Silvia G. Dapía on
Borges and Mauthner
Patricia Hart
- Silvia G. Dapía. Die Rezeption der Sprachkritik Fritz
Mauthners im Werk von Jorge Luis Borges. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 1993.
Silvia Dapía's importance in
demonstrating the depth and breadth of the influence of Nineteenth-century German poet,
novelist, literary critic, and philosopher, Fritz Mauthner, on the fictional and
essayistic work of Argentine Jorge Luis Borges is unquestionable. She has studied the
subject in depth and has written about it at length in various articles, but it is in
Die Rezeption der Sprachkritik Fritz Mauthners im Werk von Jorge Luis Borges that
Dapía consolidates her contribution.
Mauthner (1849-1923) was arguably the first modern
philosopher to assert that philosophical problems are essentially linguistic problems. His
major contribution is that he discovered and developed a hidden tradition of using the
criticism of language (Sprachkritik), as a tool for philosophical analysis.
However, posterity has largely forgotten Mauthner, and the recently-published studies that
look at the philosophical underpinnings of Borges's work have studied the influences of
Schopenhauer (Roberto Paoli and Juan Nuño, for example), Wittgenstein (Sierra Mejías) or
the Platonic component. Dapía, though she addresses and digests all these studies,
chooses to map instead the uncharted territory of Mauthner's influence, and a fascinating
area it is indeed. To begin, Dapía carefully documents Borges's explicit admiration for
and fascination with Mauthner. In 1940, for example, Borges remarked that Mauthner's Wörterbuch
der Philosophie was one of the five books most covered with notes that he owned. A
year later, in a review of Gerald Heard's Pain, Sex and Time, Borges refers again
to Mauthner's dictionary, calling it "admirable". In 1944, in the prologue to Artificios,
Borges mentions Mauthner as one of the seven authors that he says he continually rereads.
Borges also explicitly states elsewhere that he used the Wörterbuch in the
preparation of essays such as "La doctrina de los ciclos" (1936) and "El
idioma analítico de John Wilkins" (1952).
In order to bring the reader to an understanding of German
literature on her Argentine subject, Dapía starts with a reconstruction of Borges's
"lecturas alemanas." It should be made very clear that the purpose of this is
not at all to flatter or appeal to the German reader of her book, or to demonstrate the
well-proven fact that Borges was a well-read intellectual, familiar with German letters.
Much more significantly, Dapía uses this chapter to describe the fertile ground into
which the seeds of Mauthner's ideas were planted. First she looks at Borges's relationship
with lyric poetry (principally Heine), and next at narrative (especially Meyrink and
Kafka), before arriving at philosophy in German, with a special focus on the influence of
Schopenhauer.
In Chapter Three, so that the reader of her study will have
a clear idea of the thesis and fundamental ideas of Mauthner's critique of language,
Dapía explores eight important studies on the philosopher (by Gustav Landauer, Walter
Eisen, Elisabeth Leinfellner, Gershon Weiler, Allan Janik, Joachim Kühn, Walter
Escehnbacher, and Lars Gustafsson). This interpretive mosaic enables us to fully enjoy and
appreciate Dapía's tracing of Mauthner's influence in Borges's short fiction, and is also
recommended reading for anyone interested in Dapía's other published studies on Mauthner
and Borges.
Once all this is established, the real fun of Dapía's book
begins, namely that of demonstrating the influence through a close and careful analysis of
eight Borgesian short stories. The first story analyzed is "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote"
(l939), a piece that Hans Robert Jauss (The Theory of Reception) insisted
anticipated the shift from classical aesthetic production to modern aesthetic reception.
Pierre Menard, the title character of the tale, conceives the goal of writing Cervantes's Quijote,
word for word, by converting himself into the one-armed survivor of Lepanto. He proposes
to learn Spanish, convert to Catholicism, fight the Moors or Turks, and forget all
European history that transpired since the Quijote was published. Ultimately,
however, he rejects the process, stating: "Ser, de alguna manera, Cervantes y llegar
al Quijote le pareció menos arduo -por consiguiente, menos interesante- que seguir
siendo Pierre Menard y llegar al Quijote a través de las experiencias de Pierre
Menard."
Dapía asserts that through Menard's project, Borges
manages to contrast two types of interpretation of literary texts, attempting to pursue
the author's intention, or concerning oneself with the reader. Says Dapía, according to
the first method, Menard intended to arrive at the Quijote by identifying with
Cervantes; according to the second, Menard would continue being Pierre Menard and arrive
at the Quijote through his own experiences. Dapía deftly demonstrates then that
the story lays out for us different temporal interpretations of phrases and intentions.
One example she gives regards Cervantes's use of the phrase, "la verdad, cuya madre
es la historia." The narrator of the story attempts to account for what both
Cervantes and Menard mean when they use the phrase. According to the narrator, it is an
empty rhetorical phrase for Cervantes, while for Menard, writing in the twentieth century
and being a contemporary of William James, the meaning is totally different. Another
example comes from the famous proclamation of Chapter 38 of the Quijote when the
Knight of Mournful Countenance declares himself against letters and in favor of arms. The
narrator gives several possible explanations, namely that Menard might have subordinated
himself to the psychology of his "idol," that he was merely intending to
transcribe the Quijote, that he was under the influence of Neitzsche, or even that
he had the "resigned or ironic habit of propounding ideas that were the strict
reverse of those he preferred." By showing that Borges was well aware, in 1939, when
he wrote "Pierre Menard," that there was no single, fixed meaning to be dis-covered
in a text, but rather that our reading covers a text with a multitude of discourses that
vary according to time, place and individual reader, Dapía greatly enhances Borges's
figure as a literary and philosophical pioneer. Surely this is a facet of Borges that many
critics have intuited to some degree, but none has explained so well as Dapía. And
certainly no one else has traced the path that Borges followed to arrive at these
insights, a path well-marked by Mauthner, as Dapía has done.
