The Corporeal Unreal: Illness and Pain in Borges
By: Jordan Cutler-Tietjen
Tags: Blindness, Pain, Vertigo, Jorge Luis Borges, Borges

Jorge Luis Borges writes in the postscript to “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that “contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world” (Collected Fictions 81). In doing so, he reveals that the fantastic, when systematic and habitual, can chafe against reality, causing changes that are not just poetic or intellectual but concretely tangible. This phenomenon is, at first brush, unremarkable, a well-understood scaffold for the entire genre of magical realism. But it is not just Borges’s worlds that are “afflicted with unreality”; his characters suffer, too (CF 70). Although escapees, detectives, librarians, and critics carry out their destinies in vastly different landscapes, Borges diagnoses them, again and again, with vertigo, insomnia, and blindness.

These specific illnesses are intentional and chronic — they recur in conjunction with Borgesian themes. In this essay, I focus on the pathology of this trio, using the conditions as touchstones for Borges’s claims about totality, memory and authorship. and circularity. I then address a series of isolated diseases that earn mention in various texts. Finally, I wade in the undercurrent of physical pain that flows through Borges’s canon to understand how it powers and is powered by his prose.

Borges, preternaturally confident in the power of the adjective, suggests the first condition with just one word. “I began to leaf through it and suddenly I experienced a slight, astonished sense of dizziness that I shall not describe” says the narrator of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (CF 71). Although he declines to say more about the dizzying experience, what brought it on is clear: his unpacking of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, the beginnings of an all-encompassing inventory of an invented planet. In at least seven (though likely more) of Borges’s short stories, something similar conspires to dizzy a main character. As a Beth-branded man leaves Babylon, he tells us that his “is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality” (CF 100). Ireneo Funes, who never forgot anything, is said to have “lived in […] a dizzying world” and Jaromir Hladik communes with God thanks to a single letter on “a dizzying page” (CF 136, 160). The pseudo-golem in “The Circular Ruins” understands “that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work” (CF 98). Ts’ui Pen believed in “a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times,” and Lönnrot is given pause in the Villa Triste-le-Roy by an “astonished, dizzying recollection” (CF 127, 154). Even the meta-novel The Approach to Al-Mu’taism is “a dizzying pullulation of dramatis personae” (CF 84).

The sheer continuity of diction, which itself makes for a dizzying catalogue, suggests that these characters have shared a malady. Hurley, the translator, arrived at the adjective “dizzying” and its iterations from the word vertiginosos, which connotes vertigo even more clearly. Those ailing from medical vertigo experience imagined motion — that is, they feel like the world around them is spinning when it is, in fact, perfectly stationary. Colloquially, though, the term is often used to mean general moments of unbalance, like what one might feel standing from a lofty height or overcome by a sudden epiphany.

The momentum propelling many, perhaps most, of Borges’s fictions comes from a sweeping attempt at totality. When the plots stretch to totalize something that can’t be enumerated, characters are caught off-balance by its impossibility. This pattern happens over and over in his vignettes; that’s why vertigo is so catching. Babylon’s Lottery requires “all time to be infinitely subdivisible,” an extrapolation of Zeno’s Paradox (CF 105). In The Approach to Al-Mu’taism, this occurs on two levels, as the book itself tries to “catalog every motion of the human spirit” and the critic-narrator tries to catalog every motion of the book (CF 84). Lönnrot is unsteadied at the moment he realizes his totalizing detective system has failed, and Ts’ui Pen couldn’t help but represent his multidimensional conception of time incompletely (CF 154, 127). Thus, when exposed to the beauty but ultimate failure of these successive totalizations, the characters’ bodies react in tandem, a sort of punishment by association.

These portions of Borges’s narratives are like an M.C. Escher sketch — conceivable, but unable to actually be realized. No wonder that, standing on the precipice of looping staircases and impossible triangles, Lönnrot and his peers feel queasy.

