In his 2012 study Borges, between History and Eternity, Hernan Diaz analyzes Jorge Luis Borges's penchant for narrative framing, “one of the decisive formal traits of his literature” (34). Throughout his oeuvre, Borges suggests that a given reality's ontological status is subjective, determined vis-à-vis adjacent layers of discourse: an empire is cloaked with a map drawn at the same scale as the territory it depicts; our world becomes subsumed by a fictional world whose own creation is attributed to yet another fictional world; a magician dreams a man into existence, only to realize that he himself is another's dream; a library contains a book that contains all this library's books.
For Diaz, Borges's variously realized framing device connects two mutually informative sides of the writer's texts—the metaphysical and the political: “If power imposes a representation as reality, it follows that there ought to be another (vaster, truer) reality withholding the fictional one. The conspiratorial view of politics based on this particular take on idealism necessarily implies a model where worlds are nested within one another” (35). Diaz enumerates several types of framing across Borges's literature, one of which he describes here as nested worlds, and elsewhere in his analysis as Russian matryoshka dolls (37). Another type of framing emphasizes engulfment—as when a representation or a fiction completely overtakes the world that initially framed it—and may be pictured as a map that bears a one-to-one relation to the territory it depicts (as in the microstory “Del rigor en la ciencia” [“On Exactitude in Science”]).
In Borges's double sonnet “Chess” and in his story “The Aleph,” Diaz locates a third type: a “paradox” whereby “the smallest of the matryoshkas is, in fact, the . . . frame that contains all the other dolls” (37). While Diaz sees this version as a confounding subtype of nesting, I believe viewing these iterations as instances of nesting does not fully account for their affordances.Footnote 1 This version features the additional quality of supersession—that is, one stratum, layer, or variant of reality supersedes another. I therefore propose that we assign to this iteration its own analogous image: instead of seeing it in terms of matryoshkas, let's imagine it as an ouroboros. The figure of a snake biting its own tale, which Borges conjures (without naming) in several stories, and to which he devotes an entry (“El Uroboros”) in El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings), is patently distinct from the first two types of framing. Unlike the engulfing map that overtakes, or matryoshkas that embody diminutive gradation, the ouroboros represents self-consumption.
Diaz explains why it makes sense that so many of Borges's stories use framing devices. “Borges's conception of power derives mostly from considering reality an administered construct rather than a mere given. Truth tends to be layered, and can only be approached asymptotically, traversing endless fictional strata, representations of representations.” Framing enables Borges to depict “contextual deferral, the interposition of mediations, and the succession of layers of realities.” It boils down to this: “In the Borgesian notion of politics, power is defined in terms of representation and verisimilitude: it can be measured by the degree to which the fiction it imposes is believable” (45).
Diaz builds Trust on this foundation. A meditation on the subjective nature of truth, the novel shows how the version of reality we live in is determined by he (and in the story's time and place it is inescapably a he) who wields the most power. It is within the financier protagonist Andrew Bevel's power to impose a believable fiction, and he would have succeeded in doing so had he not died before the completion of his (ghostwritten) autobiography. It is fitting, given the novel's premise, that it is structured as variously nested narratives, with layers competing to overtake one another. But there's more than nesting and overtaking. There is also a self-perpetuating framing—in other words, supersession. In fact, supersession is the mode of framing that is most essential to Trust. Because in addition to being about who gets to decide what is true, what is real, the novel is about the insidiously consumptive nature of capitalism (not for nothing do we call buyers “consumers”). Images of devouring run through Trust's multiple textual layers, always circling around capitalism's self-perpetuating insatiability.
Overtaking: Map
Let's begin with the type of framing that seems most prominent in Trust: overtaking. How does Borges use this device? “On Exactitude in Science” tells of cartographers who create a map that exactly corresponds to the territory it depicts: “un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el Tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él” (“a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it”). The map engulfs—overtakes—the land, completely covering the empire like an equally sized blanket, such that after it begins to disintegrate “perduran despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa, habitadas por Animales y por Mendigos” (“there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars”; “Del rigor”; “On Exactitude”). While it was still intact, the blanket-map literally enveloped the land.
Such overtaking—albeit by an idea, rather than a physical object—is described in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The narrator relates that once Tlönian items begin cropping up in the world, “[c]asi inmediatamente, la realidad cedió en más de un punto. . . . El contacto y el hábito de Tlön han desintegrado este mundo” (“[a]lmost immediately reality ‘caved in’ at more than one point. . . . Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world”; 26; 81). Soon, the narrator prophesies, “[e]l mundo será Tlön” (“[t]he world will be Tlön”; 27; 81).
