By Hugo Burell

Almost fifty years ago I discovered my vocation for writing from the casual and decisive reading of El hacedor , the book that Borges himself has pointed out as the most personal of all that he wrote. I do not consider myself an expert or a scholar in the literature of Borges, but I have been a devoted and constant reader of his work. I was not lucky enough to meet him personally. But neither did I meet Kafka, Onetti or Faulkner, who also guide me on my writing path.

Through these reflections on one of Borges’ most famous and accomplished short stories, El Aleph , which also gives the title to the book published in 1949, I will express my tribute to his teaching as a writer who has guided my steps in literature.

I will try to repair some notable aspects of this story in the light of what could be defined today as the society of dizzying images. I think that a work is capable of giving new meaning to its contents as the times and its readers change, without losing its initial meaning.

The century in which we live questions great literature as a guide for thought; a century given over to the vertigo of images, light thinking of the dying postmodernity, devoid of philosophers and crowded with banal and media characters, from economists and technological gurus to athletes, the material offered by El Aleph is incredibly appropriate.

I am not going to elaborate here on the plot of the story that I imagine everyone should know: the discovery in a basement on Garay street of a fantastic object called Aleph, through which it is possible to simultaneously contemplate the entirety of the inconceivable universe. The anecdote that sets the scene for the discovery is the link between Borges -narrator and character- with the unbearable Carlos Argentino Daneri , a quirky poet who is the first cousin of Beatriz Viterbo, who died «one hot February morning» in 1929, to the narrator’s misfortune. I love her.

The Aleph is a story inspired by that loss that relies almost exclusively on visual images, especially those of Beatriz Viterbo. The name Beatrice and other details in the tale have encouraged some commentators to discover correspondences with Dante’s Divine Comedy. I will not dwell on that possibility.

Regarding the images: the first, notable for its unusualness, is to evoke Beatriz Viterbo from a renovated advertising billboard for blond cigarettes located in the Plaza Constitución. The change in the image of that publicity is the first that the narrator notices to indicate that «the incessant and vast universe» was already moving away from Beatriz. A banal change that refers to the world of advertising, which today is equivalent to saying the world of dizzying images and the empire of the ephemeral as defined by Gil les Lipovetsky. With current parameters, that first image of El Alephit multiplies its meanings, strengthens them and updates them in an exemplary way due to its trivial essence. The universe changes because an ad changes.

According to what the narrator informs us, Beatriz Viterbo would have her birthday on April 30, and Borges takes advantage of that date to go to the house on Garay street and visit Beatriz’s father and Carlos Argentino Daneri . Waiting to be received in “a crowded little room”, at twilight, the narrator reviews the many portraits of Beatriz that are there. The enumeration that he makes of these images prefigures the one that he will later make of the images seen in the mysterious Aleph in the basement.

The narrator suffers from the absence of his beloved Beatriz by reviewing those photographs that allow him to evoke her at different times in his life. As we know, the invention of photography forever changed the way we look at ourselves and others. Owning the effigy of oneself and others cost a lot of money – you had to know a portrait artist to paint it – before Joseph Nicéphore Niépce achieved the first photographic image from his window in Le Gras in 1826. Later, Daguerre perfected the invention and managed to reproduce faces that no longer had to be painted. Today our own images and those of third parties crowd telephones, computers and » tablets » until they record every moment of our lives in an obsessive and unnecessary way to later upload them to Instagram and all conceivable planetary exhibition spaces. It is the end of private life and civilized modesty. It is not excessive to compare what the narrator contemplates in the «crowded little room» with a kind of archaeological preview of Beatriz Viterbo’s Facebook wall. See “ selfies ” of Beatriz.

The information that Borges gives about the images is the accurate identification of what he sees, even with some date and information about the places. The story of Beatriz Viterbo summarized in images. Some are even in colors -as Borges details-. Beatriz dies in February and that view of the photos is in April 1929, so the data implies a certain novelty.

The narrator refers to successive visits to Garay Street over the course of several years.

