search by...

| volume | author | word | > menu

Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes

Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza

¿Qué dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza
De polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías? 1

S
uch is the closing tercet of the double sonnet “El Ajedrez”, by J.
L. Borges. .And this question represents, perhaps, the quintes-
sence of what can be called “Borges’ rhetorical ontology”2.
Rhetoric is, no doubt, one of the central points in the Borgesian Welt-
anschauung. Not only rhetoric as subject, but also rhetoric considered as
an intellectual or, moreover, an ontological position, and even, like in
this sonnet, as a way to deal with the problem of God.
For the occidental tradition, the idea of God is intimately related to the
idea of causality. That means that for any chain of facts it is reasonable
to postulate an absolute beginning, which can be called “God”. Never-
theless, if instead of explaining the universe through the principle of
causality we decide to refer to the pure idea of a “form” -as one can
speak of “rhetorical (or mathematical) forms”-, the chain ceases to be
factual and becomes structural and iterative, like a grammar, and there
is no longer any way to avoid the possibility of denying a “real” begin-
ning. The entities in the world become figures in a diagram, the onto-
logical “history” becomes a rhetorical “texture” (trama), and God (writ-
ten with upper initial) may always “be moved” by some other “god”

1 God moves the player, who moves the pawn. /And behind God, which god opens

the run /of dust and time and dream and agonies? (El Hacedor, OC 2: 191).
2 The present essay is a re-elaboration of some themes dealt about in the Permanent

Seminar of the “J. L. Borges Centre for Studies & Documentation”, in 1994 and 1995,
as well as in the Ph.D. Seminar of the Faculty of Arts, University of Aarhus during
the Fall Semester 1995. We owe many of the following ideas to the participants in
the Permanent Seminar.

Variaciones Borges 2/1996

 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 19

(with lower initial), and so on, following a never ending texture “of
dust, and time, and dream and agonies”.
The purpose of the following pages is to illustrate this Borges intellec-
tual position with some of his most relevant texts. Considering the on-
tological option of Borges’ rhetoric (or the rhetoric option of his ontol-
ogy, which, in this case, is the same) can also help us to discover the
amazing degree with which the boundaries of rhetoric have been
changing steadily throughout the centuries.

The Nature of Rhetoric

According to Juri Lotman, the ancient and medieval conception of

rhetoric can be presented following three types of oppositions: a) as
opposed to poetics, rhetoric is taken as the art of prose discourse; b) as
opposed to ordinary language, it is considered as the art of ornamented
discourse; c) as opposed to hermeneutics, it can be considered as the
art of generating texts, instead of interpreting them.
Today, still following Lotman’s definition, in the scientific area deter-
mined by poetics and semiotics, rhetoric acquires three new distinctive
features: a) as a part of linguistics, it is the set of discourse-constitutive
rules at the transphrastic level, i.e. beyond the boundaries of a simple
sentence, as, for instance, the narrative structures; b) as a discipline
studying the poetical semantics, it becomes a theory of tropes, its pro-
prium being constituted by the displacements of meaning; and c) as text
theory, rhetoric is the part of poetics which studies the inter-textual re-
lationships as well as the social functioning of texts as unitary semiotic
organisations.
As far as we are concerned, the evolution of rhetoric can be divided
into seven different periods including as many trends: 1) the ornamen-
tal trend, 2) the argumentative trend, 3) the poetical trend, 4) the lin-
guistic trend, 5) the semiotic trend, 6) the cognitive trend, and 7) the
ontological trend. We must anyway bear in mind that the evolution in
this case was not linear and that the notion of ‘periods’ should perhaps
be considered as a fictive presentation of sometimes synchronic phe-
nomena.

The ornamental trend

Rhetoric was born as the art of oratory or public speaking, probably in
the early sophistic milieu. Its normal intellectual area was neither poet-
ics nor philosophy stricto sensu, but politics, in general; this term in-
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

20 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

volving here the deliberative activities before the laws, the forensic dis-
courses before the courts, and the epideictic speeches before occasional
assemblies.
Aristotle was the first who systematically tried to turn rhetoric from a
simple strategy of persuasion into a real theoretical endeavour to eluci-
date the conditions of persuasion. And thus, he placed rhetoric in some
tense relationship with dialectic, which, as for it, only aims to ‘expose’,
without any perlocutionary intention. Even if Aristotle attempted to
make rhetoric meet somewhere the question of truth, mainly by includ-
ing the syllogism as a figure of speech, he and his disciples continued
to consider it as a purely pragmatic discipline. Gradually rhetoric re-
ceived its standard division into inventio (subjects, arguments, com-
monplaces), dispositio (arrangement of large units of discourse, such as
narration, peroration, etc.), and elocutio (management of terms and
phrases). To this last component belongs the well-known division into
tropes and figures. In this long first period, they are considered mostly
as ornamental means belonging to the complex art of persuasion. Quin-
tilian described the tropes as “the artificial alteration of a word or
phrase from its proper meaning to another”, and the figures as “a
change in meaning or language from the ordinary and simple form”.

