On “Everything and Nothing” Jorge Luis Borges

Photo by Marcos Domingo Sánchez 

Model: Pedro Jiménez 

“There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone”

“That same day he disposed of his theater. Before a week was out he had returned to the village of his birth, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood; and he did not bind them to those others his muse had celebrated, those made illustrious by mythological allusions and Latin phrases”

“[...] he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I oneself; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”

The unnamed man is now many-sided. He has no name, because he has no fixed identity. But he is, in fact, one.

Borges’ writing shows a sense of oneness by portraying a man who actually is not a man. And when a man does not consider himself a man, there are problems. The self, the soul, the mind, or in other words, one’s identity must be fed by self-confidence and reason.

 

Is Borges writing from an autobiographical perspective? Well, if one takes into account the fact that he was considered to be a modern symbolist we could say: maybe yes, he is. Symbolists sought for absolute truth. The impact of the modern world, however, had not only changed psychology, physics and technology but also literature and rejected (not all of them) religious thinking. The modern world was especially challenging in terms of socio-political issues. In this sense, when “he had returned to the village of his birth” searching for the truth out there in nature, the unnamed man could be said to be a romantic self immersed in nature, where melancholic childhood reigns.

God is “Everything” but at the same time “nothing”. For those who believe in God, me I do, we cannot see him but our faith is still there. He is not visible, so he is nothing. He is God, so he is everything. He is like that unnamed man Borges is talking about, a man whose masks are infinite but whose self does not exist. Is that possible?

Is Borges, -like the Irish Joyce did in A portrait of the artist as a young man-, trying to pose a theory of art in which he places God at the same status than the unnamed man? God asks the unnamed man not to complain because he is “many persons—and none”. In my opinion, Borges theory of art is that of the symbolists writers, that in which truth can only be described as an indirect object from an indirect perspective. The Gods are indirectly visible. We know of their existence but never saw them. 

Thanks for reading.