object:Partial Magic in the Quixote
class:Essay
class:chapter
author class:Jorge Luis Borges
Partial Magic in the Quixote
I
t is plausible that these observations may have been set forth at some time
and, perhaps, many times; a discussion of their novelty interests me less
than one of their possible truth.
Compared with other classic books (the Iliad, the Aeneid, the
Pharsalia, Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies), the
Quixote is a realistic work; its realism, however, differs essentially from that
practiced by the nineteenth century. Joseph Conrad could write that he
excluded the supernatural from his work because to include it would seem a
denial that the everyday was marvelous; I do not know if Miguel de
Cervantes shared that intuition, but I do know that the form of the Quixote
made him counterpose a real prosaic world to an imaginary poetic world.
Conrad and Henry James wrote novels of reality because they judged reality
to be poetic; for Cervantes the real and the poetic were antinomies. To the
vast and vague geographies of the Amadis, he opposes the dusty roads and
sordid wayside inns of Castille; imagine a novelist of our time centering
attention for purposes of parody on some filling stations. Cervantes has
created for us the poetry of seventeenth-century Spain, but neither that
century nor that Spain were poetic for him; men like Unamuno or Azorín or
Antonio Machado, who were deeply moved by any evocation of La Mancha,
would have been incomprehensible to him. The plan of his book precluded
the marvelous; the latter, however, had to figure in the novel, at least
indirectly, just as crimes and a mystery in a parody of a detective story.
Cervantes could not resort to talismans or enchantments, but he insinuated
the supernatural in a subtle—and therefore more effective—manner. In his
intimate being, Cervantes loved the supernatural. Paul Groussac observed in
1924: "With a deleble coloring of Latin and Italian, Cervantes' literary
production derived mostly from the pastoral novel and the novel of chivalry,
soothing fables of captivity." The Quixote is less an antidote for those
fictions than it is a secret, nostalgic farewell.
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality;
Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective and the subjective, the
world of the reader and the world of the book. In those chapters which argue
whether the barber's basin is a helmet and the donkey's packsaddle a steed's
fancy regalia, the problem is dealt with explicity; other passages, as I have
185noted, insinuate this. In the sixth chapter of the first part, the priest and the
barber inspect Don Quixote's library; astoundingly, one of the books
examined is Cervantes' own Galatea and it turns out that the barber is a
friend of the author and does not admire him very much, and says that he is
more versed in misfortunes than in verses and that the book possesses some
inventiveness, proposes a few ideas and concludes nothing. The barber, a
dream or the form of a dream of Cervantes, passes judgment on
Cervantes. . . It is also surprising to learn, at the beginning of the ninth
chapter, that the entire novel has been translated from the Arabic and that
Cervantes acquired the manuscript in the marketplace of Toledo and had it
translated by a morisco whom he lodged in his house for more than a month
and a half while the job was being finished. We think of Carlyle, who
pretended that the Sartor Resartus was the fragmentary version of a work
published in Germany by Doctor Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh; we think of the
Spanish rabbi Moses of Leon, who composed the Zohar or Book of Splendor
and divulged it as the work of a Palestinian rabbi of the second century.
This play of strange ambiguities culminates in the second part; the
protagonists have read the first part, the protagonists of the Quixote are, at
the same time, readers of the Quixote. Here it is inevitable to recall the case
of Shakespeare, who includes on the stage of Hamlet another stage where a
tragedy more or less like that of Hamlet is presented; the imperfect
correspondence of the principal and secondary works lessens the efficacy of
this inclusion. An artifice analogous to Cervantes', and even more
astounding, figures in the Ramayana, the poem of Valmiki, which narrates
the deeds of Rama and his war with the demons. In the last book, the sons of
Rama, who do not know who their father is, seek shelter in a forest, where
an ascetic teaches them to read. This teacher is, strangely enough, Valmiki;
the book they study, the Ramayana. Rama orders a sacrifice of horses;
Valmiki and his pupils attend this feast. The latter, accompanied by their
lute, sing the Ramayana. Rama hears his own story, recognizes his own sons
and then rewards the poet. . . Something similar is created by accident in the
Thousand and One Nights. This collection of fantastic tales duplicates and
reduplicates to the point of vertigo the ramifications of a central story in
later and subordinate stories, but does not attempt to gradate its realities, and
the effect (which should have been profound) is superficial, like a Persian
carpet. The opening story of the series is well known: the terrible pledge of
the king who every night marries a virgin who is then decapitated at dawn,
186and the resolution of Scheherazade, who distracts the king with her fables
until a thousand and one nights have gone by and she shows him their son.
The necessity of completing a thousand and one sections obliged the
copyists of the work to make all manner of interpolations. None is more
perturbing than that of the six hundred and second night, magical among all
the nights. On that night, the king hears from the queen his own story. He
hears the beginning of the story, which comprises all the others and also—
monstrously—itself. Does the reader clearly grasp the vast possibility of this
interpolation, the curious danger? That the queen may persist and the
motionless king hear forever the truncated story of the Thousand and One
Nights, now infinite and circular. . . The inventions of philosophy are no less
fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The
World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: "Let us
imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly
and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect;
there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not
registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in
such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of
the map of the map, and so on to infinity."
Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the
thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why
does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a
spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions
suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators,
we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that
the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and
read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.
Translated by J.E.I.
book class:Labyrinths
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