Irish writer Paul R. Hyde's essay Circles of Time, an essay on Borges. This Irish writer has been heralded as a major literary talent and a word magician.

Time and destiny lie at the heart of Borges' world. These inseparable obsessions inform the stories and poems with a melancholy terror which is ancient as it is modem. Heir not only to Kafka and to Nietzsche, to the Bishop of Cloyne and the stoical idealist of Edinburgh, his line extends to Zeno of the infamous paradoxes, to Pythagoras, Heracleitus and to the dark heresiarchs of the second century. Borges' terror is of the spirit and is born of a contemplation of the mystery of time and of an implacable, invisible destiny.

A radical sceptic and idealist, Borges seeks in his writings to forge a single archetypal shape for both time and destiny, a figure which reconciles each to the other, the many to the one. Such a figure must be perfect and 'known to God from the start', hence atemporal; it must be the resolution of number and idea, that is, in Pythagorean terms, it must be an ultimate reality. This figure is the circle.

They knew it, the fervent pupils of Pythagoras
That stars and men revolve in a cycle . . .

The Cyclical Night

And in Conjectural Poem on the death of Laprida, Borges writes:

Now at this last point I find
The recondite code and cipher to my days
The fate of Francisco de Laprida
The missing letter, the perfect
Form known to God from the start.
In the mirror of this night I find
The unexpected mien of my eternity.
The circle’s closing . . .

The primordial figure of the circle invests many of the stories with an irrevocable structure, fearfully glimpsed by the characters as the form of their personal destiny.

Schopenhauer's opening, 'the world is my idea ...' is axiomatic for Borges. The world is elaborate, fabulous and abominable, but it is a dream. And between the unreal world and the elusive dreamer runs the quicksilver of language, endorsing with sleek complicity, the illusions of time. In seeking to enunciate the paradoxes of time, Borges is trapped, like all writers, in the temporal essence of narrative art, for language, like time itself, is a condition of human experience. Although the trap is also an illusion, it is nonetheless a trap from which the protagonists in the stories try to free themselves by acts of 'weak magic', by dreams of transcendence.

For Borges, the core of time's illusion is its apparent linear and irreversible structure, a structure which is represented by the outer form of the fictions in an uncertain compromise always undermined by symbols, by a devious syntax, by alarming oppositions, indecisions and repetitions. As reality is a dream, its time too is false. Just as beneath the city of the Immortals lie the innumerable circular labyrinths of time, so beneath and within the outer linear form of these narratives are circular forms which betray to the characters the secret shape of time and reveal intimations of their destinies. As the city of the Immortals itself is a parody, an inversion, a grotesque and demented eternity, so this shape of time inspires horror and terror.

In The Gay Science and in Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche revived the ancient Zoroastrian concept of a circular time to replace the defunct historical time of the Nazarene.

I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Before the birth at Bethlehem, the prevailing concept of time in ancient civilisations was cyclical and many cultures linked this to a doctrine of metempsychosis. The time of the Greeks, the Persians, Chinese and Babylonians and Egyptians was cyclical, based on astrological observance, harmonised with cycles of change in the natural world. Historic, irreversible time, a time of unique moments and events, is thus a revolutionary Christian 'invention' derived from Judaic eschatology. At the nativity of the historical Christ, ancient and pagan astro-time was disrupted by the star which absconded from its celestial itinerary to lead the three Magi to the birth of a new 'historical' time, literally, to the first event in history. Nevertheless, almost four centuries after that event, Augustine, ever preoccupied with time, eternity and destiny, was to write:

Let us follow Christ, our right way, and leave this circular maze of the impious.

The City of God

Borges brings together cyclical time and linear time in the story of Jaromir Hladik, a Jewish writer executed by the Gestapo in Prague. Hladik's strange dream at the opening of The Secret Miracle is a presage not only of the Nazi invasion of the city but also of the dreamer's own destiny located precisely within historical time:

"... the process of his dying from the sleepless dawn to the mysterious volley."

Hladik attempts to escape the execution by imagining it an infinite number of times but this process itself forms a circle and returns the dreamer to linear time, the time of his destiny. The dream is a reflection of subsequent events; in the mysterious chess game, with its infinite possible moves, enduring for centuries, is the dream image of Hladik's anticipations of the execution and as these form a circle so the chess game is endless. Yet the chess game which has been 'going on for centuries' does not begin in the dream.

"The clock struck the hour for the game which could not be postponed."

