Borges and Bruno Schulz on the Infinite Book of the Kabbalah

Abstract

Borges and Bruno Schulz on the Infinite Book of the Kabbalah Rolando Pérez 22°06'39'N 78°37'40'W 41°21'32'N 2°5'57.9'E 40°44'54.36'N, 73°59'8.36'W …simetrías en el tiempo (3 de septiembre, tercer mes del año), simetrías en el espacio (3 lugares) … un destino por descifrar “Hypertextuality” may be a new term, a product of the Internet, but the reality of it goes back thousands of years. Religious and literary texts always established wittingly or unwittingly transversal connections with other texts within and outside of their own cultures and traditions. And fortunately for us, the by now exhausted literary concept of influence has given way to the notion of confluence: the ways in which texts flow into each other in a process of mutual enrichment. The aim of this article, then, is to present the philosophical confluence of some of the ideas of the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and the Polish writer, Bruno Schulz (1892–1942). Certainly I am not the first to connect them in a general way with respect to their interests in metaphysics and mysticism. Susan Sontag did so when she referred to Yugoslavian writer, Danilo Kiš’ acknowledge affinities with both writers (Kiš xi, 267). But no one until now has offered a detailed exposition of their ideas, and the impact these ideas had on their work. For the scholar of Hispanic letters, an introduction to Borges is unnecessary. However, the same cannot be said of Bruno Schulz, whose work was relatively unknown in the Spanish language until the publication of his Obra completa (1993).1 [End Page 41] Schulz was born at the end of the nineteenth century in the sleepy town of Drohobycz in the region of Galicia—a region which changed hands several times throughout its history: first Polish, then German and Russian, and today Ukrainian. Like Galicia, whose identity kept shifting with changes in geopolitical power, Schulz’s identity seems to have been quite as liquid, as he, along with other Galicians, had to adjust to the whims of political power. Born into a Jewish family of textile merchants, Schulz was fascinated by Jewish (mystical) culture; he wrote in Polish, knew German, and had no knowledge of Yiddish. He studied architecture, and earned his living as a high school teacher of arts and crafts. In terms of his writing, his complete works include two works of prose fiction, The Street of Crocodiles [La calle de los cocodrilos] and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass [Sanatorio bajo la Clepsidra], and some brief essays and letters. His life came to a terribly tragic end one day in 1942 when a Gestapo officer executed him in the street, for the simple reason of being a Jew: in the wrong place, at the wrong time, almost in a manner that recalls Borges’ “brújula” pointing to a death foretold in a book that needs to be deciphered. And that is not surprising, since both writers conceived of the world as a union of materiality (the body: mortality) and spirit (the Word: eternity), and both writers had profound interests in the the Kabbalah. “Yo afirmo que la Biblioteca es interminable,” declares the narrator of Borges’ “La biblioteca de Babel” (1989 I 465). While humans, as interpreters-librarians, are imperfect mortal beings, the library itself is eternal. “La Biblioteca existe ab aeterno…No me parece inverosímil que en algún anaquel del universo haya un libro total…” writes Borges (466, 469 emphasis in the original). And when Joseph, the protagonist of Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is given a “book” by his Father, he reproaches his father for trying to fool him with a reproduction of The Book. “‘You must know, Father,’ I cried, ‘you must. Don’t pretend, don’t quibble. This book has given you away. Why do you give me that fake copy, that reproduction, a clumsy falsification? What have you done with The Book?” (1978 3). The son wants to know what the Father has done with The Book, because the book he has been given...