The argumentative trend

In fact, the elocutionary conception of rhetoric, even if overtaken by
other tendencies and more or less striped of its ornamental function,
has until now never been totally dismissed. On the contrary, the most
recent studies about argumentation emphasize the virtues of the figura-
tive discourse, which, being addressed to a more complete range of
human faculties than the simple inferential demonstration, develops its
own strategy of rules, independently of the dialectical or logical rules,
and even including them. Renaissance rhetoricians called these conver-
sational attitudes: “metaphorical arguments” or “concetti napoletani”
(Tesauro 88, 99) because, having developed in the Spanish earliest
“conceptist” environment, they reached the Italian intellectual circles
via the Naples harbor. Even if from the logical point of view these
“metaphorical arguments” can be ranked among the paralogisms, be-
cause their medium term is often constituted by a metaphor3, their
euristic force is, nevertheless, undeniable.

3 Tesauro (25-26) said that while theologians search to confirm their theses by the

means of litteral arguments, God, through the Inspired Writers, often has recourse
to the “concetti predicabili” based on metaphors.
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 21

From the 16th-century French Philosopher Pierre de la Ramée (who

ranged figures into serving as arguments and serving as extrinsic or-
namentation) until today’s “New Rhetoric” (Cf. Perelman and Ol-
brechts-Tyteca), the permanence of the argumentative trend is constant
in the history of rhetoric. For New Rhetoricians rhetoric is related to a
“theory of argumentation”, as opposed to “demonstration”, and repre-
sents the epistemological field where the ‘non-empirico-deductive’
statements, like those of the ethics, can find their logical justification.

The poetical trend

The notion of “displacement” included in the etymology of the word
‘trope’ makes the field of rhetoric gradually lose some emotive ingredi-
ents and attain a new aesthetic and poetic dimension. Because they
were dealing with the problem of the nature of symbolic expressions
and their relationship to the notions of truth and of proper meaning,
the major contribution to this change of perspective was most likely of-
fered by the sacramental and exegetic theology in the early Christendom.
The poetry or literary art, rather than the communicative strategy, be-
comes the natural area of rhetoric. The number of tropes began a trans-
formation of reduction: from more than 350 (Peacham) to ten (cf. Laus-
berg), to four -metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and irony- (Fraunce),
to three -metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy-, or to two -metaphor and
metonymy- and, finally, even to one: for some theoreticians the meta-
phor is the general mechanism producing all displacements of mean-
ing, for others (cf. Groupe µ) synecdoche is the universal matrix of
every trope, producing in praesentia the metonymy and in absentia, the
metaphor.

The linguistic trend

The major representative of this point of view was, no doubt, Roman
Jakobson, with his famous article “Two Aspects of Language and Two
Types of Aphasic Disturbance”. For Jacobson, metaphor an metonymy
become two constant aspects of any language. Any verbal organisation
orients itself toward one or another of those tropes, displaying an axis
of selection (the “paradigmatic” axis, oriented to metaphoric function) and
an axis of combination (the “syntagmatic” axis, oriented to metonymic
function). This linguistic “metaphorisation of metaphor”, though open
to criticism, gradually became a real standard for all semiotic analysis
situated in the linguistic-saussurian tradition.
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

22 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

The semiotic trend

The semiotic point of view, mostly represented by the position of Juri
Lotman, criticises the notion of ‘substitution’, that seems presupposed
by the traditional theory of tropes. For Lotman, the scope of metaphor
and metonymy
is not to enunciate, by the means of some semantic substitution,
somewhat that can be enunciated even without it, but to express a
content or convey an information that can not be transmitted other-
wise. (1053. Our translation)
The notion of ‘substitution’ generally entails that a trope is ‘another’
way to say something, founded in the presence of some common ‘seme’
in both elements -the substituted and the substitute. Lotman retorts that
the effect of the trope is determined not by the presence of some
common ‘seme’ (…), but by the incorporation in some incompatible
semantic areas and by the degree of semantic distance between non-
coincident semes. (…) The borders between the substitute and the
substituted are so incomparable that any attempt to establish the cor-
respondence becomes irrational. (1052)
The consequence of this position is, so to say, a ‘substitution of the the-
ory of substitution’: the real trope is a displacement of the relevance
level of a semiotic unit. An artistic text, for instance, doesn’t necessary
contain any phrastic or lexical trope, but is a whole trope in itself. The
fact that, in addition, it is structured by many non linguistic (spatial,
musical, social) patterns gives it a second kind of modelisation (Lot-
man’s ‘secondary modelisation’), which produces a ‘gap effect’ be-
tween the continuous and the discontinuous way of interpreting it.
That is why, for Lotman, the actual state of rhetoric coincides with the
“text poetics”. He says:
The rhetoric structure doesn’t result automatically from the linguistic
one, but constitutes a clear reinterpretation of it. (…) The rhetoric
structure comes into the verbal text from outside as a complementary
systematization. Such are, for instance, the various ways of introduc-
ing in the text, at their different levels, the laws of symmetry which
constitute the base of spatial semiotics and don’t belong to the struc-
ture of natural languages. (…) It can even be said that the rhetoric
structure not only introduces into the text some external organization
principles that are intrinsically unfamiliar to it, but is also subjectively
perceived as irrelevant to the structural principles of the text. (1060)

The cognitive trend

One further step on the way to generalisation of tropes can be per-
ceived in the attitude that considers them no longer as only universal
linguistic functions but even as universal cognitive patterns.
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 23

