The author argues that Borges, often perceived as a purely abstract and detached writer, is in fact deeply concerned with political and metaphysical questions, frequently intertwined. A key concept explored is the Borgesian notion of **"vaivén,"** or a back-and-forth, swinging movement, illustrating his refusal to prioritize either the historical or the eternal but rather illuminating the connections and tensions between them. **Most Important Ideas/Facts and Supporting Quotes:** **1. Borges's Political Undertones and the Administration of Reality:** Despite Borges's own claims to the contrary, and his cultivation of an image as a detached bibliophile, his work is inherently political. His seemingly abstract "games with time and infinitude" expose the precariousness of perceived reality and how it is "administered," a concept that inherently carries political weight. - "If Borges is often perceived as a writer utterly detached from reality, dealing in abstractions, literary puzzles, and unsolvable philosophical riddles, it is mostly because of his own doing. He cultivated this myth in his texts... Yet, all these supposedly abstract brainteasers question the stability of our place in the world and expose the precariousness of the categories that rule our perception of it. In this, oddly enough, they reveal themselves to be profoundly terrestrial, inasmuch as they examine how our reality is administered, rather than merely 'given.' And this issue can quickly become a political one—political power is always concerned with the imposition of a reality." - The author highlights early, explicitly political writings by Borges, including manifestos and historical poems. - Borges's fascination with American criminals, filtered through Poe, contributes to a "historical component" in his transcendental stories, leading to ideas of the universe as legible or reality as a conspiracy. **2. The Influence of Poe and Whitman: A Chiasmic Relationship:** Poe and Whitman are presented as crucial, yet often counterintuitive, influences on Borges's articulation of the historical and the eternal. - **Poe's Influence:** Poe, known for his ratiocination puzzles and "decadent" style, paradoxically becomes a source for Borges's _political_ fiction, dealing with conspiracies, paranoia, and the administered nature of reality. - "...Poe, the 'decadent' writer, designing puzzles of ratiocination, is the prime source of Borges’s political fiction—the one dealing with conspiracies, paranoia, and the administration of reality." - **Whitman's Influence:** Whitman, the "engaged" poet of American democracy, provides Borges with inspiration for his aesthetic program and experiments with eternity and totality, such as the concept of a literature without a central subject and stories like "The Aleph." - "On the other hand, Whitman, the 'engaged' writer, singing to America and its novel political configuration, becomes the inspiration for fundamental aspects of Borges’s aesthetic program (such as a literature freed from the tyranny of a central subject—the author) and the source of many of his experiments with eternity and totality, such as 'The Aleph.'" - This dynamic is described as a "chiasmus," where the expected influences are reversed or intertwined. **3. The Universal and the Historical: A Defining Borgesian Trait:** The confluence of the universal and the historical is not accidental but a fundamental aspect of Borges's work from its inception. This is evident in his early call to widen the definition of "criollismo" to encompass the world and transcendental concepts. - "The confluence of the universal and the historical is not, therefore, an accidental detail in Borges’s literature. It is one of its defining traits and one of its driving forces from the very beginning." - "Let it be criollismo, then, but a criollismo able to address the world and the self, God and death. I hope someone helps me find it." [“Criollismo, pues, pero un criollismo que sea conversador del mundo y del yo, de Dios y de la muerte. A ver si alguien me ayuda a buscarlo” (TE 14)]. **4. Sovereignty as a Metaphysical Allegory: "No one is the fatherland, but all of us are."