Matei Călinescu

 

 

Adventures of Misreading: Borges’s “Death and the Compass,” a Commentary

 

 

My interest in questions of reading, rereading and misreading explains my long-time fascination with “Death and the Compass” by Borges, a story that thematizes the ineluctably reciprocal as well as antithetical relationship between reading and writing, deception and self-deception–in the form of a complex allegory. I must hasten to add that “Death and the Compass” is not the only allegory of reading/writing in Borges’s work and perhaps not even the most obvious or the most famous one. That prominent place in the oeuvre of this author obsessed with the problematic of reading/writing is disputed by other stories, of which the best known and most extensively commented upon are probably “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote.” “Death and the Compass” (hence “DC”), however, has the advantage of being Borges’s own choice for opening his Personal Anthology (1967), whose prologue states unequivocally: “My preferences have dictated this book. I should like to be judged by it, justified or reproved because of it…”^[1] It happens to be also my choice, alongside only with “The Aleph”, to which it is linked by common kabbalistic-gnostic elements.

I will start my commentary by saying that “DC” is a supremely rereadable text, also in the sense that its implied reader or internal model reader is a rereader, contrary to all appearances. “DC” may look like a detective story in the ordinary sense, a linear puzzle with suspense and a final surprise, constructed in view of a first reading, but it is at the same time a metaphysical-mystical parable as well as an obvious parody, whose multiple meanings can be fully grasped only on condition of numerous reperusals. “DC” also has the quality of containing in nuce most if not all the major interconnected themes of Borges’s fictions and essays: ranging from God and his secret Name to the fatal human urge to decipher its forbidden meaning; and including references, direct or oblique, to the Bible (the sacred text) and its interpretation (as illustrated in particular by the Kabbalah, the great model of reading and writing for Borges), the dialectic of the same and the other, the symbolism of the labyrinth and the mirror (mimesis: duplication, mimetic reversal, and the fearful ultimate identity of the conflicting parties), time and repetition, contingency and necessity, numerology and the magic of the letter.

A brief synopsis is in order here. There are two protagonists in this Jewish story, the detective Lönnrot and the master-criminal Scharlach; and there are four murders, one of them simulated, whose victims are all Jewish. Ironically, the victim of the last murder is none other than the detective Lönnrot himself; and the solution of the puzzle is given by his killer, Scharlach. Why is the sophisticated detective, a reincarnation of Poe’s infallible raisonneur, Auguste Dupin, outsmarted by the criminal? Because he misreads the first accidental murder of rabbi Yarmolinsky and constructs a perfectly farfetched “rabbinical” scenario which revolves around the ineffable four-letter name of the Hebrew God, Yahveh (JHVH in the Hebrew Scriptures). Learning from an Yiddisch newspaper about the detective’s fantastic hypothesis, the criminal sets out to confirm it by committing a second murder and staging a third one, thus luring his unsuspecting enemy to the place of his execution.

Published in 1942 (the third year of World War II, but harking back to World War I), the story starts with the murder of Marcelo Yarmolinsky, a scholar of the Kabbalah and a delegate to the Third Talmudic Congress held in an unnamed city—a Buenos Aires whose streets and buildings have French names. Three is emphatically important in “DC”. Yarmolinsky, who had endured “three years of war in the Carpathians” (during World War I) is killed on the night of December 3 (sometime in the interwar period), in the Hôtel du Nord, in his room on floor R, situated in the vicinity of the suite occupied “not without some splendor” by the Tetrarch of Galilee. The Tetrarch is known to own some of the world’s most precious sapphires. [Note the introduction of the numeral four, “tetra” in Greek, in reference to the mysterious Tetrarch.] On the fourth of December, at the scene of the murder, Erik Lönnrot, a private investigator (“a pure reasoner, an Auguste Dupin,” but also something of an “adventurer” and a “gambler”) discusses the possible motive of the criminal with the police inspector Treviranus (whose name means “three men”, “tres viri” in Latin). Treviranus is a pragmatist averse to taking useless intellectual risks. He thinks probabilistically that there is no need to look for roundabout explanations (no need “to look for a cat with three legs,” as he puts it: again three): the murderer was after the Tetrarch’s sapphires but by mistake had entered Yarmolinsky’s room; and since the latter had been awoken from his sleep, the robber had to kill him.

