Jorge J.E. Gracia, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Rodolphe Gasché, eds., Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco. New York: Routledge, 2002. 248 pages.
Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco, edited by Jorge J.E. Gracia, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Rodolphe Gasché, explores the relationship between literature and philosophy, addressing the central question of what such literary works have to offer in philosophical terms or, as Korsmeyer puts it in her introduction, whether "philosophy [can] be done in or through or by means of fictional literature" (3). Many of the contributions contained in this disparate but illuminating collection arise from a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1999. As Korsmeyer notes, many of the essays in the collection take as their point of departure Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote": "'Pierre Menard' is repeatedly invoked in these essays, more than any other single work" (6). Even Calvino and Eco themselves, Korsmeyer tells us, "acknowledge a debt to Borges" (2). This indebtedness is evident throughout the collection; of the eleven essays, five focus exclusively on Borges, three on Calvino and one on Eco, while the remaining contributions treat some mixture of the three. Borges' work, as Lois Parkinson Zamora notes in her essay, "is routinely invoked to illustrate a vast array of theories and critical positions," from Michel Foucault to Harold Bloom (47). Throughout this collection, contributors address the very ambiguity that defines "Menard"; just as the story blurs the distinction between story and essay, these essays explore the erasure or question of boundaries between disciplines raised by such fictional works. [End Page 1143]
The essays approach this central issue from a variety of perspectives. In "Intersections" Deborah Knight discusses questions elicited by Borges' work in particular—namely, the problem of discerning the identities and boundaries distinguishing literature and philosophy from each other. The question Knight poses—"whether literature can be an alternative avenue to philosophical truth" (17)—leads to a similarly ambiguous answer—"yes and no"; Knight argues that while literature is one of many "avenues" to philosophical truth, the two remain "different practices" that, even so, become "intertwined" (17). Having established Borges' role in raising such questions, Knight discusses how various philosophers, such as Booth and Nussbaum, have approached the practice of ethical criticism. As her title suggests, Knight points out that ethical criticism mainly addresses realist works "with basically Aristotelian plots and richly developed psychological characters engaged in courses of action that are serious and demand second-order reflection from the characters as well as from readers" (23). Ethical criticism, and more generally philosophy of literature, Knight argues, is often at a loss to account for the "self-conscious and self-reflexive metafictions written by Borges, Calvino, and Eco" (23). According to Knight, philosophy of literature is limited in its capacity to address kinds of literature other than those that easily lend themselves to ethical readings. Looking ahead to Wladimir Krysinski's essay at the end of the collection, Knight concludes by suggesting that in order to read Borges, Calvino, and Eco we need a "philosophy of metafiction" rather than a "philosophy of literature" (25).
In "Philosophy and the Philosophical, Literature and the Literary, Borges and the Labyrinthine," William Irwin approaches the problem from a different angle, adapting Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance to clarify the relationship between literature and philosophy. Having concluded, not surprisingly, that Borges' ficciones are indeed literature or literary, Irwin poses a more challenging question: are Borges' stories philosophy? Focusing primarily on "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Irwin decides that the story is indeed philosophical "in that it raises issues and asks questions that are of concern to philosophers" (41). He then asks whether "Menard" is "an instance of philosophy" and concludes that although "Menard" "raises interesting and important philosophical issues, but it neither argues for, nor provides answers" (41); the story is philosophical, though not philosophy per se.
Lois Parkinson Zamora's essay "Borges' Monsters" addresses these questions differently, examining the parallels between Borges' hybrid genres and his imaginary monstrosities. Zamora provides a historical-biographical context within which to understand Borges' art of combination, focusing on various incarnations of the monstrous in Borges' work, be they the monstrosity of imaginary beings, of the trinity, or of crossed genres. She concludes that Borges stimulates philosophical questions through these "metaphysical mixtures," "disciplinary combinations," and "generic hybrids," which "move his reader from the particular to the universal, from reality to myth, from [End Page 1144] personality to archetype, from realities to Reality"—a "universalizing impulse Borges shares with philosophy and philosophers" (78).
