Borges Infinity and One

Infinity and One: On Jorge Luis Borges's El Inmortal
Author(s): Rex Butler

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 107, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 182-197
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.107.1.0182
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INFINITY AND ONE:

ON JORGE LUIS BORGESS EL INMORTAL
e short story El inmortal is undoubtedly one of Jorge Luis Borgess essential texts, one of the no more than twenty on which his reputation rests. e
story is discussed in virtually every survey of Borgess work, and is frequently
selected when just a few are taken up. In the books on Borges that strive
to develop a more general thesis or argument, the story is inevitably one of
those referred to, as though it were necessary that it be accounted for. e
story has attracted a wide range of critical responses but arguably remains
essentially unread. is story of immortality, in other words, needs to be told
again, and this, I would suggest, is how it lives on. But what kind of a story
is it that can never be exhausted, that can keep on being retold? is is both
one of the questions El inmortal asks and one of the questions at stake in
reading it. e answer Borges provides is surprising. It is not that immortality
is some enigma which cannot be fathomed, that remains the same beneath
all of its various retellings. It is rather because immortality is equivalent to its
narration, and does not exist before it, that it lives on for ever. Immortality
is its narration: this is the unexpected equivalence that Borges proposes in
El inmortal, which at once makes the story eminently susceptible to literary
criticism and challenges every critical perspective upon it.
El inmortal was originally published in Los anales de Buenos Aires in February , and was later included in the fourth volume of short stories Borges
was to publish, El aleph, in . Los anales was a journal that Borges, who
principally earned his living as a freelance reviewer, edited from early
until mid-, when he resigned aer a dispute with the proprietor. During
the period of just over eighteen months he was in charge of the journal,
Borges published in it, as well as El inmortal, such other classic stories as
Los telogos, La casa de Asterin, and El zahir. But the period, for all of its
professional success, was personally dicult for Borges, which has prompted
several autobiographical readings of El inmortal. e most common interpretation, backed up with some evidence from Borges himself, is that the story
is an allegory of the severe insomnia from which Borges suered during these
years. As his rst ocial biographer, Emir Rodrguez Monegal, writes: e
literary sources of El inmortal are so obvious [Poe and Kaa][. . .] that the
reader may overlook how much of the story is based on Borgess insomnia,
which he suered from for years. A later biographer, James Woodall, more
speculatively proposes that the story stems from Borgess sexual fears, or at
Emir Rodrguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (New York: Dutton, ),
p. .
Modern Language Review, (),

Modern Humanities Research Association
least is a response to the psychotherapy he was then receiving to overcome

certain sexual diculties:
What [the psychologist] discovered was a man whose deep-rooted inhibitions, over
coitus in particular, needed removing not just for the sake of his psychological health,
but also for the good of Argentine literature. [. . .] El inmortal begins with a Roman tribunes quest to join the City of Immortals in desert sandsa parable full of
labyrinths and hopes for endless life, for eternal escape from the self.
In overall critical assessments of Borgess uvre, the stories of El aleph,

coming aer the earlier volumes El jardn de senderos que se bifurcan ()
and Ficciones (), are seen to contain more recognizable characters and,
although still featuring fantastic plots, to put them in more realistic settings,
including even the names of actual Buenos Aires suburbs and streets. is
approach is understood to be consistent with a move away from such previous
essay-ctions as El acercamiento a Almotsim and Pierre Menard, autor del
Quijote, which oen take the form of book reviews or bibliographic entries,
towards more traditional forms of narrative. Commentators, when they speak
about the new ctional depth to the stories of El aleph, most oen mention
El zahir and El aleph, but they could equally well point to El inmortal.
e story is one of Borgess longest, coming in at some , words, and it
features a central character whose fate is meant to move us; indeed, the whole
notion of the pathetic, or our ability to identify with another, is explicitly
at stake in the text. And yet the story is oen judged by critics as a failure,
containing neither the dizzying metaphysical conceits of the earlier stories nor
the dramatic complexities and dely sketched characters of the later. Typical
of such negative critical assessments is the following by Gene H. Bell-Villada:
El inmortal has an awkward, unwieldy quality, and, except for the pathos
in the third-person account of Cartaphilus, one notes a certain atness, a
curious lack of meaningful irony and emotion in the narrative.
In a way, Bell-Villadas comments are entirely justied. ere is in El inmortal a lack of a compelling central character with whom we can identify
and a confusion over narrative voice. But these are risks that Borges deliberately runs: he is trying to create a narrative in which the central character lacks
identiable qualities and in which it is impossible to decide who is speaking
at certain moments in the text. Indeed, for both logical and dramatic reasons,
the identity of the central character of the story must remain uncertain. He
is in fact several characters at once; but this blurring of identities must remain implicit, even in the nal revelation, for fear of tipping the narrative
too far towards the supernatural. Instead, Borges suggests this confusion of
James Woodall, Borges: A Life (New York: Basic Books, ), p. .

Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and his Fiction: A Guide to his Mind and Art (Austin: University
of Texas Press, ), p. .
Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal
personalities formally, with a subtle and at rst reading almost indiscernible

shi between rst- and third-person forms that takes place throughout the
narrative. Again, it is possible that Borges is not entirely successful in this
strategyboth in adequately making clear the ambiguity between characters
and in suciently explaining itbut it is crucial to realize that both this
ambiguity and the inability entirely to explain it are essential to the story and
its intended eect.
I would say, however, that posing these essentially literary questions regarding the success or failure of the story is to fall short of the deepest level of
El inmortal, or at least that the literary in Borges is inseparable from another
whole level of meaning and pleasure in the text that I would call, for want of
a better word, philosophicalnamely, the way in which Borges so brilliantly,
and movingly, dramatizes ideas in his stories. is too has been recognized in
the critical writing on El inmortal; and I oer here, before putting forward
a dierent interpretation, a brief overview of the main ideas that have been
seen in the story, along with the names of some of the chief critics associated
with them.
Critics such as Ana Mara Barrenechea and L. A. Murillo have recognized
the importance of the notion of the labyrinth in El inmortal. In the maze of
underground chambers the Immortal must negotiate before he can get to the
City of the Immortals, the connection is made to such other Borges stories
as La muerte y la brjula and El jardn de senderos que se bifurcan, which
feature a similarly ramifying or labyrinthine structure. Indeed, such later critics as Dominique Jullien argue for a perversion or reversal of the usually
understood relationship between these underground chambers and the City
above it, in so far as it is the labyrinth above ground that is more confused
and disorienting than the labyrinth below.
Critics have related the experience of immortality as evoked in El inmortal
to other of Borgess meditations on the nature of time, in both his ction and
his essays. us W. H. Bossart points to the fact that in his Nueva refutacin
del tiempo Borges similarly presents a cluster of arguments supporting the
view that time is unreal. And Cynthia Stephens draws a connection with
Borgess La nadera de la personalidad, which argues that the personality is
See on this Brbara Alfano, Fugitive Diegesis of the First Person Singular in Borges and
Calvino, Variaciones Borges, (), ; and Ronald Christ, e Narrow Act: Borgess Art
of Allusion (New York: New York University Press, ), pp. .
See Ana Mara Barrenechea, Borges: e Labyrinth Maker (New York: New York University
Press, ), pp. ; and L. A. Murillo, e Labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges: An Introduction
to the Stories of El aleph, Modern Language Quarterly, (), (p. ).
See Dominique Jullien, Biography of an Immortal, Comparative Literature, (),
(p. ).
W. H. Bossart, Borges and Philosophy: Self, Time and Metaphysics (New York: Peter Lang,
), pp. .
a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation

