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connecting El inmortal not only with those stories and essays that take up
obviously similar topics but with everything that Borges wrote. It is this logic
that accounts for the long debates in Borges (and in the secondary literature
written about him) on the nature of time, but also on the relationship between
empiricism and idealism, nominalism and realism, and, ultimately, everything and nothing. We might begin anywhere in Borgess work, I suggest,
and always come across the same logic. Each instance of it would, however,
be dierent; this logic is not able to be seen outside its eectively ctional
representation on each occasion. In all of this, again, we have not only the
complex relationship between ction and philosophy in Borgess work, but
the fact that Borgess work is also about this relationship, takes it up as its very
subject. In all of these ways, I would contend, El inmortal remains unread,
and we must always go further in unravelling the storys inexhaustible logic.
El inmortal begins in with the rare book dealer Joseph Cartaphilus
selling to the Princess de Lucinge (a close namesake of the character in Tln,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) a copy of Alexander Popes six-volume translation of
Homers Iliad. Cartaphilus is described as an emaciated, grimy-looking man
with grey eyes, grey beard, and features that are singularmente vagos. Inside the last volume of her copy the Princess nds a manuscript that purports
to relate the adventures of a Roman centurion, one Marcus Flaminius Rufus,
who lived during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian in the third century .
Rufus is a tribune in one of the Emperors armies when, early one morning
while his forces are stationed in Egypt, a man covered in blood comes riding towards him and speaks, just before dying, of a river that purica de la
muerte a los hombres (p. ). Rufus then resolves to go in search of this
much-rumoured river, which is said to lie where se acaba el mundo (p. ).
His commanding ocer grants him some two hundred troops to begin his
expedition, but, made feverish by the desert sun and driven mad by drinking
poisoned water, they soon begin to desert him. One morning Rufus leaves
his camp with just a few of his most trusted men, only, in time, to become
separated even from them. Wandering through the desert alone, and in sight
nally of the fabled City of the Immortals, he collapses. When he awakes, he
nds himself lying in a makeshi grave with his arms tied behind his back.
Burning with thirst beneath the unrelenting desert sun, he drags himself
with enormous eort down a slope towards a small, dirty stream he notices
trickling through the mud and plunges his head down to drink. Just before
passing out again, he notices himself inexplicably repeating words from some
unknown Greek text: Los ricos teucros de Zelea que beben el agua negra del
Esepo . . . (p. ).
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Coming to again, with his hands still tied behind his back, Rufus spends
days and nights lying on the blazing sands of the desert, unable to move.
e strange, dog-like creatures who live in the surrounding caves and whom
he had seen earlier on his journey neither attack him nor come to his aid,
despite his pleas for help. Eventually Rufus frees himself, crosses the stream,
and approaches the City of the Immortals, accompanied by two or three of
these Troglodytes. When he crosses the City walls, he has then to negotiate
an almost endless series of underground rooms, in which all but one of nine
doors lead back to the same room. Aer a journey that seems to him interminable, Rufus reaches a nal room, where a ladder takes him up to the City
itself. e City in turn reveals itself to be another labyrinth, laid out seemingly
at random, with corridors that lead nowhere and staircases that peter out in
mid-air aer two or three levels. ere appears to be no consistent plan or
design, with the most heterogeneous styles and eects being yoked together
without any thought. Almost in horror, Rufus ees the City, once again having
to negotiate the endless series of underground chambers. ere to meet him
when he emerges is one of the Troglodytes who had earlier accompanied him
to the walls of the City. is particular Troglodyte accompanies Rufus on his
subsequent journeys, and Rufus calls him Argos, aer the dog in Homers
Odyssey. Rufus, as he gets to know Argos, is led to remark on how dierent
their respective experiences of the world must be. However, one day, as a
heavy rain falls on them both, Rufus is astonished to see Argos li his face
to the sky and utter the words Argos, perro de Ulises (p. ). When Rufus
then asks him how much of the Odyssey he knows, Argos replies, to Rufuss
further amazement: Muy poco. Menos que el rapsoda ms pobre. Ya habrn
pasado mil cien aos desde que la invent (p. ).
