Jorge Luis Borges worried that “The Aleph” (the title story of a collection) was too ambitious to be a short story. He was right to be concerned. As Steven Boldy (Companion to Jorge Luis Borges) points out, the story is really three stories: A melancholy love story about the narrator’s (a fictional “Borges”) love for the dead Beatriz and his effort to keep her memory alive; a satirical tale of literary rivalry between “Borges” and Beatriz’s cousin, the mediocre poet, Carlos Argentino Daneri; and “Borges’s” encounter with the Aleph in Daneri’s basement.
Daneri is hard at work on an epic poem entitled “The Earth,” in which he hopes to portray every place and feature of our planet. “Borges” finds it insufferably bad, and his disgust is intensified by Argentino’s pompous self-satisfaction. “Borges” dismisses the whole project with the conclusion that “the poet’s work had lain not in the poetry but in the invention of reasons for accounting the poetry admirable.” In a Postscript at the end of the story, “Borges” reports that Argentino’s poem received a Second Prize in the Argentinian “National Prized for Literature,” while “Borges’s” own work wasn’t even nominated – a deep insult to “Borges’s” ambitions.
Daneri’s universal poem is connected to the “Aleph.” Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, whose shape, “Borges” reminds us, “is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher.” In the Jewish alphabetic mysticism, the Kaballah, the first letter is associated with “the pure and unlimited godhead,” and the Aleph in Daneri’s basement is a portal that gives the viewer a God’s-eye view of all of reality.
In a long, richly detailed paragraph, “Borges” lists some of the things he sees when he peers through it:
The Aleph’s diameter must have been about two or three centimetres, but cosmic space was in it, without diminution of size. Each object (the mirror’s glass, for instance) was infinite objects, for I clearly saw it from all points in the universe. I saw the heavy-laden sea; I saw the dawn and the dusk; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silver-plated cobweb at the center of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London); I saw interminable eyes nearby, looking at me as if in a mirror, I saw all the mirrors in the planet and none reflected me; in an inner patio in the Calle Soler I saw the same paving tile I had seen thirty years before in the entranceway to a house in the town of Fray Bentos; I saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and every grain of sand in them; I saw a woman at Inverness whom I shall not forget; I saw her violent switch of hair, her proud body, the cancer in her breast. . . .
Despite feeling “infinite veneration, infinite compassion,” “Borges” can’t bring himself to admit that Argentino actually possessed an enchanted looking-glass. Parting from his rival, “Borges” implies that Argentino has gone mad, adding, as a prescription for sanity, “that the country and its quiet are two grand doctors.”
Two of the Aleph’s scenes stand out, both of them to do with Beatriz: “in a desk drawer I saw (the writing made me tremble) obscene, incredible, precise letters, which Beatriz had written Carlos Argentino; I saw an adored monument in La Chacarita cemetery; I saw the atrocious relic of what deliciously had been Beatriz Viterbo.” To “Borges,” who has idealized his beloved, the revelations of the Aleph are maddening. Instead of a muse of pure femininity, he sees evidence of a sordid affair with her cousin and her rotting corpse. His love collapses into tawdry sex and all-consuming death. And it becomes evident that “Borges’s” hatred of Daneri is more than literary envy; it is also a rivalry in love.
Borges – the author now – is offering a reflection on the ambitions of literary art. Given his lifelong obsession with mirrors mirroring mirrors and labyrinthine passages, it’s likely “The Aleph” (the story) is ultimately about “The Aleph” (itself); it’s about Borges’s own ambition to enclose the world in a nutshell (or in twenty pages of text) so as to be “King of infinite space” (the Hamlet quotation is the first epigram of the story).
But there’s a further layer to the story that elevates it to the status of a masterpiece: “The Aleph” is Borges’s Divine Comedy. The most obvious clue is “Beatriz,” who, if the name weren’t enough to take us to Dante, is of Italian extraction and functions, even after her death, as “Borges’s” muse. As Boldy points out, Argentino’s surname, Daneri,” is a mash-up of “Dante” and “Alighieri.” “Borges’s” descent into the basement is his passage into inferno, and, like Dante, he’s granted a vision of all things. There’s a structural parallel between the Comedy and the story: Dante wrote of “Dante,” Borges of “Borges.”
There, though, the similarities end. Dante’s cosmos, even in hell, is neatly organized in circles, terraces, and spheres, patterned by threes and nines. “Borges’s” vision is a hodgepodge of places, people, plants, tigers and bison, diseased bodies, cobwebs, “the circulation of my obscure blood” and “my face and my viscera.” He sees “that conjectural and secret object whose name men usurp but which no man has gazed on – the inconceivable universe.” Dante’s Beatrice, though dead, lives and appears to “Dante” the pilgrim in splendor, guiding him through the cosmos with her bright eyes. “Borges” finds a putrid corpse. “Dante” is transfigured by his journey, ultimately folded into the rainbow-on-rainbow of the Triune dance. “Borges’s” vision doesn’t change him a whit; he’s the same petty, competitive, minor writer after as he was before – worse, perhaps, for he won’t even share his vision with Argentino (though he does share it with us!).
The essay on “The Aleph” in the Cambridge Companion to Borges says that all the stories in Borges's collection are concerned with “the overcoming of doubt and dread and their acceptance as part of the human condition.” The world is a “dance of phantoms,” full of “radical incoherencies and meaninglessness,” like sand slipping through the clenched hand that tries to hold it. In such a world of existential horrors, Borges’s work “obey[s] a creative will that, in spite of apparent radical skepticism and threatening disorder, tells stories, imagines coherent sequences, invents characters, and faces its own horrific origins in very human dreads.” For Borges, the heroic response to a world of unmeaning is a life of “willful struggle.” Borges’s endlessly fascinating fiction is the fruit of that struggle.