In his critical study, Diaz connects this kind of overtaking to its political implications. The Tlön society, funded by the capitalist Ezra Buckley, “has a clear political agenda.” It “superimpose[s] an order onto the world that coincides inch by inch with it (again, like that perfect map stretching over the entire empire)” (Borges 65). Diaz points out that the case of the Tlön society—and analogous ones in several other of Borges's stories—“are all subsets that overtake the superset. In this sense, ‘totalitarianism’ can be understood quite literally as that instance when one particular order or configuration (which is necessarily partial and therefore contained within reality) expands and elevates itself to the entirety of reality. The political dimension of framing does not escape Borges” (66). The way Diaz describes Ezra Buckley, he may as well be talking about Trust's Andrew Bevel. Both are tycoons who use their millions (billions?) to impose their preferred version of reality on the world. This connection is underlined by Diaz's parenthetical musing that “‘Buckley,’ by the way, sounds like a slightly disfigured version—very much like a hrön—of ‘Berkeley’” (Borges 67).Footnote 2 “Buckley” and “Berkeley,” we might add, sound perhaps like hrönir of “Bevel.”
Trust opens with a novel-within-the-novel, “Bonds,” about Bevel and his wife, Mildred (renamed Benjamin and Helen Rask), by Harold Vanner. In “A Memoir, Remembered,” the third part of Trust, narrated by Bevel's ghostwriter, Ida Partenza, we see that Bevel does not stand for Vanner's version of his story. Bevel entreats Partenza, “‘Can you believe it? The imaginary events in that piece of fiction now have a stronger presence in the real world than the actual facts of my life’” (Trust 237). And so Bevel decides to do something about it: he asks Partenza to compose what will essentially be a second piece of fiction to supplant Vanner's version. Bevel explains to Partenza, “If I'm ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake” (266). Retconning by means of “bending and aligning reality” occurs throughout Trust. Partenza repeats this phrase to show Bevel that she understands his aims, right after he tells her that he did not only bury Vanner with lawsuits but also took “Bonds” out of circulation by buying a controlling stake in Vanner's publishing house so as to bind the author to his current contract, with plans to “buy every single copy of every print run. And pulp them all” (287). With these actions Bevel ensures that Vanner's version of reality will disappear—not unlike the territory that disappears beneath the blanketing map, or the world that caves into Tlön. Bevel attempts to justify this by pointing out that “reality needs to be consistent. How incongruous would it be to find traces of Vanner in a world where Vanner never existed?” (288).
Later on, while conducting research at the New York Public Library, Partenza describes the “massive wave of terror” (313) precipitated by her inability to locate any mention of Vanner in the Library's vast catalog:
I flipped back and forth the VAM-VAR drawer, always pausing in the same place and feeling my heart leap each time I confirmed the void:
Vann, William Harvey. Notes on the Writings of James Howell. 1924.
Vannereau, Maurice. L'Ornière, pièce sociale en 1 acte. 1926.
It was inconceivable that the New York Public Library would hold an obscure essay by an unknown critic and, also, an unheard-of short play by a thoroughly unnoted French writer but not one book by the author who should have fallen between these two names. . . . I knew it was simply impossible that one of the largest, most comprehensive collections in the world would not hold any of Harold Vanner's books. . . . There was only one explanation. Bevel, one of the Library's main donors, had bent and aligned reality. (313–14)
In an impossibly anachronistic postscript, the narrator of Borges's “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” writes, “[Y]a en las memorias un pasado ficticio ocupa el sitio de otro, del que nada sabemos con certidumbre—ni siquiera que es falso. . . . Si nuestras previsiones no erran . . . desaparecerán del planeta el inglés y el francés y el mero español” (“[A]lready a fictitious past has supplanted in men's memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain—not even that it is false. . . . If my projections are correct . . . French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the earth”; 26–27; 81). Disappear like Vanner. In both stories an obscenely wealthy financier covers and replaces a version of reality with the one he prefers.
Eternal Recursion: Matryoshkas
The form afforded by Russian matryoshka dolls is the quintessence of nesting—the second type of framing we can locate throughout both Borges's writing and Diaz's novel. In perhaps the most well-known example of the former, matryoshkas are called forth in the devastating revelation at the end of “Las ruinas circulares” (“The Circular Ruins”) whereby the magician situates his existence somewhere along a vortex of ontologically stacked versions that extend indefinitely in either direction: “Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo” (“With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him”; 50; 100).
