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Borges's affection for genre fiction, especially detective stories and
science fiction, is apparent. Not only has he written of them with
sympathy and praise in his criticism, but he has also incorporated
elements and themes from both genres into his fiction, both individually
and in collaborations with Adolfo Bioy-Casares. Indeed one might argue
that many of Borges's chief works are throwbacks to an earlier time--a
time before George Eliot and Nathaniel Hawthorne--when literary fiction
*was* genre fiction, accomplished with artistry, grace and literary
acumen. "El inmortal," the story which opens El aleph, successor to
Ficciones, is only one example.
 Encountering Borges as we do, in the late twentieth or early
twenty-first century, we automatically--I think--encase his stories in
an irony which may or may not be there. When we begin "El inmortal" and
learn that the story is not (allegedly) Borges's but rather is his
translation of a latinate English manuscript secreted into the sixth
volume of a first edition of Pope's Iliad, most of us assume that
Borges is employing a common post-modernist distancing device--
separating himself from all responsibility for his tale, allowing himself
the freedom to write in a little-respected genre, and/or having a little
joke at the expense of nineteenth century faux-nonfiction fiction, such
as Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Shelley's Frankenstein.
But is this an adequate explanation of Borges's practice here and in many
other tales? Certainly if one lays "El inmortal" alongside any number of
Borges's poems, one is immediately struck by the difference: the poems
are direct, humble, un-"screened", even sentimental. What if we were to
approach "El inmortal" in the same manner that the poems demand we
approach them? The story doesn't change, of course: what happens is
that we remove the intellectual filter which we put into place when we
read a Borges fiction.
In this case, "El inmortal" perhaps ceases to be an ironic homage to the
past, an intellectual parlor game, and becomes instead an actual story--
a narrative in a now bygone fashion, which uses, as did its forebears,
the strangeness of the events recounted as a base from which to discuss
issues which demand the writer's attention. Huxley and Orwell, after
all, did not write their dystopias because they were gaga with Vernian
visions but because the "implausible" format allowed them to investigate
human tendencies--freedom vs. totalitarianism, the emotional tangle of
love vs. mechanistic sex--in a less threatening way. And yet these
books, like Borges's stories, are considered literature and not
science fiction--as opposed to similarly engaged works by H.G. Wells,
Ray Bradbury or Robert A. Heinlein--not because the latter gentlemen's
ideas are less serious but rather because their writing as writing is not
good enough--they do not transcend genre levels of quality.
Borges, of course, uses his skills as a writer to take even the genre
elements farther than mere genre writers can. "El inmortal," as the tale
inside the tale unwinds, keeps looping back over itself, so that it
imitates in structure the structure of the City of the Immortals at the
heart of the story--with the distinction that, whereas the city is a
labyrinth due to lack of care and forethought, Borges's story is a
labyrinth because the labyrinth is a metaphor for the peculiar windings
of the individual human life, which leads to only one final chamber, more
especially so in the case of a life that last two millenia. The
labyrinth is recurrent in Borges, to be sure, and that recurrence is yet
another marker that distinguishes him from writers of lesser intellect
(if equal linguistic skill) who tend toward more conventional metaphors
such as the river or the road. (In fact, Norma Garza Saldivar's study of
Borges is called Borges: La huella del minotauro [Borges: The Track of
the Minotaur] (Mexico City : Editorial Aldus, 1999).)
The metaphor links "El inmortal" horizontally to other fictions of
Borges--such as "La casa de Asterion" ("The House of Asterion"), also
included in El aleph and whose narrator is the Minotaur--as well as
vertically to great genre fiction of the past, such as The Iliad, a war
story, and The Odyssey, a fantasy, both of which are deliberately
evoked here, explicitly in such references as Pope's Iliad and the
inclusion of Homer as a character, implicitly in the apparently
directionless, Odyssey-like path of the narrator: "apparently"
because, just as Odysseus could only "solve" his labyrinth by making his
way back to Penelope, so too does the immortal return home (to mortality)
on the shores of the Red Sea where he was first infected, as a Roman
tribune, with the dream of eternal life.
Suitably, for a story which concerns and mimics a labyrinth, "El
inmortal" features the immortal's death three times, twice in the
original tale, once in the postscript of 1950. The death first occurs in
Borges's introduction, when his reader has yet no idea if Joseph
Cartaphilus, the owner of Pope's translation, who dies at sea, is the
immortal of the title. The death occurs again, in anticipation, in the
memoir of Cartaphilus, indeed the "immortal", after he realizes that he
has once more contracted mortality and so has decided to record his tale.
Here he philosophizes about what it has meant to be himself and what it
means that his own retelling of his life seems at times to be a confusion
of his life and Homer's. He concludes, "I have been Homer; soon I will
be No One, like Ulysses; soon I will be everyone; I will be dead."
Finally Borges himself enters the tale again, in the postscript which
ostensibly responds to accusations that the manuscript he claims to have
translated is false. He concludes that Cartaphilus was correct in
asserting that eventually "only words remain," some of which have been
appropriated from others. At first glance Borges has brought us to a
depressing moment of clarity--even a life as long as the immortal's ends
in death and nothing but words. But stepping back, we realize that the
presumed desolation is a ruse--or a product of the reader's own filtered
gaze--because the words do survive. That is what Borges and
Cartaphilus tell us--the words are not lost, they remain. And so
immortality, which Cartaphilus gladly shed himself of after 2000 years,
is not conquered at all. He and (by implication) Borges are not dead,
though the immortality then share does not require their presence.
That "El inmortal" is a labyrinth; that it layers itself, story inside
story; that Borges was born in 1899 rather than 1799 should not render us
incapable of reading the story without post-modernist irony. So read, it
elegantly and concisely pays tribute to the grand, large-scale fiction of
the past which Borges so obviously enjoys at the same time that it
develops into an immortality ode and meditation on the blankness and
apparent endlessness of a life inadequately directed. And if we presume
"El inmortal" as a source for Philip Jose Farmer's Time's Last Gift
(1972), then Borges's homage to some of the fictions which inspired him
becomes itself an inspiration and a continuation of the quest as old as
Gilgamesh.
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