or visceral reality.
Drawing on a passage in the story in which an Immortal explains the consequences of immortality, some have sought to discern a certain ethics of
immortality in El inmortal. A chief characteristic of this is a certain disdain
or indierence, in that each act is cancelled and corrected by its opposite. is
ethics is elaborated by Alfred Mac Adam in the following terms: e Immortals Cartaphilus meets near the City of Immortals are brutish Troglodytes:
immortality locks them inside history, which for them is a pre-established
order, a completed text. And this fatalism or determinism can be seen to be
Borgess own, as evidenced in a whole series of such stories as La forma de la
espada and Tema del traidor y del hroe, in which opposites turn into each
other.
Yet further critics, prompted by the postscript to the story in which the
tale we have just read is designated an anthology, have sought to identify
the many literary quotations and allusions that make up El inmortal. is
would include both those authors and texts directly alluded to in the story
(such as Homers Iliad and Odyssey) and those alluded to only indirectly
or forming part of the general intellectual background against which Borges
wrote: Karel Capeks e Makropulos Case, for example, which he reviewed
for the weekly El Hogar in . is series of allusions is generalized by such
critics as Ronald Christ, who traces a series of borrowings from omas de
Quincey, suggesting that beyond any specic reference it is the very procedure
of allusion itself that is the point of the story.
In each case, the critics are essentially right in their identication of the
relevant themes of El inmortal, but perhaps they do not go far enough. ey
understand each of these themes as part of the content of the story, without
seeing how they are also played out in its form. And, beyond the obvious
overlapping of these themes, they fail to see how each is a manifestation of the
same underlying logic, which I would call that of the equivalence of innity
and one. It is a logic in which innity is possible only because of an underlying
unity, while at the same time any such unity is discernible only in an innity
of dierent forms. It is a logic that is to be found throughout Borgess work,
Cynthia Stephens, Borges, Sir omas Browne and the eme of Metempsychosis, Forum for
Modern Language Studies, (), (p. ).
Alfred Mac Adam, Machado De Assis and Jorge Luis Borges: Immortality and its Discontents,
Hispanic Review, (), (p. ).
See Christ, pp. . Possibly the most recent of these eorts is Carlos Mario Meja, El
inmortal: lectura de la echa cretensa y otras prdidas, Variaciones Borges, (), ,
which as its title implies is an attempt to trace a series of hitherto overlooked borrowings by
Borges in the writing of his story. Meja argues especially for the relevance of the rst-century
Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyrana, who at one time was considered a kind of historical
double of Christ (p. ).
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. ).
Jorge Luis Borges, El inmortal, in Obras completas, (Barcelona: Emec, ), pp.

(p. ). All further references to this volume will be indicated by page numbers within the main
text.
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
una sentencia de Herclito. El pensamiento ms fugaz obedece a un dibujo invisible

y puede coronar, o inaugurar, una forma secreta. S de quienes obraban el mal para
que en los siglos futuros resultara el bien, o hubiera resultado en los ya pretritos.
(pp. )
Drawing the nal consequences of this balancing out of opposites, some

time in the tenth century the Immortals realize that, if there is a river whose
waters grant immortality, there must also be a river whose waters grant mortality. Given that the number of rivers in the world is not innite, it is certain
that in the innite amount of time the Immortals have available to them they
will eventually nd that river. e Immortals then set out across the world to
nd that river whose waters will bring them death.
e rest of the story details the wanderings of Rufus, who, like the other
Immortals, is constantly on the lookout for that second river. In he ghts
at the Battle of Hastings. In the thirteenth century he translates the story of
Sinbad in Egypt. In he is in Romania, and later in Germany. In ,
in Aberdeen, he subscribes to the six-volume series of Popes translation of
the Iliad. In , nally, a boat taking him to Bombay runs aground on
the Eritrean coast. While ashore, he drinks from an unidentied stream and,
upon pricking himself with a thorn, notices that he is bleeding and feels pain.
He realizes that he is mortal once again. Rufuss narration then comes to a
halt. When he resumes a year later, he reects upon rereading his manuscript
that what he has written is unreal to him because se mezclan los sucesos de
dos hombres distintos (p. ). He notes that, while some of his statements
would accord with a soldier like Rufus, much of what he has written seems
as though it was narrated by a poet. In particular, he observes that sprinkled
throughout the text are several phrases and expressions taken from Homer.
Not only do we as readers already suspect that the real author of what we have
just read is Cartaphilus, but Rufus/Cartaphilus begins to suspectalthough
this is never explicitly spelt outnot only that they once met Homer but
that they actually are Homer. is accounts for the fact that the narrator
expressly mentions that he once subscribed to an edition of Popes Iliad. It
would indeed be pattico (p. ), in the sense of movingas the narrator
also speaks of other events he relatesthat Homer should nd a version of
his own text in such a distant place and in such a foreign tongue. It would
also be appropriate that, in so far as he was Homer, Cartaphilus the bookseller
helped ensure the perpetuation of the Iliad by passing Popes translation of
it on to another. Finally, it is perhaps no coincidence that Cartaphilus dies at
sea while returning to his homeland of Smyrna and is buried on the island of
Ios in the Aegean, because Smyrna is said to be where Homer was born and
Ios where he is buried.
At the beginning and end of Rufuss/Cartaphiluss tale there is a prologue
and a postscript, written presumably by its editor. e prologue describes