His visit on April 30, 1941 -the eve of the New York premiere of Orson Welles’s El ciudadano , epitome of the modernity of the moment in cinematographic images, which Borges would comment on that same year- affords us a vindication of modern man by the ineffable Argentine Carlos. I quote:

I evoke him in his studio, as if we were to say in the watchtower of a city, equipped with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, radiotelephony devices, cinematographs, magic lanterns, glossaries, timetables, handbooks. , newsletters…»

The cumulative description anticipates what Daneri will confess to having written, that clumsy, outrageous, and interminable poem entitled La tierra . But I stop at the previous image, the description of that modern man is so current that it is astonishing if the technological elements that allow him, today, to dominate the environment, connect to it instantly and abolishing the borders are changed.

Daneri makes of modern man also anticipates the cult of technology and the accumulation that many make of technology as a way of becoming infatuated with devices that quickly fall into obsolescence: for example, cell phones that change the model every six months. Of course, the Borges character abhors all of that. But at the same time, he is fascinated by Daneri ‘s delirium . The madness of others always fascinates.

The following accumulation and description of images is a subtle preview of what Borges will later contemplate in the basement and is a kind of » trailer » or synopsis -in the cinematographic sense- of what Daneri sings in his atrocious poem: «… In 1941, it had already dispatched a few hectares from the state of Queensland, plus one kilometer from the course of the Ob , a gasometer north of Veracruz, the main business houses of the parish of La Concepción, Mariana Cambaceres del Alvear’s farmhouse on Calle Once de Setiembre, in Belgrano, and a Turkish bath establishment not far from the accredited Brighton Aquarium”.

The chaotic accumulation and made of contrasts is what guides the description. Pages later, the author-character states that Daneri «had created a poem that seems to infinitely expand the possibilities of cacophony and chaos.»

The enumeration – not cacophonous but chaotic – that awaits us in the description of what is seen through the Aleph will not be different. Immediately a mention of Borges on the telephone establishes an unquestionable advance of our current trivialization of the use of technological devices: «Starting early Friday the telephone began to worry me» – I clarify: Daneri was going to call him about a matter related to the tome of his poem. “I was outraged that this instrument, which one day produced Beatriz’s irretrievable voice, could be lowered to a receptacle for the useless and perhaps angry complaints of that deceived Carlos Argentino Daneri ” – affirms Borges character.

Beatriz is a memory, photographic images and also a lost voice that the phone once reproduced. It is clear: that instrument, the telephone, capable of communicating the most transcendental, but at the same time being capable of propagating the most banal or despicable. Modernity has allowed it and the nightmare of those who talk on their cell phones in public spaces and shouting is one of the excrescences of progress.

Now I am going to refer to the central idea and event of this story: the vision on the nineteenth step of the basement on Garay Street of the amazing and at the same time terrible Aleph. To begin with, its size: a sphere no more than two or three centimeters in diameter capable of containing the entire cosmos. The resource is masterful and contains a preview of what will later be nanotechnology, capable of storing or containing astonishing amounts of information on a tiny printed circuit. In order not to abuse the quote, I will summarize it in the following passage:

“For the rest, the central problem – to describe the Aleph, I clarify – is unsolvable: the enumeration, even partial, of an infinite set. In that gigantic instant, I have seen millions of delightful or atrocious acts; none astonished me like the fact that they all occupied the same point, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous: what I will transcribe successively, because language is.

I finally get to the core. One of the feats of Borgean writing is to give an account of that marvel that is the Aleph. In the Aleph, there is the name of the God of the world. There is the beginning, the hidden point. To see it he had to go down nineteen steps. The number 19 in Kabbalah is the letter Qof, which is worth 100. It is the mystery, the secret. But also the Aleph is a mathematical symbol that allows to represent different types of infinities. And the aleph is «the first letter of the sacred language» with which, as narrated in the Sefer Yetzira , the divinity created the universe.

Using an apocalyptic tone in the repetition of the verb «I saw» – apocalypse means «revelation» in Greek – Borges develops the chaotic and partial description of the vertigo of images that he contemplates through the Aleph. Undoubtedly, those who read El Aleph can remember the masterful sequence of what was seen. A page and a half of the story takes that enumeration.

Four details I am just going to highlight.