In "Borges' 'Pierre Menard': Philosophy or Literature," Jorge J.E. Gracia returns to the questions raised by "Menard," addressing in particular the postmodernist view that no difference exists between literary and philosophical discourse:
[B]ecause our ultimate aim is to establish whether Borges' "Pierre Menard" is philosophy or literature, and "Pierre Menard" is both a work and a text, to facilitate our task I propose to reformulate the general question we are trying to answer as follows: What distinguishes literary works from philosophical works and literary texts from philosophical texts? The more specific question about Borges turns out something like this: Is Borges' "Pierre Menard" a work of philosophy or of literature, and is it a philosophical or a literary text? (86)
In pursuit of this question, Gracia presents the distinction between the text and the work as a means of understanding "Menard": "We can say that the entities that constitute the texts of Cervantes' Don Quijote and Pierre Menard's Don Quijote are the same, but the work of Cervantes and the work of Pierre Menard are different" (88). This distinction helps him define the differences between philosophy and literature: "A literary work is distinguished from a philosophical one in that its conditions of identity include the text of which it is the meaning" (91). Returning to "Menard" as a concrete example of this distinction, Gracia raises the problem of translation, arguing that, in the end, literary texts are not really translatable, while philosophical texts are; a translation can faithfully represent ideas, but not such things as style, tone, and connotation: "[T]he difference between literary works and philosophical works is that for the former the texts that express them are part of their identity conditions, whereas for the latter they are not" (98).
Anthony J. Cascardi's "Mimesis and Modernism" hopes "to identify the particular modes of inflection that allow Borges to imagine and articulate difference within historical conditions that might be called 'the age of mimesis as mechanical reproduction" (110), hence positioning Borges alongside Benjamin and Adorno as a theorist of modernism:
Borges is himself so subtle and compelling on such points that rather than turn further to someone like Adorno or Benjamin for elucidation of the relations of mimesis, repetition, and difference, I want to proceed by reconstructing what I think of as the archaeology of their relations using some of Borges' own texts for the purpose. Said in other terms, I think that Borges himself provides models for the process out of which his distinctive mode of fiction-making emerges. (116-17)
Like most other contributors in the collection, Cascardi begins by considering "Menard," but then, and laudably so, seeks answers within Borges' own essays, such as "Narrative Art and Magic" and "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote"—as well as in his better-known fictions.
In "A Method for the New Millenium: Calvino and Irony," Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert revisits Italo Calvino's assertion in Philosophy and Literature that [End Page 1145] comedy provides a "common bond" between the two disciplines. Millán-Zaibert explains Calvino's statement by examining an alternative view of philosophy provided by the work of the German Romantic movement, which, as Millán-Zaibert explains, questioned the foundationalism of mainstream philosophical systems by employing irony to question the very possibility of absolute knowledge. Rather than developing a complete system, Schlegel, Novalis, and other German Romantics recognized the necessary incompleteness of the philosophical project and instead cultivated the idea of the fragment as a means to representing both the desire for and the limitations of knowledge. Like the German Romantics, Calvino looked to literary works such as Cervantes' Don Quijote and Shakespeare's Hamlet for philosophical insight. Millán-Zaibert explains that "both Schlegel and Calvino are drawn to such works [because] they lead us directly to irony, where the root of the relationship between literature and philosophy is to be found" (140).
Henry Sussman, in "The Writing of the System: Borges' Library and Calvino's Traffic," argues that although Borges and Calvino parody the system-building tendencies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these "parodic bad-boys of philosophical systematization may derive much in tone, style, and imagery from the conceptual machines from which they presumably part company" (151). Sussman first attempts, in a section entitled "Twelve Ways of Looking at a System," to provide a definition of systems in the form of a list not unlike, he suggests, Borges' famous Chinese Encyclopedia. He then examines the prevalence of systems in the writings of Borges and Calvino. Borges, Sussman argues, "configures figurative simulacra of language, and these are characterized by systemic features" (157); Sussman sees here more a "collusion" with than a "liberation" from such systems (159), whereas Calvino "in comparison to Borges, leaves more room in his fiction for the everyday, and its particular register of humor" (159-60); Calvino's system is more open and ludic. Against Borges' more static systems, Calvino's are more dynamic and allow more room for movement: [W]here the Borgesian ficción luxuriates in the arabesques of complication, labyrinths, lotteries, and endlessly twisting plots, [...] Calvino's systematic writing looks back over its shoulder at the pure elements of philosophical speculation" (163).
