Other Inquisitions

One at a time the essays pass the subtractive test almost as well as the fictions. “Kafka y sus precursores” is two pages: the precursors, Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard and Browning, with Bloy and Lord Dunsany named after them, and then the turn, and nothing could go. “La esfera de Pascal” runs one metaphor from Xenophanes to Pascal in a few pages without a spare clause. The book does not pass. It keeps what a journalist’s collection keeps: “Dos libros”, the note on Shaw, the polemic against Américo Castro, reviews whose subject has dimmed, a Valéry essay that is mostly a pairing. Remove a quarter of the book and the book is stronger. Held above the cap because the core is required and the weak pieces are short; held well below the fictions because this collection shows that it was assembled.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosures can be stated, and several hold. That the reader makes the tradition: “cada escritor crea a sus precursores” (each writer creates his precursors), so that the past is altered by what comes after; Eliot had said something near it in 1919, and Borges says it with an example that proves it. That every classification of the world is arbitrary and conjectural, shown by an encyclopedia whose animals include those “pertenecientes al Emperador” and those “embalsamados” (belonging to the Emperor, embalmed). That the aesthetic fact is “la inminencia de una revelación, que no se produce” (the imminence of a revelation that does not occur). And, in “Anotación al 23 de agosto de 1944”, that Nazism is unlivable and its defeat in some sense wished. Held off the top because what is disclosed is the mind’s condition before the world, and literature’s, not human life in its other orders, and because the book’s skepticism, by design, asserts little it will stand behind.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The elevation is cold and frequent, and it comes at the ends. “La esfera de Pascal” closes on a sentence of the widest reach: “Quizá la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonación de algunas metáforas” (perhaps universal history is the history of the different intonation of a few metaphors). “Nueva refutación del tiempo” spends its length taking time apart and then gives it back, with the river, the tiger and the fire, and the admission that the one who refutes it is Borges. The wall and the burnt books, the flower brought back from Paradise, Keats’s bird that is every nightingale: each rises. Held where it is because the middle of most essays is argument, citation and irony, which do not rise and are not meant to, and the reviews never leave the ground. Height is high; frequency is moderate.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The book’s subject is archetype itself, and it builds as well as evokes. The sphere whose centre is everywhere; the book that contains the world, in “Del culto de los libros”, which ends on Mallarmé’s world that exists to end in a book; the dream that produces a palace in the thirteenth century and a poem in the eighteenth; the nightingale that is the Platonic form of its kind; the map inside the map and the Nights inside the Nights. The essays do not decorate with these figures; they argue through them, and in that sense the myth bears weight. Held below the gate because an essay holds its myth at arm’s length, as a figure examined, where the fictions that share these images make them a world one is inside: the sphere is studied here and inhabited in “El Aleph”.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is the English essay of erudite play, De Quincey, Chesterton and Stevenson, with Schwob in French; the Spanish essay of Unamuno and Ortega; and the metaphysical joking of Macedonio Fernández. The turn is criticism written as speculation: theology and philosophy read for their aesthetic value, and the essay made a short, closed, ironic form with the shape of a story. “Kafka y sus precursores” reverses influence; “Nueva refutación del tiempo” carries idealism to its end and then confesses defeat. The stake was real in its place and moment: a Spanish-language essay that refused both nationalism and engagement, written under Perón. Held below the gate because much of the turn was taken in Discusión (1932) and Historia de la eternidad (1936); this book perfects the manner more than it founds it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Within each essay the form is the knowledge. The hedge, the “quizá”, the footnote that undoes the thesis, the chain of citations that rehearses the history it describes: a skeptic’s argument cannot be put into a treatise without becoming dogma, and the brevity enacts the claim that a few metaphors are enough. “Nueva refutación del tiempo” knows what it knows only by its turn: the argument against time is spent in time and ends in a man who is its river. The book as a whole has no such form. Its order is not an argument, and a reader can enter anywhere. A collection whose order could be shuffled is scored on its parts; the parts are strong, and the whole that holds them is what keeps the axis at this figure.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence, and plenty of it. The Wilkins essay opens the preface of Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (1966), and linguists, taxonomists and information theorists have reread it since. “Kafka y sus precursores” is a founding text in the theory of influence and reception, argued over beside Eliot and later Harold Bloom. “Nueva refutación del tiempo” is read by philosophers as a serious engagement with Berkeley, Hume and Schopenhauer and by critics as autobiography in disguise; whether its closing turn refutes the refutation is still argued. “Magias parciales del Quijote” is a standard text on metafiction. The questions stay open: whether Borges believes any of it, and whether the political essays are of a piece with the metaphysical. Held below the top because some of the yield comes from the essays as glosses on the fictions, and the lesser pieces yield little on return.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is the essay and criticism in Spanish of its century, and through translation the criticism of the West. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what an essay of literary criticism could be, short, speculative, impersonal and fictive in method, and a turn of the theory of tradition from the author to the reader. Charged: much of the reach runs through the fictions, which carry the same ideas more powerfully and were read first, and Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” holds a share of the central idea. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Labyrinths (1962) the essays reached the generation of theory; Foucault’s preface is the clearest case; the reader-response and intertextual criticism of the following decades cites “Kafka y sus precursores” often; and the Latin American essay after Paz reads with this book in hand.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over seventy-four years. Form: the text survives whole as Borges left it, and nothing that makes the work is lost; no charge. Presence: continuous since 1952, in print in Spanish throughout, taught across the Spanish-speaking world, translated widely, and its central essays anthologised in English since 1962. Against it, the book as a unit is read less than its famous pieces, which travel in selections, and the occasional reviews are fixed to their moment, Américo Castro’s alarms and a forgotten book of the 1940s among them. That charge holds the figure at the floor of the band its age allows, not above it. Fabric: nothing to charge.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The prose is among the most finished of its century: the adjective chosen against expectation; the enumeration that ends on the anomaly, as the encyclopedia’s list runs on to the animals “que acaban de romper el jarrón” (that have just broken the vase); the irony that never raises its voice; the paragraph closed on a sentence that turns the essay. The citations are deployed with a precision that makes them part of the music. Construction at the scale of the essay is exact: the delayed thesis of “Kafka y sus precursores”, the reversals of “La muralla y los libros”. Held at this figure because the occasional pieces show the same hand at lower pressure, and because the manner repeats, the “quizá”, the paired formulas, the closing conjecture, in a way that a book of forty pieces makes visible.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant pieces: “Anotación al 23 de agosto de 1944”, on the joy of the city at the liberation of Paris, and “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”. One law covers both: the world is read as a text whose orders are human conjectures, and a regime that takes its conjecture for reality, Nazism, nationalism, the state that would make individuals to a pattern, fails as reading as much as in morals. “Nuestro pobre individualismo” is of a piece with the idealism. The law holds across Quevedo, Hawthorne, Wells, Chesterton, Pascal and the legend of the Buddha. Held at this figure because a few reviews obey no law but their occasion, and because the political essays, though consistent, are thinner in the law than the metaphysical ones.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on what a book of short essays holds. Literature and its history across six or seven languages; metaphysics; theology, in Pascal, Bloy, the Kabbalah and the Book; the history of ideas; the state and politics, briefly, in the pieces of wartime and of the years under Perón; and the self, in the confession under the refutation of time. They are integrated by one mind and one method. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what the book does not hold: the life of the body, the family, labour, and the natural order except as metaphor. It encompasses the library and what the library thinks of the world. A short form is not punished for being short, and this is a wide short form; but what it holds is weighed as it is.

Score: 7.4 / 10