At this point Rufus not only realizes that the lowly Troglodytes are in fact
the legendary Immortals, but begins to think through, aided by Argos, the
logical consequences of immortality. He understands now why the Troglodytes were so indierent to his suering when they saw him lying for days in
the sun with his arms behind his back aer he had drunk from the stream
that had (he now retrospectively realizes) conferred eternal life upon him. It
is not merely because they knew he would not be hurt but also because of a
certain moral indierence, in which all acts become equivalent to each other.
As Rufus explains:
Adoctrinada por un ejercicio de siglos, la repblica de hombres inmortales haba logrado la perfeccin de la tolerancia y casi del desdn. Saba que en un plazo innito le
ocurren a todo hombre todas las cosas. Por sus pasadas o futuras virtudes, todo hombre
es acreedor a toda bondad, pero tambin a toda traicin, por sus infamias del pasado o
del porvenir. As como en los juegos de azar las cifras pares y las cifras impares tienden
al equilibrio, as tambin se anulan y se corrigen el ingenio y la estolidez, y acaso el
rstico poema del Cid es el contrapeso exigido por un solo epteto de las glogas o por
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For an example of the simplications produced by this general reading of El inmortal see
Bell-Villada: ere we read of the absolute tolerance (or perhaps nihilistic indierence) of the
Immortals towards whatever happens [. . .] Because experience of the new is unknown to the
Immortals, there are no legitimate grounds for action. [. . .] In a world without death, nothing is
of immediate or ultimate necessity, and quietism is the inevitable result (pp. ). See also
Naomi Lindstrom, for whom the literal absence of the narrator is understood as following from
immortality: e implication is that the attribution of a text to a single author is a deluded, if
widespread, practice. [. . .] e maintenance of unique selood, always a precarious achievement
in Borgess stories, cannot withstand the acid test of composition (Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of the
Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, ), p. ). In fact, we see the Immortals participate in worldly
activities, just like mortals; there always is an actual narrator in the telling of immortality.
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secretos (p. ). How then to put these two positions together? What in the
end is Borges saying about time? And how does this relate to what Borges is
saying in El inmortal? If in one way we can explain the nding of the second
stream only as a result of the undertaking of an innity of actions, in another
way this innity would exist only because the second stream is found. Its
discovery at once belongs to the series of immortal acts, as the last of them,
and is entirely opposed to them, as that outside point from which immortality
is realized. And this circularity between immortality and mortality continues
for ever: we could no sooner argue that it is mortality that makes immortality
possible than it would be shown that mortality can be arrived at only because
of immortality; we could no sooner argue that it is immortality that makes
mortality possible than it would be shown that immortality can be realized
only because of mortality.
We come back to the insight that immortality at the same time cancels
out and corrects what comes before it, placing it in a sequence in which
everything is connected, and has itself to be cancelled and corrected, shown
to be part of what it otherwise would explain. is is again why Borges writes
with the utmost precision not that opposites se anulan y se corrigen, but
only that they tend towards this. Tienden because the very thing that cancels
and corrects (the act of drinking from the second stream) has itself to be
cancelled and corrected (shown to arise as part of the endless cause and eect
of immortality). And it is perhaps in this that we see the true innity of
immortality. It is not something that is given all at once. It is rather, so to
speak, an innity of always one more. e innity of immortality arises as a
result of the always subsequent inclusion of the point from which it was remarked, and from showing that it is only an eect of immortality. Le ocurren
a todo hombre todas las cosas not because of some simple dierence between
things but because of the way in which the position of mortality, which is
the opposite of what is, keeps on getting incorporated from a position that is
opposite to it. Immortality is not a series of points strung together one aer
another, a simple absence of any end, but a series of foldings back in of any
position outside it, a constant deferral of an end that has already occurred. It
is as though we were somehow always falling short of the ultimate evening out
of experience or cancelling and correction of mortality and immortality, with
every attempt to bring this equivalence about made possible only because of
With even more precision Borges uses the self-reexive form asi tamben se anulan y se
corrigen el ingenio y la estolidez, which Andrew Hurley translates as so cleverness and dullness
cancel and correct each other (Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin, ),
p. ). James E. Irby renders it as so wit and stolidity cancel out and correct each other (Jorge
Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Essays (New York: New Directions, ),
p. ). What is lost in both translations is, arguably, the way that both cleverness and dullness
as qualities of immortality (have to) cancel themselves out, so that there is always something le
over; immortality itself can never be entirely cancelled out.