One of the forerunners of this tendency can be found in the aesthetic

orientations of Baroque. The notion of “acuteness” in Baltasar Gracián,
but principally in the writings of his Italian contemporary Emanuele
Tesauro (1592-1675), is that of a divine property, shared not only by the
humans but also by nature itself, and consists in the art of bringing to-
gether what is normally incompatible and unifying what is in opposi-
tion. The rhetoric figures constitute the appropriate mechanism of
acuteness, but among the figures, the most “acute” is the metaphor,
since “while the others clothe the concepts in words, it (metaphor)
clothes the words themselves in concepts.”4
A modern actualisation of the cognitive trend is the theory of Georges
Lakkoff who, somewhat abusively, calls “metaphor” the normal sche-
matism structuring the possibilities of knowledge.
But perhaps the higher representative of this tendency is the French
anthropologist Dan Sperber, particularly in his article “Rudiments de
rhétorique cognitive”. Sperber’s starting point is the traditional notion
of rhetoric ‘gap’ or ‘displacement’. This notion seems to require some
kind of ‘zero level’ in relation to which a discourse can be considered as
a transgression. But Sperber explains that this ‘figureless’ level of dis-
course doesn’t exist , and that even the most regular and grammatical
sentence can be interpreted in some figurative sense. He concludes:
I have pretended to show that if we can admit some gap, it is not be-
tween many types of discourses but between many levels of concep-
tual representation. The figure is not in the text, and it is not a func-
tion of the sole text. It is in the conceptual representation of the text;
it is a function both of the text and of the shared knowledge. Rhetori-
cians debate in order to know whether beside the phonological, syn-
tactical and semantic figures there are also figures of thought. I
wanted to suggest that there is nothing but figures of thought, in re-
lation to which some phonological, syntactical or semantic features
could play the role of supplementary focal points, being never neces-
sary nor sufficient to release the mechanism of figurative interpreta-
tion. (414-415. Our translation)

The ontological trend

This kind of epistemological “success story” of the theory of tropes,
that started at the ornamental level and kept developing as poetic, lin-
guistic, semiotic and cognitive phenomenon, finally arrived, via Borges
and others, at the level of a genuine ontological question.

4 “…e dove quelle vestono i concetti di parole, questa veste le parole medesime di

concetti”. (67)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

24 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

For the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, the metaphorical efficacy

overflows the limits of the language, the text or the cognition, and gets
to the point of affecting the realm of the reference. His theory of refer-
ential bearing of metaphoric statements, first developed in La métaphore
vive was later resumed by Ricœur himself in these terms:
Just as metaphorical meaning results from the production of a new
semantic relevance on the ruins of literal semantic relevance, so
metaphorical reference would proceed from the collapse of the literal
reference. In order to mark the ontological bearing of this thesis
clearly, I proposed to compare the ‘seeing-as’ of the metaphorical
statement to a ‘being as’ in the extralinguistic order revealed by po-
etic language.”(28)
Nevertheless, if we consider the role of the tropes in the vision of real-
ity offered by the texts of Borges, we must recognise that the ontologi-
cal bearing of rhetoric can go farther beyond the consideration of a ref-
erential ‘being as’. For Borges, the tropes, as forms, are the real matrix
of historical events as well as of the structure of reality. And this is
what we would like to illustrate in the second part of this essay.

The Ontology of Tropes

Somehow Borges comes back to a view that recognises the diversity of

multiple tropes as “forms”. But what is new in his own position is that
these forms contribute to structure not only discourses, but also facts
and things. It is therefore in harmony with his style of thinking, to in-
troduce a paper as follows: “I shall begin the history of American let-
ters by the history of a metaphor”5… or “Perhaps the universal history
is the history of a few metaphors.”6 Let us start our journey through
some of Borges’ most relevant texts, with his analysis of a historical
event.

“The Wall and the Books”

This is one of those typical Borges’ texts7 which are presented as having
no fictional character. It is just a “note” that displays Borges’ reflections

5 “Empezaré la historia de las letras americanas con la historia de una metáfora”

(“Nathaniel Hawthorne”. Otras Inquisiciones. OC 2: 48).

6 “Quizá la historia universal es la historia de unas cuantas metáforas.”(“La Esfera

de Pascal”. Otras Inquisiciones. OC 2: 14)

7 When not explicitly mentioned, all the quotations of Borges’ writings in English

are extracted from the American anthology Labyrinths.