Lönnrot rejects this banal line of reasoning: “‘It’s possible but not interesting,’ Lönnrot answered. You will reply that reality hasn’t the slightest need to be of interest. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation of being interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi: I should prefer a rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.” Lönnrot points to a shelf with Yarmolinsky’s works–A Vindication of the Cabala [the title of an essay by Borges: an ironic but also important act of self-quotation suggesting a significant intertext[2]], An Examination of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd; a literal translation of the Sepher Yezirah, and other Judaica books including a monograph (in German) on the Tetragrammaton, i.e. the four Hebrew consonants (JHVH) that indicate the name of God. [To be noted: the name Yarmolinsky starts with “Y”, the letter corresponding to “Yod”, the tenth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and first letter of the Tetragammaton.] Seeing the books, Treviranus exclaims: “I’m only a poor Christian…. I haven’t got time to lose in Jewish superstitions.” Lönnrot murmures: “Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions.” “Like Christianity,” adds the editor of the Yiddische Zaitung . The editor, who is present at the scene as a journalist, may be seen as an ironic disguise of the author, i.e. Borges himself.[3] At this point, Lönnrot discovers in the typewriter a piece of paper on which is written: “The first letter of the Name has been spoken.”

Subsequently, Lönnrot immerses himself in Yarmolinsky’s books and, when after a few days the editor of the Yiddische Zaitung visits him to talk about the murder, Lönnrot speaks to him about the names of God. The editor perceives the absurdity and publishes a scoffing article to the effect that “Lönnrot had dedicated himself to studying the names of God in order ‘to come up’ with the name of the assassin”; but Lönnrot, who has a low opinion of journalistic writing, remains unabated. He continues his erudite pursuits.

The second murder occurs exactly one month later, on the night of January 3, in the western suburbs of the capital, near a paint shop, the victim being a notorious thief named Azevedo. Scribbled in chalk on a wall were the words: “The second letter has been spoken.” The third crime (later revealed to have been a hoax) occurs, predictably for the rationalist Lönnrot, on February 3 in the east of the city, on Rue de Toulon (a dirty street “where cheek by jowl are the peepshow and the milk store, the bordello and women selling Bibles”), at carnival time, when a certain Ginzberg (or Ginsburg or Gryphius) is kidnapped by two Yiddisch-speaking harlequins from the Liverpool House, a tavern owned by a reformed Irish criminal, Black Finnegan. On the outdoor shed one of the harlequins had drawn an obscene figure and scribbled: “The last of the letters of the Name has been uttered.”

In the room that had been occupied by Gryphius, the policeman Treviranus finds a book in Latin, Philologus hebraeogrecus and some manuscript notes. Lönnrot is summoned. Treviranus wonders whether that night’s story might not have been a sham, a put on, a charade? But Lönnrot does not seem to listen, being absorbed by the discovery of an underlined passage in the Philologus (in the thirty-third dissertation) to the effect that “the Hebrew day begins at sundown and lasts until the following sundown.” Which would mean that, according to the Hebrew calendar, the three murders had apparently been perpetrated on December 4, January 4, and February 4. The figure four plays as important a role in the story as three: three seems to symbolize good sense (the pragmatism of Treviranus) while four is deceptive, a trap, as we shall see, but also perhaps an intimation of the genuinely sacred. On March 1, the policeman Treviranus receives a letter absurdly signed Baruch Spinoza[4] and accompanied by a plan of the city. “The letter prophesied that on the third of March there would not be a fourth crime, inasmuch as the paint shop in the East, the Tavern on the Rue de Toulon and the Hôtel du Nord were the ‘perfect vertices of an equilateral and mystic triangle.'”

