How Borges's Infinite Became Bolaño's Finite

Part of: The Deep Reader

Companion essay to: The Poet Inside the Novelist

In a Buenos Aires apartment, sometime around 1940, Borges and Bioy Casares are finishing dinner.

The conversation turns to the art of the novel. Bioy makes an observation Borges will use as the germ of a story. Somewhere in the encyclopedia — Bioy says, or thinks he remembers — there was an article about a country called Uqbar whose mirrors and copulation are described as abominable, because both of them multiply the number of men.

A search through the volumes turns up nothing.

A further search produces the encyclopedia, the article, the heresiarch, the country.

And, eventually, the planet that absorbs the country, and the sect that invented the planet, and the readers who discover, once the sect's materials have entered the world, that reality has been quietly replaced by a more elegant fiction.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' is one of the Borges stories the rest of Latin American fiction had to reckon with.

And Bolaño reckoned with them with unusual seriousness.

What he did with that inheritance is the subject here, and the short form of the argument is that he took the open infinity of Borges's mirrors and committed it to proper nouns — specific names, dates, politics, biographies — until something opened that had not been available inside the original device.

Call it claustrophobic infinity, if a phrase is needed.

The Library of Babel feels airy. Nazi Literature in the Americas feels airless. The room has closed.

The Borges Hypothesis Bolaño Turned into a Book

Consider one paragraph inside ‘Tlön that does not describe Uqbar or the Tlönian metaphysicians but the critics of Tlön — an aside, almost a joke, buried two-thirds through a long meditation on the imaginary planet:

The critics often invent authors; they select two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and The Thousand and One Nights, say — attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres… — Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Collected Fictions (trans. Andrew Hurley, Penguin, 1998)

Three sentences.

A single hypothetical.

Borges is not describing anything that happens in his story; he is offering, as a parenthetical example of Tlönian thought, a procedure that critics on the imaginary planet apparently use.

Two dissimilar books get attributed to a single invented author, and then the invented author gets the psychology that the conjunction would require. A writer is brought into being by the pressure of two texts that could not share one. The move remains purely schematic. No particular critic. No particular invented author.

No particular psychology. Just the mechanism, stated as a possibility, in the register of philosophical aside, inside a story whose main subject lies elsewhere — in the replacement of reality by a collaborative fiction.

The passage is characteristic Borges, and it stops where Borges often stops: at the point where the mechanism has been sketched.

What the mechanism would produce, if anyone actually ran it — not as a thought experiment but as a book — is not Borges's interest. He has other things to think about. The note is filed. The story moves on.

A later Argentine writer could register the aside, possibly admire it, and have no reason to carry it forward, because Borges's own subsequent stories show no interest in operating the procedure at scale.

It is tempting me to say that Bolaño read the paragraph and wrote Nazi Literature in the Americas.

How Nazi Literature in the Americas Grounds the Borgesian Device

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a 227-page novel in the form of a biographical encyclopedia.

It contains entries for thirty invented fascist writers, most of them South American, a few North American, each given a full literary biography including birthplace, death, books written, political affiliations, critical reception, and the usual encyclopedia-register sourcing. None of them exist. All of them are invented.

The book’s central mechanism resembles the one Borges states as a hypothesis in ‘Tlön,’ now executed at length. Here is the opening of the entry for one of the Argentines: Silvio Salvático. Buenos Aires, 1901 – Buenos Aires, 1994.

As a young man Salvático advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinian race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin color… He was a soccer player and a Futurist. From 1920 to 1929… he wrote and published more than twelve collections of poems, some of which won municipal and provincial prizes.

— Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, 2008)

Salvático is not real. But the entry proceeds as though he were. A birth year, a death year, a political platform listed in the comma-separated register of a policy brief, a biographical fact-sheet, a municipal-prize footnote. The fascist platform is monstrous and partly ridiculous — the permanent war against whichever neighbor as national gymnastics, the polygamy, the skin-lightening migration plan — and it arrives in the same deadpan register as the soccer-and-Futurism line that follows.

The entry does not judge Salvático. It files him. And by the time the encyclopedia has finished filing him, he exists in the reader's head with the weight of a real literary biography. The reader does not need to believe Salvático was real to feel the historical density of his invention.

The distance from Borges’s paragraph to this entry is the distance between symbol and flesh.

Borges offered the mechanism. Bolaño grounded it in twelve provincial poetry collections and an Italian Futurist affiliation and the Scandinavian migration plan.

Borges’s invented author was an homme de lettres, a category.

Salvático arrives as a man. Salvático is a man. The Argentines who knew Borges knew what an homme de lettres was; they did not know any Silvio Salvático, and Bolaño has inserted him into the vocabulary of Argentine fascism with enough specificity that the reader has to work to remember he never existed.