 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 25

on a historical deed: the fact that the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti
was the one who paradoxically ordered both the construction of the
wall of China and the destruction of all books in his empire. What dis-
turbs Borges in his analysis is that both actions, construction and de-
struction in such an enormous scale, have their origins in the same per-
son. He considers a few of the many possible conjectures -historical,
ethical, magical, etc.- that could help to interpret this paradox, but since
none of them alone provides a satisfactory interpretation, each is ulti-
mately discarded.
The most immediate interpretation is also the most trivial: “Burning
books and erecting fortifications is a common task of princes” (221)8.
But doing that in such a scale should not be a simple question of degree:
Walling in an orchard or a garden is ordinary, but not walling in an
empire. Nor is it banal to pretend that the most traditional of races
renounce the memory of its past, mythical or real. (221)9
A possible historical interpretation is that by burning the books, the
emperor attempted to eradicate the memory of the whole past in order
to abolish one single memory: that his own mother had to be banished
for being a libertine. “The conjecture is worthy of attention, but tell us
nothing about the wall” (222)10.
Borges also briefly offers a magical interpretation without further
elaboration: maybe “the wall in space and the fire in time were magic
barriers designed to halt death”(222)11.
There are also two possible psychological interpretations: a) “a king
who began by destroying and then resigned himself to preserving”12,
and b) “a disillusioned king who destroyed what he had previously
defended”13. The problem here is that these interpretations presuppose
that both acts were separated by an amount of time adequate to foster a
radical change in emotional state, but history tells that they were al-

8 “Quemar libros y erigir fortificaciones es tarea común de los príncipes” (Otras in-

quisiciones. OC 2: 11).
9 “Cercar un huerto o un jardín es común; no, cercar un imperio. Tampoco es baladí

pretender que la más tradicional de las razas renuncie a la memoria de su pasado,

mítico o verdadero.” (11)
10 “Esta conjetura es atendible, pero nada nos dice de la muralla” (11).
11 “La muralla en el espacio y el incendio en el tiempo fueron barreras mágicas des-
tinadas a detener la muerte.” (12)
12 “(…) un rey que empezó por destruir y luego se resignó a conservar” (12).
13 “(…) un rey desengañado que destruyó lo que antes defendía.” (12)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

26 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

most simultaneous, because those who hid books to preserve them

from the flames were sentenced to work on the construction of the wall.
Finally, Borges arrives to his own rhetorical hypothesis: “Perhaps the
wall was just a metaphor…”14 This astonishing conjecture means that
this historical fact may be interpreted as an aesthetic phenomenon in
which, as it happens with several rhetorical tropes, two contradictory
elements, stated together, arrive to create some unstable situation in
which they neutralize each other. In this case the burning of books be-
came an act of veneration and the act of walling in the empire an act of
trivialisation :
Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in his empire because he knew that it
was perishable and destroyed the books because he understood that
they were sacred books, in other words, books that teach what the
entire universe or the mind of every man teaches. Perhaps the burn-
ing of the libraries and the erection of the wall are operations which
in some secret way cancel each other. (223)15
Such a hypothesis, in which the plausible interpretation lies in the his-
torical ‘performativity’ of the forms as forms, independently of their
content, has the virtue of allowing the integration of all other interpre-
tations. Borges concludes:
Generalizing from the preceding case, we could infer that all forms
have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content”.
This would concord with the thesis of Benedetto Croce; already Pater
in 1877 had affirmed that all arts aspire to the state of music, which is
pure form. (223)16
This text plays a capital role in the construction of Borges’ rhetorical
vision of ontology. For the moment, we can retain three aspects of it:
First, the tropes are pure forms, without any exigency of some semantic
implication. The real function of tropes can be derived from the notion
of ‘musical’ forms as pure combinatory occurrences. Secondly, so in-
terpreted, the tropes do not only overflow the limits of the discursive

14 “Acaso la muralla fue una metáfora” (12).

15 “Acaso Shih Huang Ti amuralló el imperio porque sabía que éste era deleznable y
destruyó los libros por entender que eran libros sagrados, o sea libros que enseñan
lo que enseña el universo entero o la conciencia de cada hombre. Acaso el incendio
de las bibliotecas y la edificación de la muralla son operaciones que de un modo
secreto se anulan.” (12)
16 “Generalizando el caso anterior, podríamos inferir que todas las formas tienen su
virtud en sí mismas y no en un “contenido” conjetural. Esto concordaría con la tesis
de Benedetto Croce; ya Pater, en 1877, afirmó que todas las artes aspiran a la condi-
ción de la música, que no es otra cosa que forma.” (13)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 27

phenomena, but go also beyond the pure artistic domain, so that they
become the secret formal root (as the ontological reason) of historical
events. Finally, it seems that for Borges the rhetorical-formal interpreta-
tion of this fact somehow depends on the circumstance that the two
events were, if not simultaneous, at least occurred close together in
time. We will see that the rhetorical interpretation of the universe im-
plies its fundamental untemporality. Narrative structures seem to be
the human way of approaching the timeless ontological structure, con-
stituted by rhetorical forms.

“The Zahir”, a pragmatic oximoron

The second text we are to consider has less relevance for our purpose in
its main structure, but presents a passage in which a personal event is
explicitly described by Borges as a pragmatic trope.
One evening in Buenos Aires, the narrator, after leaving the funeral of
his friend Teodelina Villar, enters a bar and among the coins in his
change he gets the Zahir (an object, in this case a coin, which has the
property of being maddeningly unforgettable). The coin triggers a dis-
turbing series of brooding meditations, and after a restless night, he
decides to rid himself of the coin. After wandering in Buenos Aires
randomly, so he can not rediscover his location, he enters a bar and
purchases a brandy with the Zahir. Unfortunately this does not end his
obsession, but rather intensifies it: even though he no longer owns the
coin, he cannot exorcise its growing presence from his mind. Obtaining
the proper old books, he studies his condition and learns that to see the
Zahir is to be driven irrevocably mad. Nothing can save him, and the
presence of the Zahir will gradually replace reality, ultimately becom-
ing his only reality.
For our present purposes, there is a passage in the story that deserves
our attention: the narrator’s impressions of the night when he got the
Zahir:
In the figure of speech called oxymoron a word is modified by an
epithet which seems to contradict it: thus, the Gnostics spoke of dark
light, and the alchemists of a black sun. For me it was a kind of oxy-
moron to go straight from my last visit with Clementina [sic] Villar
to buy a drink at a bar; I was intrigued by the coarseness of the act,
by its ease. (The contrast was heightened by the circumstance that
there was a card game in progress). (191)17

