Shaping the Word: Repression, Archive, and Dialogical Discourse in Jorge Luis Borges’s “La muralla y los libros”

Abstract

While Borges's non-fictions as well as his fictions brought him international fame, (1) in writer's own words, his style does not change when he composes essays: Me pregunto si alguna diferencia entre el estilo de la narrativa y el estilo del ensayo. En mi caso, no lo hay (176). (2) My interpretation of La muralla y los libros [The Wall and Books] from Otras Inquisiciones [Other Inquisitions] aims to show that this text is indispensable for an understanding of author's metapoetical ideas, as well as for an investigation of complex elements of dream-work, history, and artistic expression found in his writings. (3) I suggest that La muralla y los libros can be read as an artistic illustration of Jacques Derrida's concept of and his notion of repression as archivization. contradictory views of shared by Argentine author and French philosopher, in case of Borges, are probably inspired by Franz Kafka's The Great Wall of China. In both texts, architectural construction can be viewed as a point of departure for artistic exploration of aesthetic work, and dreams as interrelated realms. These three phenomena operate by common mechanism of displacement which is also required for their interpretation. Borges's essay revolves around two projects that a Chinese Emperor aspires to accomplish: building of Great Wall and destruction of all books written prior to his own time. Using monstrously cruel methods, Emperor attempts to gain immortality and to erase all memories of past so that 'history' could begin him. His actions and meditations can be interpreted in a dialogue Derrida's approach to as an and allow one to relate notions of repression and archivization. French philosopher's vision of as is informed by Sigmund Freud's concept of repression. Considering dreams as a manifestation of suppressed material in his book Interpretation of Dreams, Freud observes that displacement, a basic process in generation of thoughts and dreams, involves repression, which takes place when fulfillment of wishes provokes a transformation of (604): it no longer has an effect of pleasure as in original thought but rather opposite. In his subsequent essay Repression, this phenomenon is described as operating through mechanism of displacement, consisting of turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from consciousness (147). Freud also develops an interdisciplinary approach to this concept in book Moses and Monotheistic Religion, where he draws a parallel between repression as a mental mechanism and repression in a historical sense. life of individual as a of humans, according to father of psychoanalysis, is characterized by the reappearance of displaced or repressed (170). Derrida, an avid reader of Freud, both uses and displaces Freud's concepts of displacement and repression for his own elaboration of notion of as an archive. In his book Archive Fever, French philosopher explicitly recognizes his debt to Freud when he observes that with single but decisive conception of a topic of psychic apparatus (and thus of repression or of suppression, according to places of inscription, both inside and outside), Freud made possible idea of an archive (91). Derrida distinguishes displacement as an essential characteristic of which is essentially fragmentary. He suggests that one recalls and archives very thing one represses, and that it is impossible to erase unconscious and virtual archives. Consequently, Derrida concludes that it is impossible to separate repression and manifestation of repressed. word archive, he suggests, evokes both the commencement, the principle according to nature and history and the commandment, principle according to law, there where men and gods command (1). …