Borges doesn’t trap this feeling of dizziness on the page, though. For one, he almost always applies the descriptor “dizzying” to the cause of the instability, rather than characterize those affected by the cause as “dizzy” or “dizzied.” This exposes the reader to the same pathogen that infects his characters. In doing so, he suggests that we risk losing our own footing by moving our eyes from line to line, riding the plot’s trajectory in our heads, and imagining motion when none exists. What’s more, Borges’s pet rhetorical device, chaotic enumeration, evokes infinity while simultaneously being defined by its existence as a limited set. In fact, Borges concludes his most famous chaotic enumeration, a page-long attempt at articulating everything the narrator sees in the Aleph, with “and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has every truly looked upon” (CF 284). This disjunction forces a sort of mental recalibration, as we try to understand the order and scope of each enumeration’s program. (It’s worth noting that whispers of vertigo are conspicuously absent in moments of successful encapsulation. For instance, one might expect to stumble upon a dizziness as Pierre Menard’s biographer enumerates his life’s work, but what he produces is a complete and accurate list (CF 89–90). As such, everyone keeps their balance.) Borges is advocating for the power of literature and the printed word, which spins ideas and characters into often-uncontrollable motion. The climax of “The Circular Ruins” puts it best: “to be not a man, but the projections of another man’s dream — what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!” (CF 100).

Borges is less coy with his reiteration of insomnia, the second recurrent illness. He goes as far to call the story “Funes, His Memories” “one long metaphor for insomnia” in the foreword to the 1944 edition of Artifices (CF 129). Borges robs his characters of sleep on more than one instance. “All night and the next day, the unbearable lucidity of insomnia [harries]” the protagonist trying to “dream a man” in “The Circular Ruins” (CF 97–98). And in “The South,” Juan Dahlmann spends eight days in his room without sleep before being driven to a sanatorium (CF 174–175). According to the National Institute of Health, sleep is essential for humans in part because of its role in memory consolidation (“Sleep, Learning, and Memory”). Borges’s clairvoyance is evident here, as he programmatically denies characters their dreams in order to elaborate his view of memory, specifically as it relates to personal past and heritage.

In the sanatorium, Dahlmann’s insomnia and subsequent symptoms are blamed on septicemia, a bacterial infection of the blood. His blood is contaminated in more ways than one — although he “considers himself profoundly Argentine,” his grandfather Johannes emigrated from Germany in 1871 (CF 176). Dahlmann’s blurry ancestry forces him to make a conscious choice, and he decides to memorially valorize one half of his heritage at the expense of another. When the infection, a literal manifestation of his inner turmoil, keeps him awake for 192 hours, his tightly-controlled understanding of his past can’t help but fall away, and he experiences “hell.” After enduring visitations from family members that only remind him of his patriarchal betrayal, Dahlmann is forcibly sedated. After waking up, he “hate[s] every inch of himself; he hate[s] his identity, his bodily needs, his humiliation, the beard that prickled [his] face” (CF 175). Although this procedure intends to cure him, it instead combusts his sense of self. On the verge of death, he is supposed to ‘watch his life flash before his eyes’ (as is the oft-described cliché), but with his memory in chaos, Dahlmann is forced to construct a myth of the quintessential gaucho Argentine to explain his fate. This is the alternative reading Borges alludes to in his 1956 postscript (CF 129).

The main figure in “The Circular Ruins” has a similarly fraught history. All readers are initially told is that he comes “from the South,” and that seems to be all he himself knows until the last line, when “with humiliation” he realizes he was dreamed up in a near-identical process to the one he’s spent the story practicing (CF 96, 100). During that process, which mostly involved “the sole task of sleeping and dreaming,” he is at one point driven to tears by “his almost perpetual state of wakefulness,” but realizes that he needs to change his tactics and succeeds in dreaming “a beating heart.” Here, insomnia is portrayed as a necessary step in “the most difficult work a man can undertake” (CF 97–98). Unable to parse his own history and memory, the man works to manifest a new, distinct one, learning about his by virtue of the project; is that not the constant work of artists, of writers? Considering this machination, insomnia is a struggle known intimately to Borges. He corroborated his knowledge of the condition (literal and figurative) in one of his lecture series, explaining that “when [he] suffered from insomnia [he] tried to forget [him]self, to forget [his] body, the position of [his] body, the bed, the furniture, the three gardens of the hotel, the eucalyptus tree, the books on the shelf, all the streets of the village, the station, the farmhouses. And since [he] couldn’t forget, [he] kept on being conscious and couldn’t fall asleep” (Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations). Memory and authorship are thus both tied into and made weak by insomnia — the act of creating something distinct from oneself clarifies one’s own history. The inability to create, to generalize, is a product of Funes’s condition. The “unbearable lucidity” that characterizes his life post-horse bucking paralyzes his mind, a cripple in more ways than one. His fantastic power, an exaggerated opposite of amnesia, is the ultimate malediction against creativity. Insomnia is, in this way, Borges’s greatest nightmare.

