Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales

Abstract

Within the revival of World Literature Studies, the oeuvre of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has performed a variety of roles. In his seminal essay, “The Argentinian Writer and the Tradition,” Borges can be seen as a Latin American cornerstone in the defense of the periphery's equality to the center; in “The Translators of The 1001 Nights,” Borges acts as a precursor to the cultural turn in translation studies and to the notion that world literature is one that gains in translation; in a plethora of other works, Borges intertextualizes world literature, whether through his interpretation of Kafka's works, his essays on Dante's Commedia, or his interest in the Kabbalah.In her fascinating new study, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales, Dominique Jullien, who is professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara, convincingly makes the case for yet another role that Borges is perfectly fit to play within World Literature Studies: that of continuator and further disseminator of the Buddhist Renunciation Tale as a morphological archetype in fictional literature. Jullien considers the aesthetic and political implications that the renunciation tale has on his work, first by reading Borges's own interest in the archetype against the background of the rise of Peron's left-wing populism in Argentina during the 1950s—the decade that Jullien sees as Borges's Buddhist decade—and then by proceeding to tease out the implications that the renunciation tale has on Borges's own philosophy of literature as seen in multiple examples of his vast oeuvre.Thus, Jullien's book reframes Borges as a significant node in the propagation and creation of a literary intertextuality that has its origin in the story of the historical/fictional Buddha—a story Borges detailed in the cowritten book What Is Buddhism? (1976). Jullien argues that the renunciation archetype extends down history and is present in the renunciation parables found in the work of modern and contemporary authors from around the globe.The book's introduction provides one of the most concise and yet rigorous compilations of past scholarship on Borges's relationship with Buddhism. As multiple scholars have argued, what for Borges started as an early interest in East Asian literature and philosophy developed during the 1950s into an ultimately lifelong fascination with Buddhism and Zen aesthetics that became increasingly prominent in his texts written during the 1970s and 1980s. Jullien's objective in the chapter is not to trace the origins, acuity, or fidelity of Borges's knowledge regarding Buddhism and its many schools. Rather, as is the point of the whole book, the goal is to shed light on the “ways in which the Buddha triangle, pulling together Buddhism, Schopenhauer, and Idealism in a shared negation of the individual self, yielded a serviceable pattern to decades of Borgesian stories, poems, and essays” (xviii).Chapter 1 traces Borges's essays on Buddhism and their relationship to Borges's cosmopolitan ideal. The end goal is the outlining of a “Borgesian Weltliteratur” that Jullien relates to Goethe's idea of world literature as a morphological phenomenon and to Vladimir Propp's notion of folktale morphology. A Buddhist tale of a king who renounces his kingdom in order to live as a hermit reappears in different literary iterations around the world, a fact which, Jullien argues, dovetails with Borges's own “view of literature as transmigration and circulation of fables and metaphors across time and space” (20).Chapter 2 focuses on the morphology of the renunciation tale in its political dimension. Jullien contextualizes the possible didactic and prescriptive readings that such a philological unit can possess. After an exploration of the historical background out of which such stories emerged, Jullien explores how the tensions between the worldly-political and the ascetic-spiritual dyads contained within this archetype emerge in what she terms the Borgesian hypertext, that is, the ever-reemerging texts of world literature to which Borges frequently alludes to in his writing. These encompass works that range from his beloved 1001 Nights to Oscar Wilde's “The Happy Prince.