Borges wants his reader to use imagination to participate in his fiction, to imagine the vision of the universe as anAleph. The vision of the Aleph is paradoxical, impossible, inexpressible--a point in space, in the basement of ahouse in Buenos Aires, where all other points in the universe are simultaneously present. The reader sees theAleph--or the illusion of the Aleph, watching it emerge as if through Borges＇ own eyes, as an unrequited lover andfrustrated poet gradually accommodating the infinite vision to the limitations of actual perception. The illusion ofactual presence the reader evokes seems to include the reader as both a subject reading and an object in the vision.The reader mirrors himself in the enumeration as the reader imaginatively projects associations and expectationsinto the images in order to make sense of them. The reader tries to avoid involving himself in the vision, but theimages the writer presents the reader with are ambiguous, schematic, demanding intervention to try to resolveapparently unresolved contradictions by trying out the different interpretations that may make sense of them. Overand over again in reading the enumeration the reader encounters images that allow him to convert sequence intosimultaneity, part into whole. Other images suggest the presence of infinite, multiple, perspectives on each objectconverging in the Aleph and reveal insights into hidden designs and into secret interiors of structures. The visionthe reader reads must seem to exceed the limits of language and perception. Opposed to images of disintegrationand chaotic dispersal are microcosmic images that suggest a whole reflected or contained in its parts, worldsreflected within worlds by infinite regress. Infinite regress undermines the assumption of a subject and objectdichotomy in the act of reading and enhances the illusion of participation in the vision. Infinite regress, imagewithin image, world within world, is a symmetry that asserts itself against the illusion of the enumeration asapparently random and chaotic and reinforces the illusion of infinite convergence on one point in space. Thesuccess of this illusion depends partly on Borges＇ success in finding a stylistic formula that encourages the reader toevoke a total, simultaneous vision from a partial, sequential listing of images. The I saw...l saw...l saw formulaprovides a minimal formal order for referring each separate image to the concept of a total vision withoutinterfering with the illusion of actual participation by calling attention too much to the artifice that holds the visiontogether. Just as the separate images of the enumeration threaten to break loose from their minimal syntacticalframe and assume autonomy of their own, so the enumeration itself seems to assume autonomy from its narrativecontext. Within the context of a story of failed mediation in which every attempt at communication is interrupted,aborted, or comically transformed into unanticipated consequences, the reader seems to have resolved the problemof poetics Borges the writer poses to him as a reader. The reader＇s reading of Borges＇ fiction is a kind of hypothesisthe reader projects into his words in response to a problem of inexpressibility the writer poses for the reader justbefore he attempts to describe the Aleph. Similarly this fiction requires a certain kind of reader and reading--areader who intervenes in the fiction to complete with our imagination what the writer only hints at or denies, and areader who seeks out those contradictions or refutations in our interpretation that indicates our reading is onlypartial and falsifying, a hypothesis we propose in response to a problem of inexpressibility the writer has posed.
展开▼
