БОРХЕС

In one of our last conversations, Borges did not lament in the face of the forgetting into which, as he foresaw, his work would disappear. Although this certainty did not weigh on him, he wished that, among the thousands of pages, one poem could be conserved: “The Golem.” But then, repentant at having staked too excessive a claim, he reduced his wish to one stanza, the first:

If (as the Greek affirmed in the Cratylus)
The name is the archetype of the thing,
In the letters of rose is the rose
And all of the Nile in the word Nile.

Why preserve only “The Golem”? Why only one part? Why the first stanza? Why not all of it? Why not only a name? Many years earlier, in the famous “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,” already cited, the narrator, agreeing with the author, affirmed:
There is no intellectual exercise that is not infinitely futile. A philosophical doctrine is at first a verisimilar description of the universe; the years turn and it is a mere chapter—if not a paragraph or a name—of the history of philosophy. In literature this caducity is even more notorious.

It is not the first time that, anticipating by many years the alarming forecasts of a century split down the middle, Borges foretold the disappearance of literature, of poetry, of the word.

“All the Nile in the word Nile,” said Borges, and in these italics he finishes. But if the conjectures are resplendent, the final word Nile, the last or only that remains after the elimination that the poet prophesied with less resignation than joy, would be the only relic. Vernichtung, in German: a destruction that erases even the traces of that annihilation, in English, nil. Its French homonym, Nil, returns to the name of the river.

In “Le démon de l’analogie,” Mallarmé speculates about the painful enjoyment (pénible jouissance) that the words of sad nature produced in his mouth. He did not avoid that same analogical perversity taking over his words in order to suppress the reference at the same time that he invoked it. “The Penultimate is dead,” said Mallarmé, stressing the strange magic that torments the syllable nul, penultimate and nul, on the verge of disappearing in “that absurd sentence.”

It is not strange that an aesthetics of annihilation swaddles a century that has made of sheer annihilation its shadow, of silence and sounds, its danse macabre. In the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul said: “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.” According to certain contemporary academic radicalisms, the prophecy has already been verified: if history disappeared again, if poetry was condemned and hermeneutics grew through the decline of theories— or the inverse, if the death of the author was announced more than once, confirming greater deaths that preceded it and those of them who announced it, if in this disappearance en masse, reality also fell, whom could it surprise that the work disappears and there only remains a word?
Like Cratylus, Borges believes in the truth of words, in the similarity they guard between themselves and with things, and this is why he would preserve a stanza, the first, and the final word, several times final: Nile, a variation of nil or of nihil, res nata, “nothing” is the contradictory redemption. In Genesis, golem designates the man created in the image and likeness, an embryo, a “larva,” mask and specter, a being who still is not or is no longer. Similar is strange. He who prohibits imitation, does he imitate himself? That is why, observing the contradiction more than the interdiction, the rabbi of Prague does something further: he gives life to his semblant by way of the word, inscribing emet, Hebrew for “truth,” in the same way as, in order to destroy it, he obliterates aleph, the first letter, leaving met, in Hebrew, and it remains transformed into a cadaver, or it does not remain at all.

BORGES The Passion of an Endless Quotation
Lisa Block de Behar