But at this point Hladik wakes up; this awakening is re-enacted at the moment of his execution which is and is not postponed. The chess game has already occurred, has not yet begun, cannot be put off but is postponed. Within the postponement of the execution, Hladik finishes his play entitled The Vindication of Eternity – within a 'year' of cyclical time, a second of historical time.

It is an enigmatic play which, predictably, has a cyclic form and seems to be another hidden model of the whole story. Borges calls it a 'circular delirium'; it is a dream but one completed within another dream. With its completion, the dreamer dies just as the central character in his play dies. The year granted by God, in which the 'physical universe came to a halt' to answer Hladik's prayer, is a false year, a simulacrum of historical time within which the doomed author vindicates eternity by fulfilling the circle of time. Its completion coincides precisely with his historical destiny – the execution.

The dream 'whose substance was the same with varying circumstances' recurs in other stories. In The Waiting a fugitive, pursued to a secret address, locked in his room, assumes the name of his pursuer and retreats into dreams whilst waiting for his executor. The time of waiting is again historical time whilst beneath it inexplicable patterns of circular time are vaguely glimpsed.

The fugitive knows; 'I must act so that everyone will forgive me...' and knows that 'these things ... accidental and in no special order ... would in time become invariable, necessary and familiar.' And in the cinema, 'tragic stories of the underworld ... contained errors ... contained images which were those of his former life...'

An infinite regression of dreams, murderous and automatic, return him always to the period of waiting, itself verging on dream, which only the arrival of his pursuers can end. His final 'act of magic' is an attempt to transmute physical reality and its historical time into dream in order to avoid his destiny.

'... this confinement was different for it had no end.'

The pattern of confinement, dreams, waiting, death, with its hypnotic and obsessive power is common to many of Borges' stories. Circular symbols abound: clocks, mirrors, lights, drums, towers, labyrinths. In The God's Script a circular prison is the symbol of time. In one half the magician Tzinacan awaits 'the end destined to me by the gods'; in the other half a jaguar paces, measuring the time of his captivity – in time. The shape of the cell aggravates 'feelings of oppression and vastness'. Once more the duration of historical time is filled by waiting and by oneiric endeavours at transcendence through intuitions of the very nature of time.

'I considered that we were now, as always, at the end of time...'

Cyclical time has no end; all points are ends and beginnings equally. Tzinacan believes that the god has encoded some symbol in the world with a secret sentence which will confer power to avoid the evils of the apocalypse at the end of time. Resolving that this symbol is the jaguar, he deciphers the pattern on its skin, a pattern which represents the various enigmas of time.

'points, others formed crossed lines ... others, ring-shaped, were repeated...'

The god's language implicates the universe and all time instantly. After a negative delirium of dreams within dreams, the magician acknowledges his predicament as 'one who is imprisoned' and the acceptance that 'a man is, by and large, his circumstances' brings the desired illumination, a vision of the unity of all creation in the form of a vast wheel. Perception and intellection are a single act revealing the nunc stans, the one concealed within the many. A crucial preposition betrays Borges' meaning:

'... a man becomes confused gradually with the form of his destiny.'

Such a confusion extinguishes the historical man when the inexorable sequence of events which comprise his life are ended. Knowing his destiny, a man knows only his subjection to time. The illusion of personal identity must be renounced. Tzinacan must transcend Tzinacan if he is to intuit the wheel which contains all time and all space, all causes and all effects. Yet the vision at the centre of The God's Script is still of the archetypal circle, a wheel which must turn.

Borges' irony is symmetrical and subversive. Circular time in The Theologians is an 'abominable heresy'. Two rival theologians, seeking to refute and destroy heretical doctrines of time, engage in an invisible duel which itself endorses and ultimately fulfills the beliefs they abhor. Paradoxically, it is the contention that time does not tolerate repetitions which obsesses Aurelian, an idea which is consonant with Christianity. Its implication that Jesus was crucified but once and once only is compatible with the 'atrocious thesis' that the most ordinary and commonplace experiences are unique and without precedent. Yet this reductio ad absurdum of historical time can be easily used to refute the circular time of the Annular sect, already suppressed by Aurelian's opponent. Aurelian's refutation of the Histriones is taken directly from the earlier refutation of the Annulars, which refutation was heretical in respect of the latter but not of the former.