Cartaphiluss death and the circumstances by which the Princess came into
possession of his manuscript. e postscript, dated aer the original publication of Borgess story, details the literary reception of Rufuss/Cartaphiluss
tale, and particularly the account of it given by one Dr Nahum Cordovero
in his A Coat of Many Colours (), a survey, it seems, of texts made up
of other texts. Cordovero, aer speaking of certain Greek and Roman anthologies, and of Ben Jonson, who characterized his contemporaries through
excerpts taken from the rst-century Roman playwright Seneca, then turns
his attention to what he calls la narracin atribuida al anticuario Joseph
Cartaphilus (p. ). In this tale, consistent with the theme of his book,
Cordovero notes numerous quotations or what he calls intrusiones (p. )
from such other authors as Pliny, de Quincey, Descartes, and Bernard Shaw.
From these quotationsperhaps bearing in mind that they come from such
disparate cultures and from such dierent timesCordovero concludes that
Cartaphiluss document is apcrifo (p. ). e editor rejects this conclusion, arguing instead that, in Cartaphiluss words, cuando se acerca el n, ya
no quedan imgines del recuerdo; slo quedan palabras (p. ).
Many interpreters of El inmortal begin with the passage in which Argos the
Troglodyte outlines the consequences of immortality to Rufus/Cartaphilus. It
is said to lead to a perfeccin de la tolerancia y casi del desdn, because
over un plazo innito le ocurren a todo hombre todas las cosas. As Rufus/
Cartaphilus then goes on to elaborate, good and evil, cleverness and dullness,
or any other pair of opposites, over the innite amount of time notionally
available to an immortal tienden al equilibrio [. . .] se anulan y se corrigen.
It is this supposed indierence that would explain how the Immortals were
able to let Rufus/Cartaphilus suer aer he drank from that rst stream.
It is this that would explain why the Immortals set out to nd the stream
that would cancel their immortality. And it is this that is ultimately seen to
explain Borgess own aesthetic of immortality: not only the whole series of
ctional scenarios in which apparent opposites, such as hero/traitor, believer/
unbeliever, victim/persecutor, are shown to turn into each other, but also his
belief that through the practice of literature we are able to become everybody
else. When an author such as Shakespeare writes, he identies with each of
the characters he writes about; but, equally, when we read Shakespeare, we are
able successively to inhabit all of these characters and sympathetically, if momentarily, to become all of them in that great communal exercise of literature.
As Borges writes of the Odyssey in El inmortal, in a way that would apply
not just to the one writing the original text but also to all of those (including
Homer) who later come to read it: Homero compuso la Odisea; postulado
un plazo innito, con innitas circunstancias y cambios, lo imposible es no

componer, siquiera una vez, la Odisea (p. ).
Again, it is at this level of generality that El inmortal is usually read, with a
vague gesturing towards the desdn and to the se anulan y se corrigen that
the notion of immortality seems to imply. But even on a rst reading, there
are qualications made to this, qualications so typical of Borgess work and
so important to a full understanding of it. Borges does not speak of desdn
but of casi del desdn. He does not say that cleverness and dullness cancel
and correct each other, but that they tend towards that end. is leaves open
the possibility that this desdn is never entirely whole, that cleverness and
dullness never entirely cancel each other out, that, just as in the game of
ipping a coin that is spoken of, any particular result can not only be the
cancelling and correction of what comes before but also what has itself to be
cancelled and corrected. It is this that explains the statementalmost entirely
overlooked in readings of the storythat, given the tendency of good and evil
to cancel and correct each other, there are quienes obraban el mal para que
en los siglos futuros resultara el bien, o hubiera resultado en los ya pretritos.
For one of the implications here is that the same act can be both the cancelling
and correction of what comes before and what must be itself cancelled and
corrected by what follows. It marks the end of a sequence and, simultaneously,
opens a fresh sequence. We might even say that at the same time it is dierent
from what comes before in so far as it cancels and corrects it, and the same
as what comes before in so far as it needs to be cancelled and corrected. And
this ambiguity is also to be seen in the claimwhich, again, is passed over
in most accounts of the storyboth that cado acto (y cada pensamiento) es
el eco de otros que en el pasado lo antecedieron, sin principio visible, o el
el presagio de otros que en el futuro lo repetirn (p. ), which implies a
certain sameness between acts, and that en un plazo innito le ocurren a todo
hombre todas las cosas, which implies a certain dierence between acts.
All of this can be seen in another way in the idea of the Immortals going o
in search of that second, mortalizing stream of water. Here the implication is
that, because the Immortals will do all things in the innite amount of time
that remains to them, they will inevitably discover that second stream; that is,
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.
doing all things is understood as a precondition of the Immortals discovery