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mortality
mortality
}|
immortality
F.
a further point of mortality outside it, which has not yet been attained. We
might attempt to represent this diagrammatically (Figure ).
It is at this point that we might begin to see the particular form of time
at stake in El inmortal. It can oen seem as though Borges is unable to
decide what form of time he believes in, whether he takes seriously the possibility of the stopping of time or is forced to acknowledge the inevitability of
linear time. And this indecision is oen interpreted as an example of Borgess
scepticism, his reluctance to choose between alternatives, or as a kind of
ironization, as though he were implicitly arguing against immortality. But
I reject such explanations, as though there were any subjective confusion in
Borgess position or a hiding of his true opinion. Rather, Borges is arguing
that both alternatives are simultaneously true, that both must be the case
for the time in which we live actually to take place. In the passing over of
one moment to another that makes up linear time, it cannot be that the rst
moment must disappear to allow the second to appear, in which case there
would be a gap between moments and we could never get from the beginning
to the end. But, equally, it cannot be that this second moment must appear to
allow the rst to disappear, in which case time would be over before it started,
with the end necessary for there to be a beginning. In fact, for linear time to
be possible, the rst moment must disappear as the second moment appears.
Running alongside actual time, in which one moment succeeds another, there
must be another virtual time, in which two moments exist at the same time.
A moment would take the place of the virtual time between it and the one
following it, allowing it to become the second; but, in doing so, there would
be opened up another virtual time which allowed it to become the second.
In this sense, I would say that each moment takes the place of the end of
time, but in so doing defers this end yet again. Time is a kind of perpetual
falling short of an equivalence between two moments that occurs at the very
beginning of time.
It is this logic, of course, that Zeno explores in his famous paradoxes of
time, on which Borges wrote on several occasions, and which El inmortal, as
so many other of Borgess stories, allegorizes. In Zeno, it is said that an arrow
cannot get from A to B because it must rst cross a point C, halfway between
See on this Jon Stewart, Borges on Immortality, Philosophy and Literature, (),
(pp. ), and Elena Garca-Martn, e Dangers of Abstraction in Borgess e
Immortal, Variaciones Borges, (), (pp. ).
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them, and cannot get from A to C because it must rst cross a point D, halfway
between them, and so on. And it is easy to see El inmortal replaying this
logic, inasmuch as the Immortal must accomplish an innity of actions before
he can get to the endthat is, drink from the second stream. And yet, as we
have also seen, if this were strictly true, the Immortal would never nd the
second stream, and within the logic I have tried to outline this immortality
would never exist. Rather, as Borges shows us, this immortality exists only
because of that second stream: immortality exists only between drinking from
the rst stream and drinking from the second. And this is the case also with
Zeno. e true paradox of Zeno, the hidden ingenuity of his argument, is that
in order to say we have rst to get to point C, he already has to assume that
we have got to point B. Zenos method is precisely regressive: the innity he
gestures towards as making movement impossible exists only by continuously
counting back from an end that has already occurred. Innity, as it were, exists
only between two points. And this again is the case in El inmortal, where
immortality, the fact that all things must have happened, is able to occur
between any two moments, no matter how close together, for the nding of
the second stream can occur at any time. e very idea of immortality, as
with Zeno, is not that all things have to happen in a literal sense so that the
Immortal never dies, but that in so far as we are able to get from one point
to another, in so far as we are able to die at all, we have to assume a certain
innity, that all things have happened, that we are in eect immortal. And
perhaps we might even sharpen the paradoxit is arguably what Borges does
with his idea that each act is both the cancelling and correction of another and
what must be cancelled and corrected by anotherto say that innity does
not simply lie between any two points but within one single point. e same
point is internally split between itself and its opposite, itself and its cancelling
out, itself and the void it stands in for, inasmuch as, for linear motion to be
possible, two moments must be at the same time.