A single sentence of twenty words is sufficient to ignite and confuse the destinies of both theologians, orthodox and heretic. And the thesis which first drew them to their invisible duel is vindicated though both had refuted it. After a rainy night, John of Pannonia dies at the stake; likewise, many years later, Aurelian, guilt stricken for his denunciation, is awoken, as are so many of Borges' characters confronting death, 'one night towards dawn by the sound of rain'. At midday he dies in a bolt of lightning. The circle of their shared destiny is closed as the circle of time is completed with the repetition of a single event.

What is destiny but that which renders the intolerable tolerable? What is an immortal if not a man without a destiny? He is a man of abject and cumulative despair, a man who is all men, a man pining endlessly for the art of oblivion and the sweetness of the 'vivid downpour', that baptismal dawn rain which awakens the soul to its destiny, to the 'strait gate' of self-annulment. Immortality is madness, a nightmare created by gods 'who have died ... who ... were mad...'

In The Immortal, Borges constructs an intricate and 'labyrinthine' metaphor of a 'man who is all men'. The form of the story is contained and revealed in the structure of the city of the Immortals. To pass through the 'dark interwoven labyrinths' and up into the resplendent city is to achieve immortality, the 'senselessly complex'. Escape from the dark, scarcely visible network of circular chambers, interconnected by labyrinths, brings one into an equally purposeless city, an upside-down world which 'even jeopardizes the stars'. Between the subsequent transformations of identity and the passage through these circular chambers, a grotesque correspondence is suggested which has its counterpart in the narrator's ascension into the city itself through the 'circle of light' and his later seeking out mortality by process of elimination through the centuries. The city of the Immortals is the false immortality of the flesh, false because of its subjection to historical time.

To Cartaphilus, the Immortal in the twentieth century, the equilibrium and indifference of a cyclic reality, a system of 'precise compensations', seems preferable to any other. Yet this very system generates the possibility of its opposite, viz., the river 'whose waters remove it' [immortality]. But contradiction governs this specious immortality:

'... every act is the echo of others ... or the faithful presage of others ... to a vertiginous degree.'

Thus the recurrence of each moment is inevitable. Once again, on the outskirts of a city, habit prompts the Immortal, Joseph Cartaphilus, to taste the water from a spring which yields him a contradictory mortality.

'Once again I am mortal, I repeated to myself ...'

Time, the instrument of a heinous servitude in a vile and monstrous world, inspires loathing, disgust, anguish, despair, delirium. Borges' affinity with the Gnostics lies in their mutual abhorrence of time, not as a distinct and autonomous problem but rather as an essence of a shared vision of the human condition. Vast, tortuous, complex to a 'vertiginous degree', time permeates, embraces, persists through every modality and consequently through all experience.

'Time is the substance I am made of...' Borges writes.

His protagonists revolt against the abomination of time as the Gnostics revolted not just against the organic linear time of Christianity and the earlier cyclic time of Hellenism, but against time per se, in any form. For the Marcionites, Valentinians, Manicheans and the other heretical sects, time was the essential curse of a depraved material world created by a despotic demiurge. The early heresiarchs saw the visible world as an evil, the product of an evil cosmocrator interposed between Man and the true God of love and salvation. Time and evil were attributed to this demiurge, fallen like Man himself, initiator of a fatal determinism, heimarmene, destiny of the flesh; God is wholly remote, indifferent to a world he did not create, and utterly beyond its evils. Thus time is a lie, an illusion, a grotesque and horrible caricature of eternity. The 'year' granted to the condemned Jaromir Hladik is an illusion cruelly bestowed by a malignant god, to whom the author pleads 'in darkness', a god who requires justifying, who makes 'repetitions and mistakes', a god 'to whom time and the centuries belong'.

In common with the Pythagoreans, and probably influenced by ideas from Iranian and Indian cosmologies, the Gnostics accepted a cycle of reincarnations, metempsychoses and metemsomatoses. Time returns upon itself endlessly from body to body, rather as Borges has postulated in The Immortal. Whereas the determinism of the cosmos evoked aesthetic veneration in the Greeks, stoic resignation in Marcus Aurelius, that same determinism was to the Gnostic temperament, evidence of Man's oppressive prison, his condemnation to endless becoming, a concept found again and again in Borges' fictions.