of that second stream, as given in the idea of their crossing all countries and
engaging in all of the activities recorded in the story. But, looked at another
way, this is not true at all. From the perspective of the Immortals, who have
an innite amount of time on their hands, the time taken to nd that second
stream, no matter how long it actually takes, is innitesimal. e nding of
the stream, in eect, can occur at any time, as it actually does in the story.
Indeed, we might say not that an innite number of things need to happen
before we nd the second stream, but that this innite number of things
exists only aer its discovery. Immortality, as it were, is only a retrospective
phenomenon. We never experience it as it occurs, but only aer it is over,
from somewhere outside it, aer we have drunk from the second stream.
And is this not exactly what we see in El inmortal? Argos realizes that he
is Homer, that he is immortal, only aer the rain from his own mortalizing
stream falls on his face. Rufus is able to tell his story as an Immortal only in
the past tense, from the point of view of a mortal. As he says: Ser inmortal es
balad; menos el hombre, todas las criaturas lo son, pues ignoran la muerte;
lo divino, lo terrible, lo incomprehensible, es saberse inmortal (p. ). And
this truly would be divino, terrible, incomprehensible because no one could
know they were immortal while they were still immortal: the two states, as
in Rufuss reection on the relationship between himself and the Troglodytes,
are irreconcilable. e state of immortality is, indeed, irreal because en ella
se mezclan los sucesos de dos hombres distintos; by this is meant not just
Rufus and Homer or Rufus and Cartaphilus but a mortal and an immortal.
We might think of this relationship between mortality and immortality in
terms of time, the other theme that El inmortal is seen to address. Immortality for Borges is said to lie in the repetition of two distinct moments
in time, as though two separate moments become the same moment. is
coincidence can be seen either as every moments being the same as those
that come before or aer it, or as a literal stopping of time. e text of Borges
commonly referred to in this regard is Nueva refutacin del tiempo, in which
he recounts an epiphany he once experienced, in which he imagined a scene
he was looking at having remained unchanged for thirty years: Me qued
mirando esa sencillez. Pens, con seguridad en voz alta: Esto es lo mismo de
hace treinta aos. But in his essay Borges no sooner evokes this experience
than he admits its impossibility. He is not a mystic (despite the wishes of some
of his commentators), but acknowledges that ordinary linear time is the only
time we can ever know. As he writes: Negar la sucesin temporal, negar el
yo, negar el universo astronmico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos
Jorge Luis Borges, Nueva refutacin del tiempo, in Obras completas, (Barcelona: Emec,
), pp. (p. ).
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.
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. ).
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. .
eects of the narration of El inmortal taking place through a series of

dierent voices. For, consistent with the logic in the text that immortality
exists only from the point of view of a mortality outside it, what we notice
in the successive sections that make up the tale is that nearly all conclude
with the becoming-mortal of an Immortal, who in turn has told the story
of another Immortal becoming mortal. at is, at the centre of the tale we
have the story of the becoming-mortal of the Troglodyte Argos, as told by
Rufus; then the becoming-mortal of Rufus, as told by Cartaphilus; and nally
(although, importantly, this is also spoken of at the beginning of the story),
the becoming-mortal of Cartaphilus, as told by the narrator. We have in
all of this, exactly as in the logic of immortality laid out in the story itself, a
certain excess produced by the narrative at the level before, just that of the
narrator or narration itself, an excess that has to be cancelled and corrected
by the narrative that comes aer. In this sense, indeed, we do not have a series
of sequential tales, one aer the other, a coat of many colours in the sense of
a simple patchwork, but more a series of nestled tales-within-tales, with each
successive narrator narrating the cancelling and correction of the previous
narrator, who cancelled and corrected the narrator before. Each taleand the
model here would be e ousand and One Nights, which is also a tale about
tales, with Scheherazade deferring her death by telling the story of how it
came aboutis an attempt to remark what makes possible the one before, the
deferral of an ending that has already occurred. Again, innity is not given
here all at once, but rather as a kind of one thousand (or, let us say, innity)
and one (the space or narrative that allows innity to be grasped, an innity
that is itself nothing other than a series of ones).
To conclude, this is what is at stake in the labyrinthine structure of the
tale, as seen also in so many other stories by Borges. Or we should perhaps
sayto echo the title given to the French, German, and English translations
that rst brought Borges to international attentionthat what is at stake is
the labyrinths in Borgess work, for the labyrinth in Borges never exists by
itself: there are always at least two. is can be seen in El inmortal, in which
there is not just the labyrinthine City of the Immortals, but also the labyrinth
of passages beneath it; not just a labyrinth, but also a labyrinth around a
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.
labyrinth, or a labyrinth inside a labyrinth. is is a result not just of the

