The Garden of Intersecting Paths: Jorge Luis Borges and His Visionary Intertexts

Abstract

Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, a tiny point in space that reflects the whole universe, has a truly global lineage, a fact acknowledged by the author himself at the end of his story. Claiming that he quotes from one of Captain Richard Burton’s manuscripts, he lists a whole series of similar optical devices, which appear in texts as different as One Thousand and One Nights, Lucian of Samosata’s Vera Historia, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. In this paper, I propose to complicate this intertextual network by adding a medieval source that has been overlooked in scholarship on Borges: the allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, which tells the story of a Lover who enters a wonderful garden in his sleep and starts the quest for his Rose, allegory of the beloved. Perhaps the main reason why critics have ignored Le Roman lies in Borges’s essay “De las alegorías a las novelas” (1949), where he calls it “laberíntico” and dismisses the whole allegorical art as stupid, frivolous, and intolerable for a contemporary reader. My argument is that, in fact, he owes it much more than he would like to admit.  In both Borges’s poetry and fiction, his lifelong obsession with rose symbolism is tied to de Lorris and de Meun’s poem as well. I will pay particular attention to the episode of Narcissus’s pool, which prefigures the workings of his Aleph. To mediate this medieval connection, I will bring up two other sources that had a great influence on Borges’s thinking: T.S. Eliot’s cycle of poems Four Quartets and H.G. Wells’s short story “The Door in the Wall,” both with a vision of a magical garden at heart. The (re)discovery of this literary tradition should provide new insight into Borges’s attitude towards allegorical method, questions of memory, and the nature of the visionary experience itself.