17 “En la figura que se llama oximoron, se aplica a una palabra un epíteto que parece

contradecirla; así los gnósticos hablaron de luz oscura; los alquimistas, de un sol
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

28 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

The immediate consecution of two ethically incompatible actions is

thus interpreted by Borges as a pragmatic oximoron.
Gradually Borges will lead us to the idea that the contradictions only
exist in the temporal vision of the world, which provides only one
thing at a time at the same place. Behind this appearance, there is the
timeless vision, which denies time and gives the synoptic vision of a
pure abstract combination of forms.
Borges constantly plays with what remains of the notion of truth once
time has supposedly vanished. Let us notice, for example, how the
short story “Emma Zunz” concludes, after the protagonist has con-
fessed to the police the murder of her employer, putting forward as a
reason of it a sexual abuse:
Actually, the story was incredible, but it impressed everyone because
substantially it was true. True was Emma Zunz’s tone, true was her
shame, true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suf-
fered: only the circumstances were false, the time and one or two
proper names. (169)18

“The theologians”: God’s Ars Rhetorica

The next question is about the inner system of Borges’ ontological the-
ory of tropes. Practising, as usual, a constant epistemological transgres-
sion, Borges will expose his theoretical position through the plot of a
theological story: “The Theologians”, included in The Aleph.
The events are situated in the high Middle Age, and the frame leans on
the rivalry of two great theologians in their controversy against two
heresies. It is important to stress that both heresies deal with different
conceptions of time. What follows summarises the narrative stakes of
the text:
Two theologians, Aurelian and John of Pannonia, are engaged in fight-
ing against the heresy of a sect called the Monotones, who affirm that
“the history is a circle and that there is nothing which has been and will

negro. Salir de mi última visita a Teodelina Villar y tomar una caña en un almacén
era una especie de oximoron; su grosería y su facilidad me tentaron. (La circunstan-
cia de que se jugara a los naipes aumentaba el contraste.)” (El Aleph. OC 1: 590)
18 “La historia era increíble, en efecto, pero se impuso a todos, porque sustancial-
mente era cierta. Verdadero era el tono de Emma Zunz, verdadero el pudor, verda-
dero el odio. Verdadero también era el ultraje que había padecido; sólo eran falsas
las circunstancias, la hora y uno o dos nombres propios.” (El Aleph. OC 1: 568)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 29

not be” (150)19. Simultaneously, driven by an old rivalry and rancour,

Aurelian secretly conducts a personal battle against John. Wishing to
surpass John of Pannonia in order “to be rid of the resentment he in-
spired in him” (151)20, he prepares his own refutation of the heresy. The
Council of Pergamum considers both of their refutations, finally decid-
ing that John’s treatise is the best to condemn the Monotone leader Eu-
phorbus to death. Time elapses, the heresy is banished, but Aurelian
continues his coert battle against John of Pannonia. Although both
share the same faith and the same enemy, all what Aurelian writes is
secretly destined to surpass John. Some years later, there appears a new
heretical sect, the Histriones. They found their main doctrine in a per-
version of the idea that the higher world is a reflection of the lower,
and they develop many and divergent and heretical doctrines. In
Aquilea, Aurelian’s diocese, the Histriones affirm that time does no tol-
erate repetitions. Aurelian decides to send to Rome a presentation of
Histriones’ heresy but cannot find the words to resume the thesis in
question. Suddenly he finds the right sentence and writes it down. Af-
terwards he remembers that many years before he had read literally
the same sentence in John’s refutation of the Monotones. He decides to
include this quotation in his report, aware that this could imply an ac-
cusation of heresy against John. Actually, following Aurelian’s refuta-
tion of the Histriones based in John’s arguments against the Mono-
tones, John is accused of heretical opinions and sentenced to die at the
stake. Aurelian does not cry over John’s death but spends the subse-
quent years trying to justify the death sentence and his own tortuous
denunciation. One night, by a strange coincidence, Aurelian himself
dies, “just as John had”, in the flames of a burning forest.
Borges cannot relate the surprising end of the story without a sort of
meta-narrative reflection: “The end of this story can only be related in
metaphors since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where there is
no time.” (157-158)21
And the conclusion takes, once more, the form of a conjecture:
Perhaps it would be correct to say that Aurelian spoke with God and
that He was so little interested in religious differences that He took
him for John of Pannonia. This, however, would imply a confusion in

19 “(…) la historia es un círculo y que nada es que no haya sido y que no será.” (OC
1: 550)
20 “(…) para curarse del rencor que éste le infundía” (551).
21 “El final de la historia sólo es referible en metáforas, ya que pasa en el reino de los
cielos, donde no hay tiempo.” (556)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

