METAPHOR AND IMAGE IN BORGES'S "EL ZAHIR"

I will comment on three points in this passage, each having to do with the fact that in Borges's story the Zahir assumes the form of a coin. The narrator here emphasizes that a coin is never just a coin, and thus each of these motifs will relate to a question of metaphor. First point: The coin is an aesthetic metaphor representing a compendium of the Western tradition, from Greek mythology to the modern novel, and from the Byzantine Empire to the French Revolution. A stand-in for all coins both real and Active, the Zahir is both a species (twenty-centavo coin) standing for the totality of a genus (coins) and a species representing other species (as the Spanish "historia" [history or story] emphasizes, the coin mobilizes references to world history and to literary history). This presentation of universality anticipates the famous assertion in "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" that universal history is the history of tonalities imparted to a small number of metaphors. The notion of differential repetition which Borges develops in the 1951 essay suggests that metaphor plays a fundamental role for all creative activity (art, thinking, and so on), providing the "material stuff" through which new ideas, works, and projects enter the world. It is through metaphor that a particular thinker (or even a generation or an entire epoch) finds its attunement to being, its way of engaging with and asking questions about the world. But as we will see shortly, the aesthetic metaphor in "El Zahir" does not just recall all of history, it also announces the imminent collapse of the division between the finite and the transcendent, or between representation and the absolute-and thus the end of history itself.

As was suggested earlier, Borges's strategy in writing a story about metaphor is to transform the philosophical problem of metaphor into literary form. This transposition is what drives plot development in "El Zahir," where the action involves a series of thematic transferences, exchanges, and repetitions, and thus formally resembles the logic of metaphor. The ill-fated scene in which the narrator first receives the coin marks the first in a series of transfers: of literary theme (love is substituted by money), of libidinal energy (emotional attachment to the beloved is displaced by obsession with the image of the Zahir), and likewise of proper names ("Zahir," whose Arabic meaning is "the visible," replaces "Teodelina," from the Greek teo- [god] and delina [delo: to make visible]).6 When the narrator begins to intuit the coin's sinister nature, his efforts to rid himself of it set in motion another series of substitutions and repetitions: his first impulse is to bury it (just as Teodelina is to be buried in the cemetery) or to abandon it in a library (returning it to the order of "history and fable"), but he finally decides to send it back to its native sphere by spending it, clarifying that he does so "in order to remove [himself] from its orbit" (159). The role of urban topography likewise contributes to this structuring effect: the narrator's peripatetic wanderings on the night of the wake and the following day trace a circuit which resembles the way that a coin or a word might circulate in public. The celestial metaphor ("orbit") describing the coin's sphere of influence combines with figures of economic and libidinal investment as well as urban circumnavigation to form a multi-dimensional tropological network of exchange and transference.