Treviranus sends this “piece of insanity” to Lönnrot, who “studied the documents…. Of a sudden he sensed he was about to decipher the mystery. A set of calipers and a compass completed his sudden intuition. He smiled, pronounced the word ‘Tetragrammaton’ (of recent acquistion), and called the Commissioner on the telephone,” telling him that a fourth crime was being planned. He presently takes a train to go to the abandoned quinta Triste-le-Roy in South of the city, the place identified by the doubling of the equilateral North-West-East triangle into a North-West-East-South rhombus (a shape that had already occurred twice in the story: “the yellow and red rhombi” on the wall of the paint shop of the second murder; the rhombs of the diamond-patterned harlequin tights worn by the kidnappers of Gryphius in the third spurious crime). On his way to Triste-le-Roy Lönnrot thinks of the most famous of the gunmen in the South, Red Scarlach, who “would have given anything to know of this clandestine visit. Azevedo had been a comrade of Scharlach; Lönnrot considered the remote possibility that the forth victim might be Scharlach himself.” But, in fact, as we soon learn, the fourth victim–actually the third, since the third crime had only been staged–is none other than Lönnrot himself, the rigorously “interesting” misreader of the fortuitous first murder, who had managed to suggest to his mortal enemy, Scharlach, the elaborate stratagem by which to lure him to the place of his execution. Scharlach, no less a reasoner, is a better mind reader than Lönnrot, and deceives him by understanding his wrongheaded expectations and building on them.

When Scharlach’s men have overpowerd Lönnrot and manacled him, he asks his nemesis, proposing another unlikely hypothesis: “Are you looking for the Secret Name, Scharlach?” “‘No,’ answered Scharlach. ‘I am looking for something more ephemeral and slippery, I am looking for Erik Lönnrot.'” And he goes on to explain the succesion of crimes: first, the sleepless Yarmolinsky, who had just typed the words about the first letter of the Name being written, was accidentally killed by the drunk Azevedo who had blundered into his room on the night of the 3rd of Decemeber instead of the 4th, when he was supposed to steal the Tetrarch’s sapphires; then, how Azevedo was punished by Scharlach himself, after he learned from the Yiddische Zaitung that Lönnrot was trying to solve the murder through reading the writings of Yarmolinsky and after Scharlach himself had read the popular edition of the History of the Sect of the Hassidim (“I learned that some Hasidim, in search of this secret name, had gone so far as to offer human sacrifices…. I knew you would conjecture that the Hasidim had sacrificed the rabbi; I set myself to justifying this conjecture”); then, the simulacrum of the third crime (“I am Gryphyus-Ginzberg-Ginsburg”) and the suggestions that the triple series of crimes was in fact quadruple (“the Tetragrammaton…is made up of four letters; the harlequins and the paint shop signs suggested four points…. I underlined a certain passage [which] manifested that the Hebrews calculate a day counting from dusk to dusk and that therefore the crimes occurred on the fourthof each month,” etc.). The number 4, then, has been a false clue. The key number is 3: the third and last real murder in the series is Lönnrot’s own. He now knows it, but he continues to reason and considers “the problem of symmetrical and periodic death” in a model of time that combines linearity with circular repetition, suggesting the eternal return of the same. The trapped investigator and stubborn misreader dreams of a simpler, even more profoundly paradoxical labyrinth than those of fours or threes or finally twos (the obsessive Janus-like and mirror-like symmetries that dominate the architecture of the quinta Triste-le-Roy): the single straight line: “I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too. Scharlach, when in some other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B, halfway between the two. Wait for me at D, two kilometers from A and C, halfway, once again, between both. Kill me at D, as you are going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy.” Scharlach promises to do just that and then fires. We note, however, that in the single straight-line labyrinth in which Lönnrot will presumably be trapped in a future incarnation the twos (A-B), the threes (A-B-C), and the fours (A-B-C-D) have reappeared. We are, however, in a Zeno labyrinth, one where movement is impossible, so this time around Lönnrot escapes and Scharlach will be frozen like Achilles in Zeno’s famous logical paradox and in such Borges stories/essays as: “Achilles and the Tortoise”, “Kafka and His Precursors.” Mentally, this is an aporetic space, where the Eleatic straight-line labyrinth is produced by a circular movement of time. Geometrically, we have to imagine a circle cut by a line passing through its center. A-B-C-D also suggests, in numerical terms, the 4^th Dimension. Would Lönnrot be invulnerable in the 4^th Dimension?