How Bolaño Turns Borges’s Open Infinity into Claustrophobic Form

The multiplication is abstract.

Borges’s infinity is open: no reflected self is more important than any other, and the series can continue without local pressure.

Bolaño's catalogue is different. Each invented fascist has a name and a birthplace and a death-date. The entries sit next to each other in alphabetical order, like the biographies in any real reference work, and each one is specifically located — Buenos Aires, Santiago, Caracas, Havana, Los Angeles — and each one has a political record that could in principle be checked against historical affiliates of the Falange, or the Peronist right, or the American Neo-Nazi press, or the Chilean Catholic ultra-nationalists.

Bolaño’s infinity arrives finite. The fascists stop because Bolaño gives the catalogue an ending. The book has an ending. Bolaño's encyclopedia produces, in the reader, a kind of sickened familiarity.

Each Salvático could have been a real man. Some of them, composited from real fascist writers Bolaño had read, partly were. The room has been closed. The reader is inside it, walking from one door to the next, and each door opens onto another small, carefully furnished biography of a man who did not exist and could have — some of them imaginable inside the same kind of compromised literary culture Bolaño keeps returning to elsewhere.

What Borges uses to generate philosophical amazement, Bolaño redirects toward political horror.

The device is recognizably related. The temperature is different.

The difference is that Bolaño has ballasted the device with history. Pinochet’s Chile is already in the background here.

The Argentine dirty war. The American Christian Identity movement. Nazi Literature walks us through a catalogue of twentieth-century right-wing literary culture in which the boundaries between real and invented figures have deliberately been blurred, so that the invented figures acquire the density of the real ones they stand next to. Bolaño's encyclopedia knows exactly which century it is in.

How Labyrinth Turns a Photograph into Biographical Fiction

A later and useful demonstration of the Borgesian inheritance appears in an unlikely place — a short story Bolaño wrote near the end of his life and never published, written in the same poet's-patience method that governs the longer novels.

In Labyrinth, collected in The Secret of Evil, Bolaño begins with a photograph — a real photograph, of real French intellectuals, seated around a table in a Parisian café sometime in the 1970s. The narrator identifies them:

They're seated. They're looking at the camera. They are captioned, from left to right: J. Henric, J.-J. Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M.-Th. Réveillé, P. Guyotat, C. Devade, and M. Devade. — Roberto Bolaño, Labyrinth, The Secret of Evil (New Directions, 2012)

Eight figures. Real people. Sollers and Kristeva, the Tel Quel couple; Pierre Guyotat, the novelist; others from the same Parisian intellectual scene. The story begins as it should begin: with the caption.

What happens next is where the Borgesian machinery goes to work.

Let's imagine J.-J. Goux, for example, who is looking out at us through his thick submarine spectacles. His space in the photo is momentarily vacant and we see him walking along Rue de l'École de Médecine, with books under his arm, of course, two books, till he comes out onto Boulevard Saint-Germain. There he turns his steps toward the Mabillon Métro station, but first he stops in front of a bar, checks the time, goes in, and orders a cognac. After a while, J.-J. moves away from the bar and sits down at a table near the window. What does he do? He opens a book. We can't tell what book it is, but we do know that he's finding it difficult to concentrate. Every twenty seconds or so he lifts his head and looks out onto Boulevard Saint-Germain, his gaze a little more gloomy each time. It's raining… J.-J. remains seated, and now there are two cognacs and two coffees on his tab… Who was J.-J. Goux waiting for? For someone he's in love with? Someone he was hoping to sleep with that night? And how was his delicate sensibility affected by that person's failure to show up?— Roberto Bolaño, Labyrinth, The Secret of Evil (New Directions, 2012)

The photograph has been abandoned. J.-J. Goux, a real French intellectual, has been removed from his seat at the café table and placed, by authorial fiat, on a Parisian boulevard in the rain, entering a bar, ordering two cognacs and two coffees, waiting for someone who does not come. The voice telling the story doesn't have a clue of what book he is reading. It does not know who he is waiting for. The narrator simply asks, and the questions are the story.

When we arrive at the end of the scene, Goux has acquired a whole afternoon — a route, a weather, a disappointed love-object, a delicate sensibility affected by the no-show — and none of it has been authorized by the photograph. The photograph shows a man sitting at a table. The story has built, out of that single image, a life he did not live.

Here the multiplication runs at paragraph level. One static image generates a labyrinth of possible narratives, each as plausible as the last, none of them verifiable against the photograph they claim to extend. Where Borges in "Tlön" proposed that two dissimilar books could be assigned to an invented author, Bolaño in "Labyrinth" proposes that a single photograph of real intellectuals can generate an indefinite number of invented afternoons.