Perhaps the least textually-obscured illness, blindness was also the most familiar to Borges. As he put it in his eponymous lecture, “that slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight, began when I began to see. It has continued since 1899 without dramatic movements” (Selected Non-Fictions 474). By age 55, could no longer read. His father and grand-father both went blind before him, so for Borges, it was a hereditary scourge. In his writings, the blind and near-blind (Borges could still make out colors in one eye well into his 70s) are also near-death. The narrator of “Poem of the Gifts” experiences a final “fading away […] that feels like sleep, or else oblivion” (“Poem of the Gifts” 38–40). Dahlmann, temporarily blinded by the distraction that is 1001 Nights in the stairwell, brushes against the window that spells his demise (CF 174). On the eve of his anticipated death, Jaromir Hladik of “The Secret Miracle” meets a man in a dream with “dead” eyes who connects him with with a holy atlas (CF 160). And the brave explorer of “The Library of Babel” submits that “now that [his] eyes can hardly make out what [he has] written, [he is] preparing to die” (CF 112). Besides simply increasing the climactic tension of the work, this relationship — in which blindness signals or leads to the beginning of the end — compels the act of communication. Without the capacity to perceive the world as it is, Borges and Borges’s character must resort to literary communion between author & reader and character & character, respectively. At the same time, blindness obliterates reality, freeing the unseeing from pursuing what is actual and exigent, thereby allowing them to access fantastic truths.

Another commonality of the Borgesian blind is the cause of their ailment: literature. Almost every blind character became so by wearing his eyes out reading pages, looking for a purpose. This is, as Borges has put it, “splendid irony,” but more importantly, it’s supremely circular (“Poem of the Gifts” 3). What consumed their capacity to see is the very thing they so desperately needed it for. Borges believed his destiny necessitated the looping of blindness and literature and expressed this fate with blind characters, each a targeted reduction of Borges. After all, in his autobiographical encyclopedia entry, he affirms Carlyle’s statement that “universal history is a text that we are obligated to read and write endlessly, and into which we are also written” (“Borges’s Encyclopedia Entry” 1). Blindness, then, is a morbid present: accelerating Borges’s motion of revolution from author to reader, taking away the most essential sense from his characters while blessing them with clairvoyance, providing both a coping mechanism and a justification for the end.

While vertigo, insomnia, and blindness are the most rehearsed illnesses in Ficciones, Borges deployed rarer ones no less purposefully. The first sentence of “The Aleph” concerns Beatriz Viterbo, Borges’s love interest in “The Aleph,” and her battle with breast cancer (CF 274, 283). It’s unusual that a woman feature in the foreground of Borges’s story, so the fact that her most “feminine” body part spells her doom is quite significant. Borges biographer Edwin Williamson traced the author’s romantic foibles carefully; his analysis that early sexual frustrations prompted Borges to obsess over women past illness, “even beyond illness…searching for a muse who might inspire a masterpiece that would summarize he identity” might seem rash, but it makes sense in this context (Williamson 215). She did not return his love so, whether subconsciously or intentionally, Borges is punishing her for her wiles — if he can’t have her breasts, neither can she. This essential similarity between actual Borges and the narrator of “The Aleph” rings true, considering this is one of the stories in which he gave the protagonist his name. Still, directly after her death, Borges is “deeply grieved” by a billboard advertisement for cigarettes. Although he cites his realization that “the vast unceasing universe was already growing away from her” as justification for his misery, the image of cigarettes, infamous for their cancer-causing property, evokes a punishing cycle of illness (CF 274). Taken this way, the preeminence and permanence of illness are central to the tale’s plot, as it’s Borges’s shock at the billboard that prompts him to go to her house on Calle Garay. Another instance of illness befalls Herbert Ashe in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” By killing him via “a ruptured aneurysm,” Borges satirizes the futility of Ashe’s taciturn rationality, a trait that led him to transpose “some duodecimal table or other to sexagesimal” and attempt to use “a book of mathematics” to analyze the “colors of the sky” (CF 71). For Ireneo Funes, the deathly culprit is “pulmonary congestion,” a fancy term for excess fluid in the lungs (CF 137). Funes can take memories in, but he can’t breathe them out — they so overloaded his intellectual capacity that they soaked not just his mind but his body, and drowned him.