If “DC” is a parable of reading, as I have contended, the question is: who reads (interprets) which text by whom? There are, to begin with, two obvius readers/detectives: Lönnrot, a secular Jew, a quixotic rationalist, at once a strong and a pathetically naive reader/misreader, and Treviranus, a Christian—“a poor Christian” as he defines himself—and a weak reader, with commonsensical assumptions, which are correct but down to earth and somewhat boring and could not yield a good story (i.e. “an interesting hypothesis”). Lönnrot, the intellectual Dupin-Sherlock Holmes figure, is mentioned in the very first sentence of the first paragraph; Treviranus appears a little later, at the scene of Yarmolinsky’s murder, at the end of the second paragraph. In the meantime, the apparent allegorical “author” in the fable, the powerful figure of Red Scharlach (actually a false author and perhaps an evil demiurge in a gnostic/neognostic sense, as we shall see)—at any rate the one who will lure the misreader to his death–is briefly presented. Red Scharlach (whose tautological name means “red” in English and “scarlet”[5] in German, semantically echoing the German ‘rot” in Lönnrot) appears as a criminal and a dandy bent on revenge against Lönnrot. The first paragraph is a deceptively precise anticipation of the ending of the story, with certain well-calculated temporary narrative gaps and strategic ambiguities, which are clarified only in light of the ending. Here is the first proleptic paragraph, which demands to be reread once the first reading has been completed:

Of the many problems which exercised the daring perspicacity of Lönnrot none was so strange–so rigorously^[6] strange, we may say–as the staggered series of bloody acts which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the boundless odor of eucalypti. It is true that Erik Lönnrot did not succeed in preventing the last crime, but it is indisputable that he foresaw it. Nor did he, of course, guess the identity of Yarmolinsky’s unfortunate assassin, but he did divine the secret morphology of vicious crimes and the participation of Red Scharlach, whose alias is Scharlach the Dandy. This criminal (as so many others) had sworn on his honor to kill Lönnrot, but the latter never allowed himself to be intimidated. Lönnrot thought of himself as a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin, but here was something of the adventurer in him, and even of the gamester.

The frame for the confrontation between the detective/reader/misreader and the criminal/(false) author is thus set from the very beginning. Of course, the allegory is not yet apparent at this early stage and I should perhaps qualify the equations I propose–the detective as reader, the criminal as pseudoauthor (reading the reader, trapping the reader), and the crimes as text–by pointing to the important ironic-parodic dimension of Borges’s story, in which Borges himself, as we saw, appears briefly but decisively under the guise of the editor of the Yiddische Zaitung. As we go on reading we are faced with a detective (misreader) who unwittingly creates the crimes he investigates, including his own demise! (By the way, this idea was taken from Borges by A. Robbe-Grillet, in his Erasers, where the blundering detective Wallas kills the very victim whose death he was supposed to investigate.) And, what is more, it is Lönnrot the reasoner, the rationalist emulator of Spinoza, who commits himself to a most preposterous and totally irrational if not totally perverse hypothesis: namely, that a series of gratuitous murders of Jews were perpetrated by members of a secret fanatical Hassidic sect whose sole presumed motivation would be to write in blood—starting with the blood of a rabbi—the four letters of the Tetragrammaton! This sound like a tall, utterly unbelivable story. The History of the Sect of the Hassidim, from which this kind of sinister information could be obtained, may be “popular,” issued in a “popular” edition—as Borges notes in passing—but how reliable could it be? Maybe Yarmolinsky had spoken of such strange human sacrifices as legends, rumors, or acts slanerously attributed to the Hassidim by their enemies. May be Lönnrot, unfamiliar with Juadica, had misread the History… and Scharlach, knowing what an adventurous and gambling misreader Lönnrot was, had proceeded in such a way as to catch him. At any rate, Scharlach, a penetrating mind reader, uses this specific book to get the hated detective trapped. In this respect, the sophisticated Lönnrot appears as an amazingly credulous (mis)reader. Clearly, on this level “DC” is a comic inversion of the typical detective story plot, a wry psychological satire facing the reader with what is harebrained, cockeyed, and unbelievable in many a detective story. For isn’t it true that many mysteries demand from the reader not only a “suspension of disbelief” but also, in the name of an illusory game of ingenuity, a suspension of elementary common sense?