Dapía's tour de force continues with the analysis
of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1947), in which she takes as a point of
departure the hallowed interpretations constructed by Jaime Alazraki and Arturo
Echavarría, but going more deeply into the role that language plays in the narration.
Eventually, Dapía arrives at the conclusion that the story can be interpreted as a
fruitful illustration of Borges's incorporation of Mauthner's Sprachkritik, which
supposes a divergence between language and reality, and the deforming projection of the
former on the latter. Particularly fascinating is the discussion of the encyclopedia.
Dapía shows us that Mauthner's Wörterbuch had already demonstrated to Borges that
there can be no objective system of knowledge, but that rather our systems exist in an
instantaneous state, replacing one another with each succeeding scientific discovery and
generation. Without this insight, it is hard to imagine Borges ever arriving at the notion
of "Uqbar." In the light of Mauthner's Sprachkritik, we can understand
much better the recurring theme of the encyclopedias in the story, and also the conception
of noun, adjective, and adverb.
In her discussion of "Emma Zunz", Dapía turns to
another fascinating Mauthnerian concept: the notion of Wortaberglaube, or
"Word Superstition." Mauthner affirms that humans have an ineluctable inability
to distinguish between the various ways in which a word can refer to an exterior reality
that the word itself generates, so that by means of words, primitive humans asked
themselves, "what does this earthquake mean, or this deformed child, or this
comet?" Moderns are more inclined to get hung up on questions of the meaning of words
like "soul" or "matter." Says Mauthner, "Most humans suffer from
this mental weakness of believing that because a word exists, this word must refer to
something; they think that because a words exists, a real object must correspond to
it." (Beiträge 1) Without discounting the possibility of a
psychoanalytic reading of "Emma Zunz," or other well-known interpretations,
Dapía skillfully helps us read Emma as embodying the dangers of "Word
Superstition." Emma manages to construct a story that has no reference outside of
language itself, but that, at the same time, takes charge of itself and is not an object
of question by others.
"Tema del traidor y del héroe" (1944, a story
about which Dapía has also written eloquently in Romance Languages Annual in
1992), is also analyzed in a chapter informed by Mauthner's notion of Wortaberglaube,
or "Word Superstition," and his warnings about the terrible power that language
has to create "ghosts" that may not correspond to the exterior world. Borges
himself admitted that he wrote the story under the dual influence of G. K. Chesterton
("presenta el misterio, propone una aclaración sobrenatural y la reemplaza luego,
sin pérdida, con otra de este mundo") and Leibniz ("que inventó la armonía
preestablecida"). Dapía shows that in effect, the narrator of "Traidor"
presents us with a "mystery": the enigmatic death of the conspirator Fergus
Kilpatrick, then proposes a "supernatural explanation," and finally substitutes
this explanation for an "earthly" one, namely that the "secreto y glorioso
capitán de conspiradores" is really the traitor of the insurrection. The narrator
creates the "heroe-ghost" of Kilpatrick for his own ends -for the emancipation
of the Fatherland. Thus, in this story, reality becomes a fable of languages through the
fiction created by Nolan. Dapía concludes by relating Mauthner's thesis on Wortaberglaube,
to that of one of his precursors, Francis Bacon.
In studying the l977 story, "Tigres azules,"
Dapía shows that it appears to exemplify another Mauthnerian thesis, one that shows that
mathematics are a human invention, rather than an unchangeable natural discovery. The
failure of logic in attempting to decipher natural relationships leads us to Mauthner as
well, as Dapía points out.
"El otro" (1975), examines an
"ultraísta" search for surprising and new metaphors, not unlike that carried
out by Borges himself. Borges's thesis about the metaphorical nature of language
(especially in articles he published in the 20s) is surprisingly similar to the theories
of Mauthner, as Dapía shows us.
In analyzing "El inmortal" (1950), Dapía rejects
previous interpretations, and reads the story as essentially a study of the inexorability
of the social power of languages on an individual's thought processes. This thesis is to
be found in Mauthner, explains as no other previous one has, the relationship between the
text and its epigraph, and the interpolated quotes from Pliny, Thomas de Quincey,
Descartes, and George Bernard Shaw, as well as the allusions to the theory of
reincarnation.
The last of the stories considered, "El
congreso," again is explained by one of the central ideas of Mauthner's Sprachkritik,
namely the arbitrariness of all systems of classification. One is sad to come to the end
of these fascinating analyses. The good news is that Dapía continues to write and publish
about the relationship between Mauthner and Borges elsewhere, and has studied additional
stories and essays in other articles in print or in press. (See especially: Revista de
Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 42, 1995, 189-206).
In the fifth and last chapter, Dapía sums up the insights
into Borges that have been gained by analyzing these eight stories in the light of
Mauthner. The five major themes are: the impossibility of the search for the
"catalogue of catalogues" (and, by extension, a condemnation of systems); a
head-on confrontation with Wortaberglaube; the notion that language consists of the
"words of others"; and the theme of silence. At the same time, Dapía
convincingly shows us how Mauthnerian Sprachkritik, in the form of these five
themes, can be found throughout Borges's work from the 20s up until his last works. The
Epilogue compares Borges's productive reception of Sprachkritik to the most recent
developments in U.S. criticism and philosophy embodied in Donald Davidson and Richard
Rorty.
Dapía leaves no room for doubt that without Mauthner,
Borges would not have been the same author we revere and reread today. And without Dapía,
we would not know this. The book is a fine and valuable contribution to our knowledge of
Borges, a thread that when followed leads us right to the heart of several of his most
important labyrinths.
Patricia Hart
Purdue University