This by no metric a complete collection of diseases featured by Borges, nor is it an exhaustive analysis of each condition. I only mean to illustrate the care with which Borges imagined and assigned illnesses. Indeed, it’s challenging to find any Borgesian character who remains perfectly intact. The ones without explicit medical conditions are consistently laced with adjectives like “phlegmatic” and “sallow-skinned” (CF 70, 97). Borges worked, then, to realize Funes’s reflection that “every man” is “blind, deaf, befuddled, and virtually devoid of memory” (CF 134).

This claim sums up one of two perspectives, seemingly in opposition, that have presided over the preceding pages. On one hand, the entire population of Borges’ stories are beleaguered in sympathetic ways, which suggests a universal equivalence. On the other, Borges is a known purveyor of nuance, and each instance of illness seems tweaked to fit the particular position it is set within. As it happens, this dual dynamic has already played out, quietly, in Borges, midway through his explanation of Tlön’s complex. Intellectuals of the land “explain that ‘equality’ is one thing and ‘identity’ is another, and they formulate a sort of reductio ad absurdum — the hypothetical case of nine men who on nine successive nights experience a sharp pain. Would it not be absurd, they asked, to pretend the men had suffered one and the same pain” (CF 75–76). But the immediate footnote voices an alternate opinion. “Today, one of Tlön’s religions contends, platonically, that a certain pain, a certain greenish-yellow color, a certain temperature, and a certain sound are all the same, single reality. All men, in the dizzying instant of copulation, are the same man” (CF 76). Here, again, the existence of the vertiginous tips the balance. Borges’s works strive toward singularity — each character reflecting each character, each illness reflecting each illness, infinitely. But he knows this is impractical for the exercise of fiction, perhaps more relevantly, impossible. Borges’s best magic is in his settlement for uniqueness, hurt but unencumbered.

Time in and time out, Borges constructs worlds with theoretical frameworks that are inimical for the characters that exist within them. To a certain extent, it seems a balancing act, as if their unprecedented access to the magic, fantastic, and unreal requires a sacrifice of the corporeal. It may not be immediately intuitive, but in this way, physical pain is among the most central Borgesian theme. Indeed, the way pain works is the way Borges works. It effaces the self. It is the best reminder of mortality. It deteriorates language, reducing us to shrieks and moans. It is both inherently inexpressible and the most fundamental driving force behind creativity; we will never know if our pains are greater or lesser than those of our peers or our mothers, yet we can’t help but work tirelessly to express them. Pain alerts us to our life, and in Borges’s systematic dosages, it reminds us that life is worth fighting for.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York, NY: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Borges, Jorge Luis, and Esther Allen. Selected Non-Fictions. Trans. Suzanne Jill. Levine. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Borges’s Encyclopedia Entry. Trans. Maria del Mar and Daniel de la Rocha. Printed 3 March 2017.

Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, ed. Richard Burgin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 166.

“Sleep, Learning, and Memory.” Sleep, Learning, and Memory | Healthy Sleep. Division of Sleep Medicine, Harvard Medical School, 18 Dec. 2007. Web. 30 Apr. 2017.

Williamson, Edwin. The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Poem of the Gifts”