30 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

the divine mind. It is more correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian

learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Panonnia
(the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorrer and the abhorred,
the accuser and the accused) formed one single person. (158)22
This story is quite long and its complexity discourages us from any
analytical proposal. Nevertheless, as far as we are concerned, what has
just been summarised should be enough to pick up some main rhetori-
cal patterns in the narrative plot.
One first evidence is the ‘oximoronic’ structure determined by the end
of the story: two opposite figures become one -a ‘heretic orthodox-
believer ‘ has the same structure as a ‘black sun’.
A further step into some lateral frames allow us to detect other rhetori-
cal features. Let’s consider, for instance, the two main oppositions es-
tablished by the text: the first one is determined by the axis of the ‘en-
mity’ (between an inside and an outside concerning orthodoxy) and
establishes the poles ‘orthodox’ vs ’ heretic’. The second opposition,
internal to the orthodox field, is determined by the axis of ‘rivalry’ and
establishes the poles ‘reverent’ vs ’irreverent’. What happens is that af-
ter the first victory of the ‘inside’ against the ‘outside’, the outside cate-
gories invade the inside field, and as a result the categories of enmity
coincide with those of rivalry. Moreover, if we dispose in rows and
columns these oppositions, it is easy to perceive that in each axis there
is a positive value (‘orthodox’, ‘reverent’) and a negative value (‘here-
tic’, ‘irreverent’). And then, the surprise comes from the fact that the
new attribution of categories crosses and inverts the standard values,
so that the one who becomes ‘heretic’ is not the ‘irreverent’ but the
‘reverent’, the ‘irreverent’ becoming, in consequence, ‘orthodox’. This
structure corresponds to the rhetorical figure of hypallage (from Greek
“exchange”), that mainly consists of an attribute that affects an object
different from the one it is logically or semantically supposed to affect.
In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream we find a quite extreme ex-
ample of this procedure: “I see a voice. Now will I to the chink,
to spy and I can hear my Thisby’s face” (5.1.189-90). But the most
common example is the one Borges himself often mentions, the virgil-

22“Tal vez cabría decir que Aureliano conversó con Dios y que Éste se interesa tan
poco en diferencias religiosas que lo tomó por Juan de Panonia. Ello, sin embargo,
insinuaría una confusión de la mente divina. Más correcto es decir que en el paraí-
so, Aureliano supo que para la insondable divinidad, él y Juan de Panonia (el orto-
doxo y el hereje, el aborrecedor y el aborrecido, el acusador y la víctima) formaban
una sola persona.” (556)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 31

ian hexameter: “Ibant oscuri sola sub nocte per umbras”, in which the hu-
man solitude and the nocturne shadows exchange their attributes.
Anyway, the consequence of such inversion is, in this case, not so dras-
tic. Its only effect is a total doubt installed about the relevance of any
kind of distinction: if the ‘reverent heretic’, condemned, “dies at the
stake”, the ‘irreverent orthodox’, “died just as John had”. By the way,
let us remark that, after all, both theologians meet in Paradise…
The role of flames is capital in this story. They constitute the element of
neutralisation of all varieties of distinction. Four different stakes struc-
ture the transition between opposite values. The first one is the burning
by the Huns of the sacred books in a monastery. The second one is the
punishment of the Monotones’ leader Euphorbus. The third one is the
punishment of John of Pannonia, and the last the forest “stake” that
burned Aurelian. The result of the first fire determines the way of all
subsequent transitions: the fire consumes a part of Saint Augustin’s
Civitas Dei, that refutes the platonic theory of eternal repetition, but the
burned piece concerned only the augustinian refutation, leaving intact
the stated platonic quotation as if it were a part of augustinian doctrine:
The text pardoned by the flames enjoyed special veneration and those
who read and reread it in that remote province came to forget that the
author had only stated this doctrine in order better to refute it. (150)23
Thus the first and the constant effect of the flames is to pervert any sys-
tem of doctrinal distinction: fire is blind, as Borges was. It can be said
that each character in the story is constructed following this first
schema of ‘released quotations’. Each character literally encloses, as a
refutation does, the opposite character into his own ‘script’, and then,
due to some literal or metaphorical fire, the negation and quotation
marks disappear and the contraries become a single, perverted, entity.
Yet, perverting doesn’t mean inducing in some chaotic confusion. What
time distinguishes, ‘flames’ integrate -but following different figures
that correspond to rhetorical forms. Such is the God’s ‘ars rhetorica’
Borges introduces in the coda of his story.
The final scene cannot be described but metaphorically, not -as we
would expect it- because it is impossible to describe the transcendence,
but because in the kingdom of heaven, “there is no time.” Thus the
metaphor is the timeless counterpart of narrative oppositions in a tem-

23 “El texto que las llamas perdonaron gozó de una veneración especial y quienes lo
leyeron y releyeron en esa remota provincia dieron en olvidar que el autor sólo de-
claró esa doctrina para poder mejor confutarla.” (550)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