Beyond this level, however, the story is, as I said earlier, a metaphysical puzzle and also a trap—a trap, obviously, for the quixotic Lönnrot but, more intriguingly, even for the rereader of who fails to make sense of the cues coming from the inscibed, implied, textual reader. This brings me to the important kabbalistic question of numerology and symbolic geometry in the story. From this point of view, we have noticed the intricate play of 3 and 4 as both figures and geometric translations thereof, as triangles (equilateral triangles in our case) and rhombi (equilateral parallelograms, including the square as a special case). There are two, among many others, esoteric meanings of the numeral four that I would like to call attention to: (1) the first one refers to the so-called Fourth Dimension, which we know that Borges was interested in. The Fourth Dimension can be seen as time (as in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine that Borges so admired) or as in the mixture of geometry and theosophy, with more or less geometry in the combination, which has a whole tradition from the 19^th century Charles Howard Hinton, through P.D. Ouspensky, to Rudy Rucker and Ioan P. Culianu in our time. About Hinton, Borges wrote (in 1986): “If I am not mistaken, Edith Sitwell is the author of a book entitled The English Eccentrics. No one has more right to appear in its hypothetical pages than Charles Howard Hinton. Others seek to achieve notoriety; Hinton has achived almost total obscurity. He is no less mysterious than his wotk. The biographical dictionaries ignore him; we have only been able to find a few passing references in Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (1920) and Henry Parker Manning’s Four Dimensions (1928). Wells does not mention him, but the first chapter of his admirable Time Machine (1895) unquestionably suggests that he not only knew his work, but studied it to his delight and subsequently ours” (Selected Non-Fictions, p. 509). Suffice it to say here that, as Lönnrot speaks to Scharlach about their next meeting in a straight-line labyrinth, this meeting could take place in the Fourth Dimension. (2) The second esoteric meaning of four may refer to the trap in which Lönnrot is caught, a trap set by himself in unwitting collaboration with Scharlach, his hostile double (both their names suggest the color red, the color of blood). In his book on Fundamental Symbols, RenJ GuJnon reserves a special subchapter to discuss the the esoteric meanings of “quatre de chiffre”—which his English translator renders as “the sign of four”.[7] However, the original meaning of “quatre de chiffre” is the most interesting for my purpose here: it referred, in the language of hunters, to a particular form of snare used to take small animals; its English correspondent would be the “figure four trap”, consisting of three notched sticks arranged in the form of the the arabic numeral four (4) and fitted together as a trigger. The basic analogy is with the shape of “4” which is indeed constituted by three lines forming a cross whose upper end of the vertical branch and left extremity of the horizontal branch are united by an oblique line, thus forming an equilateral triangle. If we inscribe the cross in a circle we have a compass with the cardinal points. If we unite all four extremities of the branches of the cross we get a perfect rhombus which is a square in an upward-pointing position. In the story, as we recall, the first three murders (including the staged one) indicate the North (Hôtel du Nord), the West (where Azevedo is killed), and the East (the spurious murder at the paint shop), and finally the South (Triste-le-Roy). The three “real” murders (including that of Lönnrot) draw a “4”—a “figure four trap” in which Lönnrot is caught and shot. I think that both the Fourth Dimension and the analogies suggested by “4” are relevant to Borges.

Along similar lines, one may conceive a neognostic interpretation of “DC”—which I mentioned in passing before—an interpretation according to which Scharlach would stand for the “evil demiurge” in gnostic mythology. Seen from such a vantage point, the story becomes an allegorical legend in which, for instance, the apparently anachronistic reference to the Tetrarch of Galilee (who might have existed in antiquity, but who in fact never did) acquires an unsuspected importance. In a gnostic-theosophical reading, such as the one offered by Ema Lapidot in Borges and Artificial Intelligence, the Tetrarch would represent the higher and truly ineffable divinity, the object of the jealousy of the inferior evil demiurge symbolized by Scharlach: “The elusive Tetrarch of Galilee,” she writes, “[is] the passive motivating force of the action in ‘Death and the Compass.’ He does nothing and he says nothing…We know only that he is the governor who possesses a great treasure…By the prefix ‘tetra’ in his title, he represents the fourth dimension which offers promise of the riches attainable in Higher Knowledge….The ambition to get possession of the Tetrarch’s treasure is the underlying cause of the accidental death of Dr. Marcelo Yarmolinsky.” 8 The possibility of such interpretations is one sign that we are dealing with a story which is structured like a parable (and parables are open to the most variegated hermeneutical applications). If we admit that Lönnrot, through his misreading, and at the price of his symbolic death, may have caught a glimpse of the higher hidden god, the True Absolute Writer, we may attribute to his misreading an unsuspected initiatory function. But on this subject, imitating Borges, the near-sighted, nearly blind, atheist, we had better remain silent.