The Aleph

In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1945 story El Aleph, the narrator descends into a Buenos Aires basement and is shown a small iridescent sphere, two or three centimetres in diameter, in which every point of the universe appears simultaneously and without confusion. The Aleph contains everything; the narrator’s task — and Borges’s — is to find language equal to it. The story concludes with a famous passage that admits its own failure: “what my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall set down is successive, because language is.” The Aleph is a literary wonder one can re-create in writing. The Academy hosts it as a Heart-Opener because the work it asks for is the work of looking at the world without ranking, and then writing what was looked at, accepting that the writing will fall short. To take up the Aleph as a discipline is to set oneself a small impossible exercise: to describe, in a single page, more than language can hold. The result is always partial. The practice is in the trying.

Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (Buenos Aires: Sur, September 1945; collected in El Aleph, 1949; English trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 1970). Borges places the conceit between the Kabbalistic doctrine of the Ein Sof, Dante’s Empyrean rose (Paradiso XXXIII), and the modernist project of total description (Joyce’s Ulysses, Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego). Taken up in continental philosophy by Gilles Deleuze (Différence et répétition, 1968) and in subsequent fiction (Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolaño).