culture; america · 8 min
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“The Wall and the Books” runs to four pages in Other Inquisitions, published in 1952. I believe it is the most perfect essay Borges ever wrote, and I say so knowing he wrote dozens that could make a fair claim to the title.
It opens with a historical fact, which Borges presents as the thing that unsettles him. The emperor Shih Huang Ti, who unified China in the third century before Christ and ordered the Great Wall built, was also the man who ordered every book written before his reign to be burned. The largest construction in human history and the largest destruction of the written record came from one person, at very nearly the same time, and amounted to a single act of will.
Borges makes no claim to being a historian. He hardly cares whether the details are exact, whether the burning was total or partial, or whether the wall went up from nothing or over earlier fortifications. What holds him is the conjunction, building and destroying sitting together in one exercise of power, and the sense that this means something, even if he can’t say what.
The essay is an attempt to work out what, and it never does. Borges proposes hypotheses, examines them, sets them aside, tries others, and at the end, instead of a conclusion, he arrives at something better.
Borges is honest with his hypotheses. He lays them on the table one at a time and, after turning them over for a while, lets them go.
First hypothesis: Shih Huang Ti burned the books because they held the past, and the past was a threat. Whoever controls the past controls the present, so burning the books meant wiping out all earlier history so that history would begin with him. It’s a political hypothesis, and a reasonable one. Borges accepts it as plausible, though it falls short, since it leaves the wall unexplained.
Second hypothesis: the wall and the burning are complementary operations, one closing off space and the other closing off time. Shih Huang Ti would have wanted an order that was absolute in both dimensions, where nothing from outside could get in and nothing from before could survive. Borges likes this one better because it’s more elegant, but it doesn’t quite satisfy him either. It is too symmetrical by half, and reality is seldom that tidy.
Third hypothesis: Shih Huang Ti knew the wall and the burning were impossible enterprises. No wall holds back the barbarians forever, and no fire reaches every book. Perhaps the point was the attempt, and what counted was the grandeur of the gesture rather than its efficacy. This one appeals to Borges because it turns Shih Huang Ti into something like an artist, a man who undertakes something vast knowing it will fail and who finds in the failure a form of magnificence.
Borges chooses none of them. He lets them coexist like layers of a single perplexity, and then, in the final paragraphs, in a move that is very much his own, he drops the hypotheses and shifts register, stops analysing and starts to feel. Or rather, he admits that the emotion that drove him to write the essay, the one he had from the start, had been aesthetic all along and never analytical. Explaining Shih Huang Ti mattered less to him than understanding why the image of Shih Huang Ti moved him.
“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces moulded by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or told us something we should not have lost, or are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact.”
What it says is simple, though what it implies is vast. Art, by this account, lives in the moment just before understanding, in the feeling that something is about to be said, that a meaning is there, almost within reach, almost visible, and never quite arrives. That almost is the aesthetic fact. What counts is the question that feels as though it’s on the verge of an answer, far more than any answer it might get.
The definition runs against nearly everything Western aesthetics had said before. For Aristotle, art is imitation that produces pleasure through recognition. Kant has it as the experience of the beautiful as purposiveness without purpose, and Hegel as the sensory manifestation of the idea. In each case art gets somewhere and produces something, whether pleasure, knowledge or revelation. Borges says no. For him art is the state of not arriving, a door that stays shut, rather like having a phrase on the tip of your tongue that won’t come out.
Put like that, it sounds like a recipe for frustration, and somehow it doesn’t frustrate. Borges is describing something we all recognise, the moment a piece of music moves you and you can’t say why, or a sunset seems to mean something, or a line of poetry stops you cold and you couldn’t explain what it was that stopped you. That, too, is a way of understanding, one that goes beyond what conceptual language can capture, and with that one sentence Borges gave it a name.
“The Wall and the Books” works as a key to the whole of Borges. His texts deal with very different things, yet all of them practise what this essay describes, the imminence of a revelation that never comes.
“The Aleph” presents a point that contains every point in the universe. Borges describes it, catalogues it in a list famous for its vertiginous accumulation, and then says that language is sequential while what he saw was simultaneous, so he cannot convey it. The revelation happened, but it can’t be passed on. The story lives in the imminence of that communication. We sense that something enormous was seen, and all that reaches us is the Aleph’s shadow.
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” describes a world invented by a secret society that begins to replace the real one. The idea seems to be telling us something deep about fiction and reality, about language and the world, and every time you think you’ve grasped it the story shifts slightly and the understanding comes apart. All of this happens in very exact prose, trained on something that is by nature inexact.
“The Circular Ruins” tells the story of a man who dreams another man into existence and discovers at the end that he too is being dreamed. The image wants to say something about reality and about what a self is, and whatever it wants to say stays one step beyond what the story actually says. The story points without ever getting there, and its perfection lies in the pointing.
In all three, Borges produces what he describes in “The Wall and the Books”, the sense that a meaning is there, nearly accessible, nearly formulable, and that it won’t let itself be formulated. It would be wrong to put this down to some lack of skill on his part. Meaning of that kind exists only as imminence and would destroy itself if made concrete, the way a dream dissolves the moment you try to tell it.
Art has been defined in many ways, some of them useful, some clever. Borges’ definition is the best for a reason that strikes me as decisive, which is that it alone explains why art does not exhaust itself.
If art were revelation, if a work told you something and you understood it, there would be no reason to go back. You’ve understood, that’s that, on to the next thing. Yet people do go back, to Bach, to Shakespeare, to Borges, and each time they find something new. The work is the same as it was; you are the one who has changed, and the imminence of the revelation rearranges itself around who you are now. The door still hasn’t opened, but what you imagine on the other side is different every time.
The other definitions miss this. Aristotle explains why art gives pleasure and not why the pleasure renews itself; Kant, why it is universal, but not why it is inexhaustible; Hegel tells us it has content and leaves unexplained why that content resists paraphrase. Borges covers all of it in a single sentence. Art is inexhaustible because what it offers is not a meaning but the promise of a meaning, and a promise, unlike a meaning, is never fulfilled, so it never stops working.
There is something sad in the idea, since it means we will never get there and that complete understanding is an illusion. It also consoles, because there will always be more, the work of art never empties out, and wonder renews itself. Read theologically, if you like, it is the aesthetic version of Christian hope, in which you don’t arrive but the road is infinite, and the infinity of the road is already, in itself, a form of grace.
With that sentence Borges closed “The Wall and the Books”, and closed his whole aesthetics along with it, whether he knew it or knew it perfectly well. Everything he wrote before and after is a variation on the same idea, an emperor who raises a wall and burns the books, and in doing so says something that twenty centuries later we are still trying to hear.