** Borges explores the concept of sovereignty and national identity through a paradox, exemplified in his "Ode Written in 1966." This paradox, derived in part from Whitman, challenges the notion of a central figure or entity representing the whole. - The poem revolves around the refrain, “nadie es la patria.” "No one is the fatherland." - Towards the end, this negative statement becomes an affirmation: “No one is the fatherland—it is all of us” [“Nadie es la patria, pero todos lo somos”]. - This tension between everyone and no one informs Borges's idea of a literature without authors and appears in various guises in his stories. - This paradox is traced back to the Sufi tale of the Simurg, where the thirty birds seeking their king realize they _are_ the Simurg. **5. Power, Representation, and Idealism:** Borges connects political power to the philosophical concept of idealism, where reality is understood as a form of representation or even a dream. This leads to the idea of reality being an "administered construct." - "By fictionalizing reality (by understanding it as a dream, as a representation), Borges is making strong claims about politics and power." - "Power always has to do with rights that, at some point, for some reason, were delegated, ceded, or snatched away, thereby establishing some form of representation." - Borges draws on various idealist thinkers, including Plato, Berkeley, and Descartes, to explore the idea of reality as a potentially deceptive projection from a higher instance. - "Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world" [“Admitamos lo que todos los idealistas admiten: el carácter alucinatorio del mundo”] Borges writes in “Avatars of the Tortoise.” - Descartes's evil genius, projecting a fictitious reality, becomes a direct link between metaphysical skepticism and political conspiracy theories. - "At this point, the idea of reality being dreamed or devised by a higher power becomes political in a more direct, overt way: the “fantastic” plot of metaphysics can be read as the vastest of conspiracy theories." - In many stories, like "The Lottery in Babylon," "The Sect of the Phoenix," and "The Congress," organizations or individuals superimpose their own order or "fiction" onto reality, demonstrating power through the imposition of a representation. - "Power, in brief, could be defined by the imposition of a representation as reality." **6. Fractal Worlds and Nesting Realities:** Inspired by his childhood observation of a biscuit tin with a recursive image, Borges employs the formal procedure of "framing" and the concept of nesting worlds to illustrate the layered nature of reality and power. - "If power imposes a representation as reality, it follows that there ought to be another (vaster, truer) reality withholding the fictional one." - Borges multiplies these layers of illusion infinitely: “You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened” (CF 252). - This fractal structure is evident in stories like "The Circular Ruins" and the chess sonnets, and is linked to philosophical and religious concepts like Zeno's paradox, Cantor's set theory, Kabbalah (with its nesting worlds of emanations), and Gnosticism (with its increasingly degraded divinities and realities). - This hierarchical, nested structure carries ethical and political connotations, suggesting a degradation from a perfect source (or God or the idea) to our flawed world. - The Gnostic and Kabbalistic explanation of evil is presented as a resolution to the problem through the notion of a "deficient Divinity." **7. Detective Fiction as a Metaphor for Reading and the Universe:** Borges sees detective fiction, particularly as invented by Poe, as creating a specific type of reader who approaches the world with suspicion and sees meaning in everything. This approach is extended to his "metaphysical" stories, where the universe itself becomes a cipher to be deciphered. - "Detective fiction has created a special type of reader. This tends to be forgotten when Poe’s work is evaluated, for if Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction." - For the detective and the detective fiction reader, "nothing merely is, but everything signals to something else." - This notion is taken literally in "The Library of Babel," where the universe _is_ the library, a vast, potentially meaningful but ultimately undecipherable text. - "The universe is readable,” is the detective’s first and guiding metaphor. This becomes literal in the opening line of “The Library of Babel”: “The universe (which others call the Library) . . . ” (CF 112). - Stories like "The Writing of the God" present the universe as a ciphered message, with meaning embedded in ordinary objects. - Borges suggests that "metaphysics is a branch of detective fiction," as both involve the search for hidden order and meaning in apparent chaos. **8. Whitman's Formal and Thematic Influence on Borges's Poetry and Prose:** Whitman's impact is not limited to thematic inspiration but also profoundly shaped Borges's writing style, particularly in his poetry. - Borges explicitly acknowledges Whitman's overwhelming influence from his very first published poem ("Hymn to the Sea"), where he intentionally imitated Whitman's style. - "In that poem, I tried my hardest to be Walt Whitman” (AN 56). The first verse of the poem reads: “I have longed for a hymn to the Sea with rhythms as expansive as the screaming waves” [“Yo he ansiado un himno del Mar con ritmos amplios como las olas que gritan” (TR I: 24)]. - Key formal traits inherited from Whitman include: - **Long, free, blank verses and rhythmic stanzas:** Borges adopted these, especially in his early and later poetry, as a departure from traditional meters. - **Cosmic yet intimate scope:** A combination of grand, universal themes with personal experiences. - **Enumerations:** The use of lists to encompass vastness and create a sense of totality, evident in both his poetry ("Buenos Aires," "Two English Poems") and prose ("The Aleph," essays). - Whitman's enumerations are seen as attempts to capture the vastness of America and the world. - Borges's use of enumerations is discussed in the context of "chaotic enumerations," which should appear disordered but possess an underlying "secret order." - "This composition, as almost all others, abuses chaotic enumerations. About this figure (so felicitously abundant in Walt Whitman) I can only say that it should resemble chaos and disorder but must be, intimately, a cosmos, an order.” [“Esta composición, como casi todas las otras, abusa de la enumeración caótica. De esta figura, que con tanta felicidad prodigó Walt Whitman, sólo puedo decir que debe parecer un caos, un desorden, y ser íntimamente un cosmos y un orden” (OC III: 340; my emphasis)]. - **The problematic distinction between author, reader, and subject:** Inspired by Whitman's creation of a polyphonic "I" and the blurring of the lines between writer and reader, Borges explores the dissolution of a stable, bounded subject. - "Walt Whitman . . . decided to be all men” [“Walt Whitman . . . decidió ser todos los hombres” (OC III: 471)]. - "Whitman wrote his rhapsodies based on an imaginary ‘I,’ which was constituted partially by himself, partially by each one of his readers” [“Whitman redactó sus rapsodias en función de un yo imaginario, formado parcialmente de él mismo, parcialmente de cada uno de sus lectores” (OC 686)]. - This theme is evident in Borges's early foreword to _Fervor de Buenos Aires_ and later poems like "Borges and I" and "The Watcher." **9. The "Barbaric United States" and the Leveling of Historical Value:** Borges's early encounters with the United States were not focused on modernity but on figures who challenged the state and law. He saw a shared "brutality" between the US and Argentina, refusing to place them on a teleological timeline. - Borges's fascination with figures like gangsters and hoodlums is seen as a "degraded, distorted (even secular) embodiment of the epic, and quasireligious exaltation of his elders." - In "Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities," Borges equates a street fight in New York with the Trojan War and a battle for Argentine independence, dissolving historical hierarchy through the lens of violence. - "A hundred heroes as insignificant or splendid as those of Troy or Junín fought that black deed of arms in the shadow of the elevated train” (CF 28). - "Borges’s is the 'barbaric United States' ('los bárbaros Estados Unidos' [PJLB 167]). The novelty of Borges’s approach resides in refusing to array South and North on a teleological timeline that goes from a primitive to a modern state, and insisting, rather, that both hemispheres are equally brutal at heart." **10. The "Vaivén" as a Metaphor for Borges's Approach:** The concept of "vaivén," the back-and-forth swing of a knife, is used as a central metaphor for Borges's intellectual movements, illustrating his refusal to be confined to one perspective (historical or eternal, political or metaphysical) but rather constantly moving between them, illuminating the trajectory with a "sudden flash." - "Not only is there a constant vaivén between the historical and the eternal but one could also say that he stabs one with the other." - This "come-and-go" also describes his engagement with Poe and Whitman, where their perceived characteristics are intertwined and reinterpreted. - The author suggests that this "vaivén" extends to Borges's influence on North American literature, creating a two-way current. In conclusion, Diaz argues that Borges's work is far from being purely abstract. Through his engagement with American literature and his recurring themes of power, representation, and layered realities, Borges crafts a complex and dynamic vision where the political, the metaphysical, the historical, and the eternal are constantly in "vaivén," informing and illuminating one another.