In the essay “Magias parciales del Quijote” (“Partial Magic in the Quixote”), Borges lists similar vertiginous recursions: Royce's map that, by virtue of being perfect, must also contain a map of the map; the fateful night in One Thousand and One Nights during which Scheherazade tells the story of One Thousand and One Nights; characters in Don Quixote who are also readers of Don Quixote (74–79). Each of these dolls is nested in another, and nests another in turn. The same idea is suggested in “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” (“John Wilkins’ Analytical Language”), in which Borges describes “cierta enciclopedia china” (“a certain Chinese encyclopedia”; 158; 231) that Michel Foucault writes inspired his book The Order of Things (xv).Footnote 3 This encyclopedia classifies animals into (seemingly) arbitrary and non–mutually exclusive categories, such as “(a) pertenecientes al Emperador” (“[a] those that belong to the emperor”), “(k) dibujados con un pincel finísimo de pelo de camello” (“[k] those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush”), and “(m) que acaban de romper el jarrón” (“[m] those that have just broken the flower vase”). The nesting frame is introduced with category (h): “incluidos en esta clasificación” (“those that are included in this classification”; Borges, “El idioma” 158; Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” 231). Foucault observes that this category “is indication enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all: if all the animals divided up here can be placed without exception in one of the divisions of this list, then aren't all the other divisions to be found in that one division too?” (xvii).
As varied as they are, these examples in Borges all throw into relief a distinguishing characteristic of matryoshka framing: this particular form implies gradation, a moving away from the ideal, where each successive version is inferior—whether in size, quality, value, or realness—to its predecessor. Diaz ties nesting's corollary of gradation to idealism. He writes that one of the features common to Borges's recursions is that “these models are based upon a hierarchy of realities. The notion of a gradated reality—the idea that there is an inaccessible archetype behind the faulty representations we perceive—brings us back to idealism, and, more specifically, to Plato” (Borges 37). Here Diaz refers to Plato's description of degraded furniture copies, which Borges paraphrases as follows: “we are told that God creates the Archetype of the table, the carpenter, a simulacrum of the archetype, and the painter, a simulacrum of the simulacrum” (qtd. in Diaz, Borges 37–38). Diaz remarks, “the farther we get from god's piece of furniture, the more removed we are from the ideal one” (38).
In Trust, matryoshkas materialize frequently, both at the level of structure (the novel's four narratives are variously nested—e.g., two are sometimes contained in a third—and some narratives echo phrases that appear in others) and at the level of imagery (Helen Rask's thoughts that “reflected one another, like parallel-mirrors”; Mildred Bevel's observation of “Ferns within ferns within ferns within ferns” [83, 402]). In these various iterations of nesting elements the pattern of regression (whereby the nested elements become progressively inferior) dovetails with and comments on the novel's theme of voracious capitalism.
Consider two scenes separated—within the fabula's framework—by authors, years, and an ontological border. The first is relayed by Vanner in “Bonds,” in a passage describing Helen's first impressions of Benjamin Rask's house:
It was not the conspicuous tokens of affluence that impressed her . . . She was touched by smaller things. A doorknob. An unassuming chair in a dusky recess. A sofa and the void around it. They all reached out to her with their heightened presence. These were all common-enough objects, but they were the real things, the originals after which the flawed copies that littered the world had been made. (51–52)
The second scene is related by Mildred Bevel in her diary, the fourth part of the novel; here she contemplates her husband's summer home, La Fiesolana:
Kitsch. Can't think of Engl. trans. of this word. A copy that's so proud of how close it comes to the original that it believes there's more worth in this closeness than in originality itself. “It looks just like . . . !” Imposture of feeling over actual emotion; sentimentality of sentiment. Kitsch can also be in the eye: “The sunset looks like a painting!” Because artifice is now the ultimate standard, the original (sunset) has to be turned into a fake (painting), so that the latter may provide the measure of the former's beauty. Kitsch is always a form of inverted Platonism, prizing imitation over archetype. . . . Ostentatiously, arrogantly announcing its divorce from authenticity. (370; first ellipsis in source)
Both scenes cite the inferiority of copies; Mildred's reflections additionally point out that the reverse is in vogue: there's a preference for the artificial or derivative over the authentic or original. In both scenes the entities discussed are commercial products: a doorknob; a chair; a sofa; a painting. That these objects are all furniture or décor connects them to Plato's couches and tables; that all of them are commercial products connects them to the mass-production, the cheapening, the reduction of value that goes hand-in-hand with capitalism.
