Metaphor and Image in Borges's "El Zahir"

One of the most frequently cited lines from the work of Jorge Luis Borges comes from the conclusion of the 1951 essay "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal": "It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors" (Labyrinths 192). Over the years a good deal of critical attention has been paid to the importance of metaphor in Borges's writing. Critics have pointed to his use of figural language to suture the rift between being and thought, lived experience and recollection. Literary metaphor exemplifies what one critic describes as Borges's efforts to enumerate "sharply diverse yet somehow harmonizing parts." Bringing likeness and unity into view where we ordinary see only difference and fragmentation, Borges's writing gestures to "some larger, static whole unnamable by any unilateral means" (Irby, Introduction to Other Inquisitions, x). While Borges is famous for his association of metaphor with universality, I will propose that his writing also initiates a confrontation with the limits of metaphor as it has been defined in the Western tradition. In the text I will be discussing, the short story "El Zahir," this limit is approached through a literary treatment of the image. (1) The literary image does not allow itself to be transcribed into a language of equivalence. It names a mode of appearing--or it may be the secret origin of any and all appearances--that is irreducible to hermeneutic models of reading, or to any view of literature as containing a hidden meaning waiting to be interpreted or revealed. In the first part of this paper, I discuss Borges's engagement with the problem of metaphor in "El Zahir." The presence of metaphor as a literary topos initiates two related considerations in this story. First, the text is a reflection on what could be called the economic determination of metaphor, or metaphor defined as exchange, substitution or transfer. Under this general definition, the passage which occurs in metaphor has been predetermined as an expenditure that will eventually be recuperated as value or meaning. In other words, the difference between words is conceived as a negation (of appearances) that will ultimately negate itself (as the revelation of meaning). Borges's text alludes to the central role that metaphor plays in the Western tradition. At the same time, the story is an anticipation of the end of universal history, at least insofar as it has been determined as a totality comprised of the differential intonations of a few metaphors. It foresees--and attempts to forestall--the nightmare of a world that has fallen entirely under the sway of the One. The second half of my analysis looks at Borges's treatment of the literary image. I use the term "image" with some trepidation, as it is often associated with the most traditional of metaphysical distinctions: the image as the other of "truth," "original," or "depth," and thus as a name for what is deficient in being. For Borges, the image tells a different story: it challenges the old association of truth with what is hidden beneath the surface (depth, essence). Beginning with Aristotle, theories of metaphor always come back to a hermeneutic presupposition: the idea that the metaphoric passage sheds light on a hidden meaning waiting to be revealed or interpreted. The image, on the other hand, suspends the distinction between appearances and depth, and thereby compels us to re-examine the basic assumptions of our reading strategies. Can an image be interpreted? Can we decipher what it says and what it does not say? To what extent is the literary image readable in the sense that hermeneutics understands the term? I will not attempt to answer these questions here, and will only concern myself with establishing that they represent an important concern for "El Zahir" and perhaps for Borges's writing in general. Borges approaches the relation between metaphor and image in "El Zahir" by engaging with the age-old philosophical distinction between truth and appearance. …