This Gnostic feeling of existential strangeness in the world, of being alien, cast down, condemned, trapped, animates Borges' characters in a perverse fashion to what are essentially Gnostic responses, to acts of gnosis which, paradoxically, implicate further illusions, further cycles, further regressions. For, despite all, Borges is not a Gnostic; he is indeed more radical than those fabulous heretics. Gnosis, knowledge of the esoteric, is for the heretic the sole means of salvation from temporal bondage. But Borges allows of no salvation; even the magician, Tzinacan, who achieves 'bliss of understanding' in self renunciation, has a vision of a cyclical form, a wheel. Knowledge, were it possible or desirable, of the transcendent, of 'the fiery designs of the universe' must take a circular and thus inexorable form and affords little consolation. Thus the 'innumerable contrition' of Yu Tsun in The Garden of Forking Paths.

The soteriological myth of Gnosticism which holds that the essence of Man remains consubstantial with the transcendent world of our divine origins, has no counterpart in Borges. The difference is metaphysical rather than theological. The world is a dream, a nightmare for Borges but there is nothing beyond it save further dreams. Borges is utterly agnostic. To the Manichean and Valentinian, certain knowledge is salvation. Theodotus, a follower of Valentinus, says:

'... the knowledge of who we were, what we have become...'

Such knowledge is an inner enlightenment, a revelation of self to self; predestined, it requires neither faith nor works. For the elect, such a knowledge of self implies redemption. Though Borges is a dualist – flesh and soul – and inherits its contradictions and its anguish, metaphysics, like theology, remains a branch of fantastic literature, work of the imagination. There are no angels in his work nor any haloes denoting celestial illumination. Knowledge of self is impossible for the self is unreal.

Many of Borges' characters feel themselves to be grounded in another being, feel their individual identities to be illusory and transitory. They sense a magic correspondence between themselves and those enemies who pursue them, betray them and hunt them. Who is this other being, this precursor who renders the individual unreal, a dream? Who is 'the man who is all men'? We read in The Immortal;

'... shortly I shall be all men; I shall be dead...'

And in The Theologians we find;

'... it seemed not to have been written by a concrete person, but by any man or, perhaps, by all men...'

This theme is expressed again and is expanded to include God, in Everything and Nothing where both Shakespeare and the deity discover their unreality. And in the story The Warrior and the Captive, Borges proposes we imagine Droctulf 'sub species aeternitatis', 'the generic type formed from him and many others'. This notion, central in the Borges canon, of 'a man who is all men' is derived via Plato from archaic ontology and it expresses the archetypal man of myth, the Adam of a primordial time which, in Borges, has the function of a surrogate eternity. This primordial time is not the 'nunc stans' of Boethius nor the 'nunc fluens', but a time which contains all time and all things, all events, all men. Hence it is not a remote time in the past but is a prototypical time, a time without beginning or end. It is a pure and circular time which casts a shadow of unreality over the 'reality' of lived experience. Everything is thus predetermined for all time in the sense of being already in existence, though we cannot know it and only become painfully conscious of it. This consciousness of primordial time lends many of Borges' characters the strange impulse towards their destiny:

'... many men who had magnanimously coveted the steel...'

Borges secretly disturbs the ontological co-ordinates of personal identity by distorting the spatio-temporal frame until the ego is on the brink of dissolution. Such procedures are founded in the archaic cosmologies of circular time and in the myth of eternal return. Two kinds of cyclical time can be distinguished by the possibility or otherwise, of salvation from time. Mazdaism, Ismailism, Christian Gnosticism and Hinduism all proffer schemes of salvation from the chain of eternal return. Certain Greek systems deny salvation, notably early Stoicism. In these ancient religions, salvation from time was a paramount concern dominating all others and numerous arcane methods were proposed to achieve the 'lightning flash' of mystical insight. But in Borges, as the world is unreal, then, pantheistically perhaps, God is also unreal – a dreamer. As there is no eternity, there is no salvation. Borges' protagonists are locked in a strictly deterministic universe which permits no illumination, no true insight, no acts of gnosis: for them, the centre of the labyrinth, the axis mundi, is itself unreal, profane not sacred. So their actions are unreal, reflections of other actions in both historical and primordial time. They are poised over a chasm between the primordial time of a mythical consciousness and the eschatological time of trauma, of past, present and future.

Those who ponder whether Borges' writings on time can rigour the precise inquisitions of the philosophers, confuse the nature of that discipline and forget that with Plato, philosophy emerged from myth, whereas literature knows no such divorce. Borges writes in Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote:

'For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well.'

Horrified by the demythicisation of time which abandons Man to a meaningless death, a nothingness, Borges turns to the possibility of a cyclical time. All things wish to persist in being. His prisoners and fugitives are posited between eternal recurrence and the obliteration of an empty death. Thus destiny conforms to the circle of time.

Copyright © Paul R. Hyde 2004