Borges Reading Jung

ABSTRACT

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote as he read. He made note of important passages in his books to which he might refer later, listing page numbers and ideas in the endpaper pages. As director of the National Library of Argentina, he maintained this same practice with the library books that he read and returned to be reshelved. In 2017, librarians Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez at the National Library of Argentina published Borges, libros y lecturas, a catalogue of Borges’s marginalia and endpaper notes that they discovered in books in the national collection. These published notes confirm the extent to which Borges read Jung and found in books such as Psychology and Alchemy and Psychology and Religion a lexicon with which to map and describe his private cosmology.

KEY WORDS:

• Borges
• cosmology
• Jung
• lexicon
• marginalia

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay was originally written for a festschrift honoring Dr. Roy Rosenstein, the American University of Paris (AUP).

I gratefully honor the memory of Jungian analyst Cara Denman (IGAP, London), who met Borges and recounted to me her wonderful private conversation with him about Jung.

Thanks to Dr. Daniel Balderston, Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, for posting a version of this essay on his Borges Center website.

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

1. Borges, libros y lecturas, Item 235, p. 209: “Endpaper, signature of Borges, Buenos Aires, 1947. Note: ≪Sei nur dis Persönlichkeit≫, p. 281. No de Inv:12.295.”

2. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 4.

3. Borges, libros y lecturas, Item 236, pp. 209–210: “Psychologie und Alchemie, Zürich, Rascher Verlag, 1944, p. 696. Note: signature of Borges, Buenos Aires, 1946. Half title page, manuscript notes, quoting from the book: 160, das dunkle Licht … dis schwarze Sonne [the dark light … the black sun]; 313, obscurum per obscurius [to the dark through the dark]; 429, liber, librum aperit [one book opens to another]; 583, And the top of this rock … ; 398, der Salamander [the Salamander], Cf. 376; 399, Ouroboris, Schwanzfresser [the tale-eater], Cf. Gering 12, 322, Leisegang, 111, 112, 35, 99, Nefelibal de Martinez Estrada, 29; 672, Drache als Ouroboros [the dragon as Ouroboris]; 611, the three legged ass, Vide E.Br. VII, 216, Deussen 132; 591 & 592, Des Rhinozoros [the rhinocerous], Cf. Kern 62, Winternitz II, 193, Mauthner II, 368; pp. 190, 201, des Affe Gottes [the ape of God]; Bi de Inv.: 17.336.”

4. In Gerard de Nerval’s memoir of his madness, Aurélia, it is a winged llama that is being birthed in a purple light. Jung (2015) notes this hopeful image of an animal life principle struggling to revive, following from the dream vision of a winged spirit tragically crashing into the Paris courtyard that presaged Nerval’s psychotic breakdown.

5. Borges, libros y lecturas Item 237, pp. 212–213: “Psychologie und Religion (Terry Lectures, 1937, given at Yale University) (German), Zurich, Rascher Verlag, 1942.

Etiquette, Barna Bookstore, Maipú 441, Buenos Aires; signature of Borges, 1947; 48, der Traum seine eigene Deutung sei; 60, Kontinuität der unbewussten Prozesse; 79, - den vorteil, neurotisch zu sein; 98, –deus est figura (cf. Rabelais-Urquhart- II, 340); 101, … dem kuglerunden doppelgeschlechtlichen Menschen (cf. Gomperz, II, 386); 140, … dass man von keiner Sünde erlöst werde könne, … . (cf. Leisegang, 263)

91, … und unglücklicherwise zugleich auch ihr Subjekt; 161, was im Christusleben geschieht, ereigner sich immer und überall; 165, Gehe zu den Strömungen des Nils, … ; 189, Das, was eine Neurose heilt, … ; 130, Nach Archytas ist die Seele ein Kreis oder eine Kugel. Vide Psychologie und Alchemie 444. Vide Studi Danteschi XIX 82. No de Inv.: 524.371.”

6. In his essay on the transcendent function (Jung 1957/1969, CW 8), Jung mentioned that some patients could employ an aesthetic understanding evasively and would need to experience the autonomy of their own unconscious and its imperatives; others inclined to be possessed by unconscious contents might profit from aesthetic understanding that renders the contents objectified but meaningful to consciousness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Craig E. Stephenson

CRAIG E. STEPHENSON, PhD/LP, is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institut Zürich, the Institut für Psychodrama (Zümikon), and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. His books include Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche (2009/2016), Anteros (2011), Jung and Moreno (2013), Ages of Anxiety (2016), and The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C. G. Jung: Writing to the Woman Who Was Everything (2023). For the Philemon Foundation, he edited On Psychological and Visionary Art: Notes from C. G. Jung’s Lecture on Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia (2015). He has a private practice in Lisbon. Correspondence: [email protected].