration of what might be considered mere discourse. Appearance and spectacle and dissolution of the fictional world.
Our age is a “Potemkin village” writ hyperbolic. In times like these—an age of screens—returning to the book is a melancholic gesture. Which is to say, an act of longing to recover the old balance between microcosmos and macrocosmos that has been upset: order is disrupted, confusion reigns, and the affected subject no longer obeys the laws that inseparably govern both the universe and his own fate. The screen has nullified movement with a promise of immediacy that is, in fact, nothing but alienation in disguise. The book brings us that displaced consciousness that forms an essential part of the acute sadness provoked within us by the desire to recover life. The book opens us up to reflection on displacement. This is a displaced reflection; it conceives of reading as an act that is neither fortuitous nor coincidental, and that possesses within itself a vital and intellective symbology that seeks to register the numinous nature of access to, encounter with, and use of the book-object and of the ritualistic behaviors adjacent to it. Thus, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, perhaps the best way to read the book we desire is by writing it: the quintessential melancholic gesture; acceptance and summoning of displacement by which to resist the petrifying, Medusan gaze of the Potemkin screen.
In his latest book, La biblioteca infinita: Leer y desleer a Borges (2024), Ricardo Forster takes on the risk of rowing upstream, writing about Borges after having read him all his life. What do we read in Forster’s book? A conventional critical analysis, as the present academic bureaucracy demands? Of course not. A counterpoint to those books now indispensable to any Borgesian library, like those by Sucre, Sarlo, Pauls, Rodríguez Monegal, and Gutiérrez Girardot? In part yes, in part no. The personal twist Forster gives this book points more to an exploration of Borges-as-effigy, as multi-sided symbol, than to a mere scrutinization of his vast bibliographic legacy. For Forster, reading Borges is like a journey. A sort of wondrous, reflexive aperture to the worlds presented by the author of “The Aleph.” Indubitably, to address this new book by Forster is, in a sense, to settle a readerly score: on the one hand, this means our appreciating how it reaches a happy culmination of the obsessions of an essayist who has made of memory, reading, Walter Benjamin, childhood, the city, Judaism, and critical reflection the reiterated avatars of his decades of writerly practice. On the other hand, there is also the score Forster seeks to settle with himself, as an essayist: to elucidate Borges and, through Borges, his own imaginative, cultural, and political signature: the dalliances of a personal rhythm that guides his own unique melancholic lucidity, which implicates the worlds of literature, writing, pedagogy, the humanities, philosophy, and the essay. It is as if, in this book on Borges, Forster were delving not into a subject of study as university conventions dictate, but rather into an infinite dialogue with the obsessions that have permeated his intellectual work for years. Here Forster, with Borges’s words, dreams, foretells, analyzes, paraphrases, and lays out a network of references that, in the end, could just as well belong to himself, to Borges, or to that Nobody who huddles in the generous citations and allusions that saturate the text. It is, above all, in this compelling superposition where displacement is preserved: in this essayist’s melancholic gesture of facing up to the insipid tentatio of our Age of Potemkin. When reality’s defeat is a given, the dizzying organization of memory in the nooks and crannies illuminated by reading is more than welcome. In this regard, it seems that, for Forster, Borges is the ideal excuse to account for these aftertastes or interstices that allow for the appearance of shards of meaning that still survive in the midst of the venomous spectacularity of the present. More than an intellectual biography of a canonical author, I see here an autobiography sorely needed in our ever more agraphic and visual twenty-first century.
II. The Melancholic Librarian
In his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin offers a profound reflection on the relationship between the individual and the books that surround him. For Benjamin, the library is not only a collection of volumes but also a space charged with meanings, memories, and emotions. Each book is a witness to our life, a piece of our personal history that evokes moments, thoughts, and feelings. Melancholy, in this context, is not a sensation affixed to the latent nostalgia for that which every book evokes. It is, rather, a sort of guiding thread that unites reflection, quotation, and memory. The weight of melancholy implies, among many other things, our not forgetting the obsessive mania of the quotation, of the reference, of the paraphrase: a will to conjure up that abyss that, behind every textuality, becomes menacing, revealing to us the ontological collapse brought about by the dismantling of any certainty based upon itself. The horror vacui that any archivist, librarian, or—let’s face it—reader true to himself feels at the end of the shelf provokes, quite likely, his poring back over the well-loved readings of the past, which, revisited, become an aesthetic and moral incentive with which to somehow ward off the emptiness of the present. Thus, in unpacking his library, Benjamin not only organizes his books but also relives the experiences associated with them. The act of unpacking becomes an act of introspection, in which every title evokes memories that may be as pleasant as they are painful. Melancholy, then, is manifested as a way to probe for what has been, for the readings that have left an impression on our identity.
“Forster’s book on Borges is both these things and more: as an artifact that stands out for its own itinerary of references to other books, it is a mechanism activated by that energy of contrasts that, for want of a better name, we call melancholy.”