How is all of this to be seen in terms of the narration of Borgess story,
that other aspect of El inmortal to which critics have paid singular attention?
Several analyses of the story point out the dierent voices in which the text is
written (the editors, Rufuss, Cartaphiluss, even Homers) and the irony this
produces, with the various narrators giving away things that the characters
themselves are unaware of (not only the Greek expressions in the Roman
centurion Rufuss account, suggesting that he is Homer, but the Latinisms
in Cartaphiluss account, suggesting that he is Rufus). Beyond the specic
substitution of narrative voices and the literary eects this enables, however,
we might also try to elaborate the more general and perhaps more abstract
See, for example, Ren De Costa, Humor in Borges (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
), pp. ; Jullien, Biography of an Immortal, pp. ; and Efran Kristal, Invisible
Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, ), pp. .
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is idea that the various tales of immortality in El inmortal are both sequential and circular
is one of the most complex matters raised by Borgess work. It suggests that a logical raising of
levels, with one thing being about another, is ultimately the same as two things being on the
same level, being next to each other. We see this, for example, in Borgess La Biblioteca de Babel
(Obras completas, (Barcelona: Emec, ), pp. ), where the fact that each book is the
catalogue de todos los dems (p. )that is, where one book is on a higher logical level than
the restis the same as the Zeno-like regression from one book to another spoken of elsewhere:
para localizar el libro A, consultar previamente un libro B que indique el sitio de A; para localizar
el libro B, consultar previamente un libro C, y as hasta lo innito (p. ). We see this also in El
inmortal, where at once each tale of immortality comes aer another, and each tale of immortality
is inside another.
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to another. For, pushed far enoughand this is the direction Christs analysis
takes us inI would say that there is ultimately nothing common to all of
those stories of immortality to which Borges alludes and which he seeks to
incorporate into his text. Not only is there no shared cultural or historical
context to them, but there is also no sense of a common intellectual doctrine
or literary style. If there is a tradition of immortality, it is a kind of nothing
that is passed on, not something eternal and everlasting but coming about
only in the act of transmission itself. To put it in its strongest form, I would
say that immortalityas with so many other of Borgess conceptsis only
the relationship of one to another: the one who lives to the one who narrates,
the one who writes to the one who reads, the immortal to the mortal. And it
is precisely because immortality comes about in the relationship between one
and another, because its transmission creates its object, that there is always
more to say, that aer it has been spoken about it will need to be spoken about
again. Here once more we see that endless tendency to cancel and correct
that denes immortality, in that it is the very narration of immortality that
then needs to be narrated. Immortality is this process of passing from one
narrator to another in an endless series: an endless succession of narratives or,
better, an endless succession of postscripts, as we see in El inmortal. ere is
no original immortal: not even Homer, who begins only by repeating certain
oral stories of immortality that existed before him. ere is no nal version
of immortality, not even Borgess: others have followed him, such as Alain
Robbe-Grillet in LImmortelle and Gabriel Garca Mrquez in Cien aos de
soledad. Paradoxically, we might say that Borgess version is immortal, will
live on for ever, only in so far as it can be narrated by others, in so far as others
can speak of it in their name, in so far as others can take it over entirely and
use it to try to make themselves immortal.
U Q
R B
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