The sole essay focusing entirely on Eco is Rocco Capozzi's "Knowledge and Cognitive Practices in Eco's Labyrinths of Intertextuality." Capozzi does not address directly the questions about literature and philosophy raised by other contributors and formulated most fully in Knight's essay; instead, he argues that Eco's fictional works are "like interactive epistemological metaphors [...] that bring together in an interactive way different texts and different fields of knowledge" (181). This not only helps us to understand Eco's works, but also to formulate a response, however indirect, to the questions posed throughout the collection:
In the essays in this volume we have tried to come to terms with the complex and even ambivalent relationships between philosophy and literature. But, in my [End Page 1146] estimation, this is not a problem for Umberto Eco who has often praised Galileo's prose, in which rhetoric, science, and literature are not in conflict but complement one another. The abundance of philosophical and semiotic discussions in Eco novels indicates that for the author these disciplines can complement each other as they elucidate complicated thoughts and at the same time contextualize cultural issues. (181-82)
In other words, Eco's works answer the very questions they pose by showing how discourses from a variety of disciplines interact in practice. Capozzi, like Zamora and Cascardi, addresses the question from within the texts, acknowledging their ability to speak, in some sense, for themselves.
In "Borges, Calvino, Eco," Wladimir Krysinski examines "the diverse philosophies of metafiction reflected in the works of Borges, Calvino, and Eco" (185). He addresses the definition of metafiction as "a polyvalent problematization of the critical, reflexive, analytical, or playful perspective of that which is narrated reflected on itself" (186), discussing various practical illustrations and theoretical definitions of metafiction. Krysinski argues that we should "consider metafiction a heuristic tool to facilitate discovery of complex systems of signs, arguing that "[m]etafiction should be taken as both manifestations of deconstruction and of a cognitive process" (189).
Surveying the work of Borges, Calvino, and Eco, Krysinski argues that each "embod[ies] different types of metafictional processes" (189): "Metafiction represents a specific worldview, thereby defining the writer's epistemological position vis-à-vis narration and representation as well as toward the general or particular meanings of a given literary work" (189). Krysinski concludes that "[a]t the core of Borges' writing lies the postulate of an unfinished condition of interpretativeness of the world" (190); Borges' work is permeated by the idea of the "hermeneutical infinite" (192) in which there are potentially endless interpretative possibilities. Borges' followers—including Calvino and Eco—must "depend on the Borgesian intertextuality understood as an open-ended multiplicity of textual universes and metafictional operations" (196). Calvino's "philosophy of metafiction," rests then on his consciousness of semiotics and discourses; it "presupposes achieving a complete practical knowledge of literature in order to practice it as a synthesis of rhetoric, narrative models, and a mosaic of styles" (198). Similarly, Eco "recycles" and reuses literary genres and sign systems. Situating both writers as Borges' heirs, Krysinski constructs a sort of "literary genealogy" (199):
We can, therefore, establish the following succession of labyrinthine perspectives in the literary genealogy encompassing Borges, Calvino, and Eco: (1) Borges: a fascination with the labyrinth and constant multiplication of various labyrinthine structures leading to a permanent narrative and the hermeneutical "growth" of the structures; (2) Calvino: the labyrinth as an epistemological model for understanding and challenging the world; and (3) Eco: the labyrinth as a dynamic and heuristic model for interpreting the world. (199) [End Page 1147]
Responding to the question of boundaries that dominates the collection, Krysinski closes by arguing that although these "[p]hilosophies of metafiction are not as philosophical as Cartesian, Husserlian, or Adornian discourses," they nevertheless present a particular world vision and critical stance.
In the final essay, "Philosophy and Literature in Calvino's Tales," Ermanno Bencivenga argues that "Calvino was increasingly tempted by philosophy" away from literature and thus that he provides a "precious case study" for illustrating the relationship between the literary and the philosophical (206). What Calvino's oeuvre demonstrates, according to Bencivenga, is that "[b]oth philosophy and literature aim at disconnecting us from our ordinary context":
[...] the end of both is liberation, and the agility of mind that goes with it, and the more extensive knowledge and greater adaptiveness that issue from that agility. Within this general liberating task, they play distinct but complementary roles. (216)
Hence, the collection ends by acknowledging the "difficult balancing act,
the tightrope walking" that Calvino, like Borges and Eco, achieves (217),
as well as the persistence of the questions that, though illuminated by
the essays in this collection, remain to be answered. Gathering together
various disciplinary perspectives and approaches to the very problem of
disciplinarity, Literary Philosophers provides a prism through
which to meditate upon the questions Borges, Calvino, and Eco provoke in
readers from across fields and practices. However much the answers vary,
the common questions provide a point of departure for philosophers and
literary scholars to sort out their differences.
Heather Dubnick
Boston University