Quotation and melancholy, in melancholic action, are shown to be a bridge between past and present. Citing other authors serves to establish a dialogue that enriches our conception of the world. Nonetheless, this practice can also evoke a sensation of loss, since every quotation reminds us that the voices of the past are no longer present in our immediate reality. Here, melancholy rears its head, reminding us that, although books connect us to other times and thoughts, they also bring us face to face with the absence of those who have played a role in shaping us. At this crossroads, Forster’s book on Borges captures the archivist’s practice at its most adept. I am not referring to those so commonly trafficked theories on the archive that abound in contemporary cultural and literary nomenclature. I wish rather to point out what I would call the establishment of a dynamic discontinuity of meaning, which is to say, the inherent radicality of all essayistic writing that seeks to develop a lettered culture atop the ruins of an abolished alphabet whose spoken gestures we recall only in memory. Something like what Chilean essayist Martín Cerda signals when he seeks to understand the rupture between the word and the thing signified, seeing in discontinuity—more than a ruin—an opportunity to generate expressive and vital possibilities in this no-man’s land we have dubbed reality. This tension is beautifully captured in Forster’s book as it brings together a series of allusions and “texts” that, in relation to Borges, allow for an ever more heterogeneous unfurling of reference points, creating the sensation of concentric circles in constant expansion: a sort of puzzle whose every piece forms part of a whole not sought as a conceivable wholeness in the immediacy of comprehension, but rather in the uncoincidental reverberation of associations. From this perspective, Borges falls somewhere between overseer and justfication, an open window and a confirmation, a sort of totem to which, again and again, regressively and periphrastically, Forster’s writing returns: city, memory, Judaism, journey, and reading. On the various “shelves” of the library that is this book, Forster orders, orients, and practices the art of the drift, as would any self-respecting essayist. More than following a hierarchy set by prestigious filiations, our author reads as he writes: a modus operandi that allows for associations that mark his own logic or, rather, his incumbent path. Because this is not a matter of explaining, much less of settling on a correct version of the hermeneutics surrounding the Borgesian world, but rather perhaps of leaving a series of clues between the texts at which he stops off, whether they be by Benjamin, Marechal, Piglia, Borges himself, Kafka, Salgari, or another author. As the preceding lines show, the melancholic librarian who is something like the “speaker” in Forster’s book (as if it were a poem) follows an itinerary governed by the exercise of writing itself. It is therefore interesting to note how, as we read on, this book does not necessarily betray any specific plan. In the process of reading, associations are made. There is a tempting anarchy to this, enticing us to feel a sense of freedom, but also a set code that seems to wear the mask of chance, and that nonetheless reveals, as it unfolds, a quasi-secret articulation that emerges as the speaker strays beyond the references that activate perception. Thus, I believe, the title is more than fitting; it is a justification, eminently Borgesian and, at the same time, unique to Forster: the infinite library as a metaphor for the breadth that overwhelms us, and that we are tempted to call “life.” This metaphor is not new to our essayist. In another of his essays—titled, in fact, “La biblioteca,” and included in two previous books, La muerte del héroe (2011) and Huellas que regresan (2018)—we perceive the intersection between the biographic and the bibliographic, an ordering of the imaginative passions of youth and maturity as a pursuit linking books and experiences, making experience of the book and allowing for experience to be justified in and of itself. In these essays, as in the book at hand, Forster employs a strategy of melancholic reading that may be analogous to the reading method of Borges himself: the library’s infinitude understood as an approach to an encyclopedia anchored to the unforeseen. Opening to any given page implies binding entries previously unbound, or bound, perhaps, only by the same letter of the alphabet. Through this operation, Forster writes just as he reads Borges when the latter strives to give written shape to the opacity of his dreams or nightmares: that blend of erudition, ironic play, nostalgia, childhood, hallucination, and sundry obsessions. Every reader of Borges ends up writing about Borges as the melancholic librarian who, seduced by the infinitude of the library he has tended all his life, knows there is a special delight, somewhere between pleasure and shelter, in writing that mirrors itself. Forster, like so many others both before and after, is one of these librarians.
III. Childhood Reads
There is no way to lay out all the keys to reading this book; it would be an impossible task. One could write another book on this topic alone. Here, in conclusion, I wish only to refer to one of said keys, and likely one of the most relevant: childhood.