classical division of the City of Immortals into its earthly and heavenly halves
as some critics suggest, but rather of the fact that, as we have seen, the
labyrinth of something like immortality is possible only because of something
outside it. (I mean labyrinth here in the sense that in immortality every path
must be taken, all alternatives must be exhausted, before that second stream is
discovered.) And yet that which is outside the labyrinth reveals itself in turn
to be another labyrinth. It is in this sense that there are not one but always
two labyrinths, or that the labyrinth is always divided into two. And, in a nal
twist, it is just this division between the inside and the outside of the labyrinth
that is the labyrinth, the real choice we have to make at every point along its
path. It is not, as in the classical image of the labyrinth, which Borges at once
inherits and overturns, a choice between two paths within the labyrinth, but
between the inside and the outside of the labyrinth, between there being a
labyrinth or not. Again, the labyrinthlike innityis never given as such,
but is seen only in the fact that, even though we can only ever make one choice
at a time, there is always another choice to make. e labyrinth is nothing
other than this endless series of choices, the famous putting together of the
straight line and the labyrinth, or the line and the circle, that is so much at
stake in Borgess stories.
El inmortal, as commentators have noted, is not just a story, but a story
about how stories are told. And the true immortality at stake in the story lies
not just in any actual content that is transmitted, but in its form, the very fact
of its transmission. is is perhaps rst made clear in Ronald Christs seminal
analysis of the story, which makes the point that, beyond any allusion to previous versions of the story of immortality that Borges incorporates into his text,
what is at stake is an invocation of the very idea of allusion itself, the fact that
the story exists within, theoretically, an illimitable eld of textual precedents.
As Christ writes: e Immortal uses allusion not only as a means to an
end, but as an end itself. Each of the allusions contributes to our awareness
of literature as universal memory, which, in not seeming to lose sight of anything, guarantees the survival of all, is, in a word, immortality. But we might
radicalize Christs insight by suggesting that, at its deepest level, the kind of
immortality that Borgess stories both aspire to and are about has nothing to
do with any signied content and exists only in the passage from one narrator
See, for example, Stewart, Borges on Immortality, pp. , and Carter Wheelock, e
Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges (Austin: University
of Texas Press, ), pp. .
I refer here to La muerte y la brjula (Obras completas, , ), which contains the line:
Yo s de un laberinto griego que es una lnea nica, recta (p. ); and La biblioteca de Babel,
which speaks of the Library being at once ilimitada y peridica (p. ).
Christ, p. ; see also Michael Evans, Intertextual Labyrinth: El inmortal by Borges,
Forum for Modern Language Studies, (), .
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.
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Infinity and One: On Jorge Luis Borges's El Inmortal

Author(s): Rex Butler

INFINITY AND ONE:

Modern Language Review, (),

least is a response to the psychotherapy he was then receiving to overcome

In overall critical assessments of Borgess uvre, the stories of El aleph,

James Woodall, Borges: A Life (New York: Basic Books, ), p. .

Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal

personalities formally, with a subtle and at rst reading almost indiscernible

a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation

Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal

Jorge Luis Borges, El inmortal, in Obras completas, (Barcelona: Emec, ), pp.

Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal

una sentencia de Herclito. El pensamiento ms fugaz obedece a un dibujo invisible

Drawing the nal consequences of this balancing out of opposites, some

and a postscript, written presumably by its editor. e prologue describes

Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal

un plazo innito, con innitas circunstancias y cambios, lo imposible es no

doing all things is understood as a precondition of the Immortals discovery

Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal

Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal

eects of the narration of El inmortal taking place through a series of

Innity and One in Borgess El inmortal

labyrinth, or a labyrinth inside a labyrinth. is is a result not just of the

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