The Garden and the Library as Self-Conscious Metaphors

‘For years I believed I had grown up in a suburb of Buenos Aires, a suburb of random streets and visible sunsets. What is certain is that I grew up in a garden, behind a forbidding gate, and in a library of limitless English books’ (Obras 4:9). Those words, which begin the Prologue to the second edition of Evaristo Carriego (1955), evoke, with characteristic concision, the universe of metaphors that their author, Jorge Luis Borges, inhabits. The geography is deliberately, symbolically, indefinite: Borges locates the garden and the library that created him in an unnamed labyrinthine Buenos Aires suburb whose relation to him he is perhaps no longer certain of, and in any event does not choose to specify beyond saying that it was aglow with the light of the setting sun.

Where he is definite or circumstantial, the details reveal one of those secret plots he delights in puzzling out, and perpetrating: the enclosed garden and the library of (ambiguously) infinite books appear in his parables (mostly his ficciones) as metaphors of the world. ‘The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries’ wherein human beings seek, among a practically infinite number of volumes, the one book which may contain their ‘Vindication’ (Labyrinths 51ff.). That model of humankind's perplexity, and of extravagant futility, Borges offers in ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941 – now viewable as envisioning Derrida's ‘il n'y pas hors de texte’). In ‘The Wall and the Books’ (1950) he suggests elaborate explanations – as tentative as they are mutually exclusive, if not self-contradictory – of the metaphoric significance of ‘the two vast undertakings’ of the emperor Shih Huang Ti: ‘the building of the almost infinite Chinese Wall’ and ‘the burning of all the books that had been written before his time’ (OI3). The emperor may have begun these monstrous projects at one and the same moment; hence the walling in of space and the incinerating of the past might have been ‘magic barriers to halt death’ or to delimit the world so that all things might have ‘the names that befitted them’ (OI4).