Childhood is a phase of life full of discoveries, games, and, above all, stories. Taking an arbitrary hiatus to highlight this fact’s relevance, perhaps it was German Romanticism that first brought the subject to light: poems, fragments, letters, stories, novels (or, rather, schemes for novels) and other texts that resist categorization form the foundations of an imaginary whose pages contain the fundamental element: the primal experience of the world. In Novalis, Jean Paul, the Schlegel brothers and the Brothers Grimm, in Von Kleist, Hoffmann, and so many others, this experience encapsulates the gaze and how this gaze spells out its surroundings. Here is a confluence of many things: wonderment and discovery, the haphazard gesture of ordering things, unexpected associations, the “firsts” of perception, the allure of moving toward the outside world, carrying within one’s own subjectivity (that broad, versatile, and ludic “self”) the possible responses to that which discovery, in its own time, reveals to us. Here, to discover is to verify, just as the young novice of Sais in Novalis’s story tells of his gradual acquisition of awareness of gis surroundings, of himself, and of its future repercussions. Before Nietzshe, paraphrasing Pindar, said “you must learn to be who you are,” the Romantics knew there is no “going toward” that does not mean, in turn, traveling into the world within. And, for Borges, this journey has a name: the act of reading the books from childhood that allow him to imagine, but also to treasure the experience of adventure as a need limited neither to the physical nor the spatial realms. The imagination holds a potent power. Perhaps this is why the books we read as children not only entertain us but also mold our perception, our ability to communicate, our ability to relate to ourselves. The relationship between childhood and literature is profound and often melancholic, not only because these first encounters with words often leave an indelible mark on our adult lives, but also because the stories they imprint upon us recreate ourselves, allowing us to tell the story of our own selfhood, elaborating the world of which we will form part until we die.
Forster perspicaciously observes that writers are always asked about their influences or the readings that have marked them, but they usually fail to mention what they read as children. Borges, however, takes a leap and holds on to childhood, because, to an extent—as our essayist makes clear—the author of Inquisiciones was a child all his life. In truth, Borges never left the library of his parents’ house. He saw the world through the books he read. This subtle observation does not harbor nostalgia for a world gone by; rather, it shows us the close bond between childhood and reading. According to Forster, Borges saw childhood reading as the only form of reading in which the reader fully forms part of what he reads. Adult reading, in contrast, is mediated; it is a reading of distances and involvements that establish a difference between what is written and the act of reading. Childhood reading is rather a reading of immersion, of fullness, but not necessarily of pristine clarity. Each story becomes a mirror in which our own opacity is reflected. Thus, Borgesian experience is constructed upon and within countless pages pored over in childhood, creating an effigy equidistant to the appearance of a certain innocent ingenuity and to an seemingly hermit’s distance from the world. Between these extremes, Forster identifies a continuous experience of unending reading, finding in books a series of stories that shape this elusive identity, to be sure, but that also imply a journey through which the reader plots the maps of those uncharted territories where memory crosses paths with invention, where recollection is also the present of recent events. This is where transitoriness turns in on itself, seemingly transformed into a present that contains within itself the multiplicity of events from which subjectivity cannot escape, for subjectivity has assembled said multiplicity. Thus, every fluctuation of experience holds its own reading history, allowing Forster to fittingly point out that Borges—on his travels as a famous author, then blind—saw what he had read: those cities that drew him back to his own childhood, where reading became a mediating factor between the reality of the read text and the concrete reality of the place at hand. With this anecdotic detail, Forster hits the mark and confirms something that is self-evident, but also paramount when it comes to understanding how Borges remained loyal to childhood in the midst of a presentism camouflaged in irony, which nonetheless, in truth, is not a distancing but rather a greater creative closeness and a less remorseful nostalgia. For the author of Ficciones, the adventure is always literary; there is no way to experience it but through literature. Thus Forster proves that, for Borges, childhood is always the reader’s childhood, which is to say, an experience that cannot be understood if we exclude or isolate the condition of the child who reads. The child who reads in his parents’ library, in the nook where the world was conceived and where imagination captured its reality only to make it realer than anything else. Because, behind this door, we find not only a return to reading Verne, Kipling, Salgari, or the One Thousand and One Nights as if they were a countervailing charm cast on a reality difficult to grasp or accept. In the same room, Borges also builds, assembles, and experiences the circularity of time as a peculiar, eternal game of things, images, presences, and words that return once and again, recreated in his own adult writing and loyal to the radicality of his convictions. Forster heeds this major detail, which is indispensable for Borges: his writing is the product of everything he read in his childhood, and thus, his childhood is permanent.
CODA
A book is an artifact (something that is there) and also a mechanism (something that is animated by reading). Forster’s book on Borges is both these things and more: as an artifact that stands out for its own itinerary of references to other books, it is a mechanism activated by that energy of contrasts that, for want of a better name, we call melancholy: reflection, self-absorption, evocation, intense concentration on pondering one’s own world through the second-hand turning of pages that activate memory. A melancholy mechanism that traverses landscapes, horizons, images, words. Perhaps Borges is all these things, and his Aleph is the word locked away in the throat of a mental subsoil that bears not fruits but fragments of childhood or shards of reality. And other things too. Things that come and go from the attic of wonder. That come and go from the corners of the city. From the garden of the game in which you lay out the playing cards or signs called Kipling, Verne, Salgari. Or all of this together, like when on an unknowable journey on that old train called reading, we stare out the window at the reddened face of twilight; that opaque glint that reflects back on us: ourselves, as others, moving to the internal rhythm that chose to be writing.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