There is a notable difference between the two scenes, however, and one that foregrounds a fundamental premise of the framing device: each layer, each version has a subjective claim to being the true one. Both scenes show that Helen/Mildred (each a version of this woman's archetype) prefers the original to the imitation. But each scene depicts a different moral appraisal of Benjamin's/Andrew's affluence. Benjamin is wealthy enough that he can afford “the real things”; wealthy enough to afford taste. This is consistent with his deification, the otherworldly aura bestowed on him by the general public. Andrew is equally wealthy, but the bulk of this wealth, as only Mildred knows, comes from without. The godly genius everyone ascribes to Andrew is secretly hers. In his critical work, Diaz spells out the connection between a progressive reduction in quality or realness and a progressive reduction in moral status: “this gradual departure from the source (or god or the idea) by the multiplication of increasingly cheapened copies implies not only an ontological devaluation but also an ethical degradation” (Borges 43).
Perpetual Self-Consumption: Ouroboros
A literal ouroboros is featured in Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings; the eternally self-consuming cycle this serpent represents manifests figuratively in “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”). Peering into a small sphere under a cellar's staircase, that tale's narrator sees “el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra” (“the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph”; 342; 283–84). Like matryoshkas, the ouroboros suggests infinity, but this infinitude is not regressive. Rather than an infinite recursion, the ouroboros represents a cyclical, eternal return. It is not so much that we see the thing within itself, within itself, and so on; instead, the frame level seeks to overtake the framed level, which seeks to overtake the frame level in turn, in a kind of endless back-and-forth. Infinitude arises because a complete overtaking (a total self-consumption) can never be accomplished, and thus, unlike the map and matryoshkas, this third type of framing implies a Sisyphean task. In capitalism the vicious cycle of self-consumption comes across as especially cannibalistic—a thing turning on itself. The image of the ouroboros pervades Trust, in reference to variegated milieus: Benjamin “became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body” (16); “he was able to produce some of the very securities he sold” (69); he has a “fascination with the incestuous genealogies of money—capital begetting capital” (124). Helen's “attempts always met the same end: Leopold's thoughts curved and curled on themselves, forming a circle that Helen could not enter and he was unable to leave” (44); “Dr. Frahm explained that he was turning her manic condition against itself” (100). Vanner observes that leading up to the 1929 crash “investment trusts shipwrecked and self-cannibalized” (74). Andrew laments, “A vicious cycle has taken hold of our able-bodied men: they increasingly rely on the government to alleviate the misery created by that same government, not realizing that this dependency only perpetuates their sorry state of affairs” (132). Ida Partenza ascribes a similar sentiment to her father, though here the ire is directed elsewhere: “he objected to consumerism and the alienation fueling it—in a perverse circle, workers kept dehumanizing jobs in order to both produce superfluous goods and purchase them” (215). Mildred describes the crash in terms of a perpetual cycle, this time with the language of music:
Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future. Like a retrograde or a palindrome. . . . A song played in reverse. . . . everything is turned on its head: the more a stock is depreciated, the larger the profit, and vice versa. Every loss becomes a gain, every increase a drop. All intervals in the song are flipped, turned upside down. . . . The inversion of the retrograde. A song played in reverse and on its head. (398)
Even when its contours are not directly described, the ouroboros materializes in the novel's most salient themes and motifs: the prevailing of nature, illusion and manipulation, eating, the living thing (at times monstrous), madness (often associated with perennial repetition). We have seen that the framing device can convey that “truth is inaccessible” (Diaz, Borges 43); if we distinguish the self-biting serpent's manifestations as a separate breed of framing, the ouroboros emerges as a figure especially suited to articulating the perpetual voraciousness of capitalism.
Reviewing Trust in the Los Angeles Times, Hillary Kelly notes that “[i]n Italian, al punto di partenza means to come full circle, and Miss Partenza, with her insights into Bevel, tries to close the loop on his life.” But this loop is also an ouroboros—an attempt at supersession—so we know that though it may technically be closed (the snake does, after all, make contact with its tail), the overtaking will never be complete; the Sisyphean task will continue eternally; no one version can emerge as the absolute, objective Truth.