The procedure is recognizably similar. The application is different as Bolaño has moved it from textual hypothesis to biographical invention, and the Parisian bar where Goux orders his second cognac is a direct descendant of the Tlönian critics inventing the psychology of their composite homme de lettres.

"Labyrinth" continues. The narrator will move through every figure in the photograph, inventing a night for each, constructing parallel couples — Carla Devade and Marc Devade. Sollers and Kristeva. J.-J. Goux and Jacques Henric. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Pierre Guyotat — and a set of destinies for the night ahead of them, involving sex and motorbikes and unread books and underground parking garages. The photograph has become a generator of fictions. Eight real intellectuals are converted into the population of a single pocket universe that exists nowhere else and could not have existed before Bolaño's narrator began his inventory.

The Savage Detectives and the End of Borgesian Multiplication

Where Bolaño's multiplication arrives, it gives a pressure of the largest narrative scale: travelling with two visceral realists across three continents, in the search of the vanished poet whose disappearance has organized The Savage Detectives from its opening page, turns out to have left behind a single published poem. The poem is not even made of words. The poem comes in the form of three drawings.

The first drawing is a sailing boat on calm water. The second is the same boat on turbulent water. The third is the same boat in a great storm.

That is the poem. That is what hundreds of pages of searching, across three continents, through dozens of testimonies about two poets chasing a third poet whose one surviving work is the object of their quest — that is what the pursuit delivers at its end.

A waterline.

A square sail.

Three weather-conditions.

The Savage Detectives is the book in which the inheritance runs to its absolute terminus. The whole middle of the novel is built on the same procedure that "Labyrinth" applies to a photograph — fifty-four narrators, scattered across twenty years and three continents, each producing their own invented account of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. No two accounts agree. No single testimony is authoritative. The two poets exist only through the multiplication of unreliable witnesses, the way Borges's Uqbar existed only through the multiplication of encyclopedia entries — except that Bolaño's multiplication is historical.

Mexico City in 1975. Tel Aviv in 1978. Barcelona in 1987. The testimonies are dated, located, and specific in a way Borges's never are.

And at the end of all this accumulation, when the multiplication has turned Belano and Lima into a kind of distributed saint-hood across twenty years of Latin American literary bohemia, the search they themselves are conducting arrives at Cesárea's three drawings.

The novel's whole apparatus — its testimonies, its invented-authors catalogue, its parallax biography — delivers the reader to a poem that has refused to multiply itself in language, that has refused the whole infinite-regress of interpretation.

Here the Bolaño inheritance reaches its terminal figure. “Borges’s infinite opens outward. Bolaño’s closes around the reader.

Cesárea's poem is the mouth of the closure — the wordless point at which the multiplication that generated the novel is finally asked to stop.

Nazi Literature, reading through the catalogue of invented fascists, the spectators of Labyrinth, watching the photograph unfold into eight invented nights, have been walking toward this, and, finally, the readers of The Savage Detectives, following fifty-four testimonies across twenty years, point toward this terminal pressure.

The Visceral Realist Sentence That Names the Turn Away from Borges

One sentence from the middle of The Savage Detectives offers a useful summary of what the Borges-to-Bolaño conversion changes. Ulises Lima, late one Mexico City night, tries to explain the visceral-realist method:

Backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown. — Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)

The sentence condenses the visceral realists’ poetics and gives you a workable image for Bolaño’s turn away from Borges.

Gazing at a point in the distance — Borges's infinite, held in the field of vision, still the organizing object of attention.

Moving away from it — the specifically Bolaño move, the refusal to stay inside the structure, the walking-backward that keeps the mirror in sight while leaving the room the mirror is in.

Walking straight toward the unknown — the destination, which is not Borges's, which is not anyone's before Bolaño's, and which is a finite specific unknown reached through backward movement away from the infinite structure that made the movement possible.

The visceral realists walk backward out of Borges into their own century. They keep him in their sight-line. They do not pretend he never existed.

What they refuse is Borges’s open infinity. the airy metaphysical multiplication that "Tlön" and "The Library of Babel" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" hold out as the shape of literary thought.

In its place they build something smaller and more crowded — an encyclopedia of fascists, a labyrinth generated from a single photograph, a search for a lost poet that ends in three drawings of boats.

Borges’s mirrors multiplied the number of men in a metaphysical sense.

Bolaño's mirrors multiply the number of men in the sense that matters more to him: Silvio Salvático, and J.-J. Goux walking down Boulevard Saint-Germain, and Cesárea Tinajero drawing her third boat in the middle of the last storm.

The room has closed.

The poetry is inside it.

And the novel is what Bolaño found — with Faulkner's sentence as his instrument and Borges's mirrors as his architecture — when he stopped writing poems and started, at last, writing poetry.