32 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

porally affected situation. The human vision considers the universe and
the history as constituted partes extra partes, but for the eternal present
of God, the oppositions are simultaneous elements of a complex figure.
What there is struggle, here is oximoron. The history is only a temporal
degradation of the eternal timeless rhetoric.
In fact, Borges doesn’t believe in the reality of time. Not in the sense
Kant does not, but rather he professes the temporally disconnection of
things and events. He has published an essay paradoxically titled “A
New Refutation of Time”(Other Inquisitions), in which he says:
I deny the existence of one single time, in which all things are linked
as in a chain. The denial of coexistence is no less arduous than the
denial of succession.
I deny, in an elevated number of instances, the successive; I deny, in
an elevated number of instances, the contemporary as well. The lover
who thinks While I was so happy, thinking of the fidelity of my love, she
was deceiving me deceives himself: if every state we experience is ab-
solute, such happiness was not contemporary to betrayal; the discov-
ery of that betrayal is another state, which cannot modify the “previ-
ous” ones, though it can modify their recollection. The misfortune of
today is no more real than the happiness of the past. (257)24
Finally, we can observe that the rhetorical ‘spatialisation’ of temporal
oppositions leads Borges not to a new kind of platonic dogmatism, as if
there were some rhetorical archetypes to which this reality should be
conformed, but to a sort of aesthetic scepticism. The aesthetic view of
reality allows the gratuitous treatment of the oppositions as if they
were as many figures we can contemplate, without any necessity of de-
ciding about their truth-possibilities.
In this connection we can remember that each time Borges himself has
to evaluate the different interpretations of a historical or fictional event,
he prefers to savour each of them. This is the meaning of his frequent
‘perhaps’ we have found in “The Theologians”, but also in “The Wall
and the Books”. In front of the impressive array of possible interpreta-
tions that can be provided to the paradoxical action of Shih Huang Ti,
the rhetorical position of Borges does not produce a new interpretation,

24 “(…) yo [niego], la de un solo tiempo, en el que se eslabonan todos los hechos.

Negar la coexistencia no es menos arduo que negar la sucesión. / Niego, en un nú-
mero elevado de casos, lo sucesivo; niego, en un número elevado de casos, lo con-
temporáneo también. El amante que piensa Mientras yo estaba tan feliz, pensando en la
fidelidad de mi amor, ella me engañaba, se engaña: si cada estado que vivimos es abso-
luto, esa felicidad no fue contemporánea de esa traición; el descubrimiento de esa
traición es un estado más, inapto para modificar a los “anteriores”, aunque no a su
recuerdo. La desventura de hoy no es más real que la dicha pretérita.” (OC 2: 140)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 33

but the equanimous contemplation of all the conjectures in their con-

figuration:
The tenacious wall which at this moment, and at all moments, casts
its system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a
Caesar who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; it is
plausible that this idea moves us in itself, aside from the conjectures
it allows. (Its virtue may lie in the opposition of constructing and de-
stroying on an enormous scale.) (223)25
That is why, even when Borges professes his refutation of time, he only
denies it “in an elevated number of instances”…

“Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)”: Art as Reference

The last short story we would like to mention illustrates one of the
main consequences of Borges rhetorical ontology: what formal figures
first produce is literature (or aesthetic worlds, in general), in relation to
which the empirical reality functions as a problematic reduction.
The story in question -“Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)” -
tells about an Argentine man, a gaucho, whose life resembles many
others: born in the pampas, he grew up and lived in a ‘barbarian’
world. As many other gauchos, he accepted no other justice than his
own, so that to punish an offense, he once killed a man. Since then, he
became a ‘matrero’, a man always hiding himself from the police. One
day he is captured and sent to a fort, to defend the frontier against the
Indians. Later, redeemed through this experience, he turns to civiliza-
tion and becomes a ‘good citizen’ and even a policeman. In 1870 he got
the order to capture a bandit who was a deserter and had killed two
men. The night of 12 July 1870 Tadeo Isidoro Cruz and five of his men
discovered the fugitive; surrounded by the police, the criminal left his
hiding place to fight alone and disarmed against the five men around
him. Watching this brave man fighting alone, Cruz understood that his
destiny was not to catch the fugitive. He threw his cap on the soil, he
cried that he would not consent the crime of killing a courageous man,
and taking his place beside the deserter, he started fighting against his
own soldiers.

25 “La muralla tenaz que en este momento, y en todos, proyecta sobre tierras que no
veré, su sistema de sombras, es la sombra de un César que ordenó que la más reve-
rente de las naciones quemara su pasado; es verosímil que la idea nos toque de por
sí, fuera de las conjeturas que permite. (Su virtud puede estar en la oposición de
construir y destruir, en enorme escala.) (OC 2: 12-13)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