There is no mention of colors in the description, except «a west in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.» There are no sounds either. The Aleph shows silent images. And that has its explanation: The consonant Aleph, comments Gershom Scholem , does not represent in Hebrew more than the first movement of the larynx in the emission of any sound. It is then, so to speak, the phonic element from which all articulation comes. Going from phonetics to the symbolic plane, Kabbalists have always considered the consonant Aleph as the spiritual root of all the other letters, which essentially contains the entire alphabet and therefore all the elements of human language. To hear the Aleph is properly not to hear anything. Therefore, Borges does not include any sound in the contemplated Aleph.

Out of all that chaos of simultaneity and vertigo, the images that really interest Borges-character are those of Beatriz Viterbo. Carlos Argentino has warned him that he will be able to engage in a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz. The Aleph will show him her tomb in La Chacarita and what remains of Beatriz turned into an atrocious relic and also «obscene, incredible and precise letters that Beatriz had addressed to Carlos Argentino». The data is a slap in the face in the midst of the chaos of the images.

The latest: a “I saw your face”, an extra-diegetic reference that refers to someone who does not appear in the story, perhaps Estela Canto, to whom Borges dedicates it.

I am going to take a little license with the term panopticon that I would like to bring to this comment: The panopticon is a type of prison architecture devised by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham towards the end of the 18th century.

The purpose of the panopticon structure is to allow its guard, garrisoned in a central tower, to observe all the prisoners, confined in individual cells around the tower, without them being able to know if they are being observed. In a way, the Aleph is also a panopticon from the point of view of its observer. Borges does not see himself reflected in any of the mirrors -all those on the planet- that he alludes to. He sees his bedroom with no one in it. The house, the basement, are not included in the cosmos of the Aleph either. He is the great observer of everything, almost as if he were God. He sees «what no man has seen: the inconceivable universe.» All the inhabitants of that world are unaware that Borges sees them relentlessly with exhausting clarity at that precise moment.

It is not an exaggeration to infer that in some way the Borgean Aleph has anticipated all the crude and prosaic imitations of Aleph that we suffer today: the security cameras that listen to streets, buildings, elevators, stations, highways, lounges for social use, airports and ATMs. to cite a few examples. The ubiquitous and live broadcast images of wars, sporting events, natural disasters, shows, reality shows , newscasts and a whole range of media content broadcast via satellite. The exchange on the networks of images and filming ranging from banal and domestic content to the atrocious sequence of beheadings by radical and barbaric Islam .

Everything is exhibited, registered, scrutinized and visible until reaching the total transparency of which Gilles Lipovetsky speaks: “The mass media are beyond good and evil. They do not condemn or judge, but they show everything, expose all the points of view and leave the public free of opinions multiplying and accelerating the images and information”. We live in a permanent burden of images that, in their accumulation , de- hierarchize what we see and turn reality into a show. It is the society of the spectacle to which Mario Vargas Llosa refers.

I alluded to the premiere of Orson Welles’ El Ciudadano the day before Borges contemplated the Aleph. I quote what he wrote about the film that he undoubtedly saw:

“The forms of multiplicity, of disconnection, abound in the film: the first scenes register the treasures accumulated by Foster Kane; in one of the last, a poor luxurious and suffering woman plays on the floor of a palace that is also a museum, with an enormous puzzle. In the end we understand that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the hated Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. And that all represents the one thing: Kane.»

It is impossible not to find correspondences between the Aleph that he would later write and that chaos of appearances that in the film is symbolized in the final traveling shot about Kane’s senseless accumulation of treasures distributed without order or hierarchy in a huge room. That too is, in a way, an Aleph. I am inclined to believe that Borges had that scene from that great film in mind.

A tale of images and about images, El Aleph, in my view, prolongs its inexhaustible meanings more and more. Especially the declaration, at the end of the story, that the Aleph of Garay Street is a false Aleph. The last sentence of the story is a poignant reason for that belief: “Have I seen it when I saw all things and have I forgotten it? Our mind is porous for forgetting; I myself am falsifying and losing, under the tragic erosion of the years, Beatriz’s features”.

However, the superb craft of words that the Aleph was able to erect so that readers could imagine it almost as if they were seeing it, is still valid and necessary in this 21st century and almost 37 years after Borges’s death.