34 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

Borges’ story ends: “beside the deserter Martín Fierro” and this name is
a disclosure to the reader: just now the reader notices that what he has
read was not a ‘real’ biography but the trans-fictional reconstruction of
a fictional person: Cruz, the friend of Fierro, the main character in El
gaucho Martín Fierro, a long poem written by José Hernández in 1869.
One element of surprise in this text is that Cruz, an illiterate man, as he
is living his real life, guesses that, in a certain way, he has already lived
all those present events. And only the aware lector discovers that
Cruz’s life is, so to say, a pragmatic ‘quotation’ of a character in an exis-
tent literary book. But then, the decisions the man takes moved by this
special ‘memory’ determine a ‘real’ evolution of his character inside the
plot of the book in question. The effect here is similar to the situation
created by Woody Allen in The purple rose of Cairo. The hypothesis that
lies under those artistic works is that there is no priority of real life over
fiction.
Another surprising element is that in Borges’ rewriting of the classical
poem, Cruz not only rejoins his official adversary Fierro (that is the
case in Hernández’s poem), but also ‘becomes’ Fierro: fighting with
him is a temporal way of showing his untemporal identification whit
him. This is the way in which Borges describes the last encounter:
A notorious reason prevents me from telling the struggle. Be it
enough for me to recall that the deserter wounded or killed several
Cruz’s soldiers. As Cruz was fighting in the dark (as his body was
fighting in the dark), he begun to understand. He understood that no
destiny is better than another, but that each man must fulfil the des-
tiny he carries inside. He understood that the shoulder-knot and the
uniform begun to tease him. He understood his deep destiny of wolf,
not of gregarious dog; he understood that the other was him. (OC 1:,
563, our translation)26
In the original poem, Cruz just decides to rejoin the camp of his enemy.
For Borges, he really turns into his enemy, or better, he discovers they
are the same person, as the two theologians in Paradise. Borges stresses
this effect describing some scenes of Cruz’s life in the same way
Hernández describes Fierro’s.

26 “Un motivo notorio me veda referir la pelea. Básteme recordar que el desertor
malhirió o mató a varios de los hombres de Cruz. Éste, mientras combatía en la os-
curidad (mientras su cuerpo combatía en la oscuridad), empezó a comprender.
Comprendió que un destino no es mejor que otro, pero que todo hombre debe aca-
tar el que lleva adentro. Comprendió que las jinetas y el uniforme ya lo estorbaban.
Comprendió su íntimo destino de lobo, no de perro gregario; comprendió que el
otro era él.”
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

Borges and the Ontology of Tropes 35

But for our purpose, this text presents a huge novelty in the strange
parenthetical sentence by which Borges corrects the description of the
conversion: “As Cruz was fighting in the dark (as his body was fighting
in the dark)”. This correction is not a sign of hesitation but a warning.
That means that a human being, for the author, is composed by two
separate substances: the body, that is the superficial component, and
the Other. Normally we are supposed to fill in this Other with the soul.
In this case, however, the other, the deep component is the literary
identity of the person. The narration, conceived as the temporal way of
understanding the eternal rhetorical grounds of reality, is thus telling
the imaginary moment in which the real person who fights, is a void
carcass, since his true literary entity has already left the contradictions
of the real illusion, to precede the body in the realm of the figures…
Now we can understand why, as a conclusion of his conjectures about
the wall and the books, about political, historical and ethical things,
Borges offers one of the best definitions of… the aesthetic fact:
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, cer-
tain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said
something we should never had missed, or are about to say some-
thing; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, per-
haps, the aesthetic phenomenon. (“The Wall and the Books” 223)27
He seems to say: “All real things are shadows: the rest is literature”.

Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

Bibliography

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. 3 vols. Barcelona: Emecé, 1989.
Fraunce, Abraham. The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588). Ed. by Ethel Seaton. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1950.
Groupe µ. Rhétorique générale. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Distur-
bances”. Selected Writings. The Hague: Mouton, 1971, vol. 2, 239-259.
Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. München: Max Huber, 1973.
Lotman, Juri M.: “Retorica”. Enciclopedia Einaudi. Torino 1980 Ed.

27 “La música, los estados de felicidad, la mitología, las caras trabajadas por el tiem-
po, ciertos crepúsculos y ciertos lugares, quieren decirnos algo, o algo dijeron que
no hubiéramos debido perder, o están por decir algo; esta inminencia de una reve-
lación, que no se produce, es, quizá, el hecho estético.” (OC 2: 13)
 search by... | volume | author | word | > menu

36 Ivan Almeida & Cristina Parodi

Peacham, Henry. The Garden of Eloquence (1577). Menston, Scolar Press, English Lin-
guistics 267 (Facsimile of 1st ed.), 1971.
Perelman, Chaïm, Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. La Nouvelle Rhétorique. Traité de
l’Argumentation. 2 vol. Paris: P.U.F., 1958.
Quintilian. M. Fabi Quintiliani Institutionis Oratoriae Libri XII. Oxford: Clarendon,
1970.
Ramus, Petrus (Pierre de la Ramée). Arguments in rhetoric against Quintilian. Latin
text of Rhetoricae distinctiones in Quintilianum. 1549. With English translation
by Carole Newlands. DeKalb (Ill): Northern Illinois University Press, 1986.
Ricœur, Paul. “Intellectual Autobiography”. Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.) The Philosophy
of Paul Ricœur. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1995.
Ricœur, Paul. La métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil, 1975. English transl. The Rule of Meta-
phor. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1977.
Sperber, Dan. “Rudiments de rhétorique cognitive”. Poétique 23 (1975): 389-415.
Tesauro, Emanuele. Il cannocchiale aristotelico, Ed. Ezio Raimondi. Milano, Napoli:
Einaudi, Classici Ricciardi, 1978.