Now we see “in an enigma by means of a mirror.” So Léon Bloy glosses St Paul,[1] according to Jorge Luis Borges.[2] Borges contrasts two translations from the Latin: that of Félix Torres Amat with that of Cipriano de Valera; Torres Amat is deemed “languid and verbose” while Valera, “more faithful,” and what will make him so, in Borges’s eyes, is not only his superior style, his economy, even his elegance, but also his understanding of St Paul: for Valera, the eventual resolution of the enigma reveals a vision not of the face of God, but a vision of all things.
I discover the ancient Greek origin of the word ‘enigma’ in Liddell & Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon; [3] the Liddell of this text is also the father of Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s model for the Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Many voices in Alice speak in riddles. The book’s sequel (or double) is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Alice steps through the mirror, which she will also use to read reversed writing (poetry, as it happens). Perhaps, as Tweedledum and Tweedledee suggest to Alice, this all takes place within the dream of the Red King.
In the 89th section of his S/Z, under the heading “Voice of Truth,” Roland Barthes tells us that “all the enigmas are now disclosed;” now? Yes: in the final phase of the narrative process at work in Balzac’s Sarrasine, it is “disclosure, decipherment, which is, in the pure enigma (whose model is always the Sphinx’s question to Oedipus), a final nomination, the discovery and uttering of the irreversible word.” Disclosure, of course, is also the meaning of the word “apocalypse”—revelation. So if the “irreversible word” evokes an apocalyptic tone, it may be that it sounds a note more eschatological; it could thus seem to echo Walter Benjamin’s words, in “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” about “a nameless, unspoken language […that] is preserved […] above man as the judgment suspended over him.”
Now, in “Envois,” Jacques Derrida writes “in my post card apocalypse, there are proper names, […] and [within them] reversibility unleashes itself, goes mad.” This reversibility is apocalyptic twice over—it is at once a revelation and an eschaton. In the same postcard, Derrida makes reference to a “dream of a ciphered language” in a passage that could appear to allude to Benjamin. Does it sound like I am dreaming, now, if I suggest that perhaps what renders language deciphered, rather than enciphered, is that one believes one understands it? One must consider the possibility that neither of two ways of representing the same information is necessarily truer than the other. In other words, a deciphered message is also an enciphered message, and vice versa, depending on one’s mode of reading. If some example of writing is revealed to have been reversed, the mirror allows one to perform a necessary operation of decipherment on the way to (or as a component of) interpretation; but in such a case, the same information represented another way is, then, no longer the same information – because any other way that it is represented is, itself, other information, and calls for other interpretation. A word reversed is not the same word—thus the word must be both reversible and irreversible. (S=Z) ≠ (Z=S).
Returning briefly to Borges, the way Bloy reads St Paul allows Borges to imagine scripture as “a text in which the collaboration of chance is calculated as zero.” And, from this, in turn, we might derive the notion that if everything in a scriptural text is cosmically necessary, then everything else in the cosmos can be understood in relation to it. It may even be said to mirror the totality of the cosmos it describes.
But this brings to light another issue that arises both implicitly and explicitly in Borges’ essay: the relation of scriptural language to translation. The two different translations of the passage from St Paul amount to a demonstration that the collaboration of chance in a translated text may indeed be greater than zero. Is this an intended or unintended irony in Borges’ text? What relative proportion of irony and intention might we assay here? Should the vision of the cosmos as a symbolic analogue to the scriptures always teach us the obscure necessity of translating between them?
Translation is sometimes represented as a kind of deciphering, as though languages were codes for one another (which they are, of course, not). Of the texts I’ve cited above, only those by Liddell and Carroll were written in English (Liddell’s naturally also being in ancient Greek). And Through the Looking-Glass is, on one level, a dramatic narrativization of a game of chess. Chess itself has something enigmatic about it, especially when it appears in the form known as the chess problem. Vladimir Nabokov, a writer in riddles, a self-translator, and the inventor of the Russian crossword puzzle, is said to have said that “each of his novels displays the same preoccupation with solving a ‘literary chess problem.’”[4] In order for the solution to a chess problem to be regarded as genuine, it must be the only possible solution. This solution, this word, is less like the endlessly branching possibilities offered by translation, and more like the definite but immeasurable quantity of intended irony in a text. The solution to such a problem is relatively more irreversible.
“Alice in Wonderland,” we read, “translated into Russian, was one of Nabokov’s first publications.”[5] Much later, Nabokov will tell us he “always call[s] him Lewis Carroll Carroll because he was the first Humbert Humbert.”[6] The first Humbert is Carroll, viewed retrospectively from the second Carroll, Humbert. From the first Carroll, one could not look forward to Humbert except as one might look, dreaming, toward a coming apocalypse. Carroll could also be said to serve as Nabokov’s model or precursor in that it is from him that Nabokov borrows the chess problem as a language in which to encode his riddles. Doubles proliferate and find their places on the board. Send in the clowns.
I was in Wellesley, Massachusetts for “Hidden Nabokov,” the summer 2022 conference of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. Nabokov taught at Wellesley College before Cornell, and the sylvan paths of the campus concealed a harlequinade of clues to this effect, some arranged by the aleatory shuffle of time and some by the conference organizers. I presented a paper on the so-called Lolita riddle in the first panel on the morning of the first day, leaving me carefree for the rest of the conference. My wife, Alice, asked me to visit, on her behalf, a childhood home of Sylvia Plath’s, less than an hour’s walk from the college. Given the conference’s schedule, however, the only real opportunity I could find to do so was during a presentation on Nabokov and Carroll, which I would, then, need to miss – a fact about which, at the time, I thought nothing.
I arrived at the house and took a few photos of myself in front of it – discreetly, from across the street, so as not to attract the notice of the residents. A large, beautiful, white house with rich green hedges arranged symmetrically around the door. On my return walk, I received a stream of twitter direct messages from one of the critics I had befriended at the conference, who was effusively praising to me the Nabokov-Carroll paper from her seat inside the auditorium as it was being presented. As I walked down the street back towards the conference, I looked up from reading these messages on my phone and noticed some curious figures on the lawn of a house I happened then to be passing.
A metal clock, face to the sky, read a quarter to one; it was surrounded by diecast metal figures of Alice, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, and the White Rabbit. Only the Cheshire Cat perched on an upended green glass goblet; the rest lay in the green grass next to similar goblets (one mismatched: the White Rabbit’s), placed similarly. I stopped and took pictures of the display with my phone, as if to gather evidence in order prove something to someone later – who could say exactly what, or to whom – with my eyes stinging, close to tears, but without knowing why.[7]
*
When we arrived in Geneva, I finally understood that, despite my intentions and my pretense to having made plans, it would be impossible to visit Borges’ grave. The price of tickets, the necessary travel time, the infelicities of the train schedule, and the obscure location of our apartment in Montreux all conspired against me. Nonetheless, I maintained my resolve to visit Nabokov’s grave in Clarens, being, as it was, near Montreux, as we, too, would be. In fact, to visit Nabokov’s grave was the only reason I had to travel to Montreux, along with Alice, our five-year-old son, and our one-year-old daughter. We were to remain in Montreux for two days and nights only.
Our flight had been from Nice to Geneva, Air France; when we arrived at customs, there was no guard at the desk. The crowd who had flown along with us stood helplessly gawking and shifting their weight in front of the empty customs checkpoint for one whole minute before I, looking left and right, stepped forward and simply walked through, watching myself in the security monitors above, and soon followed by everyone else. Welcome to Switzerland.
By this point in our journey, we were almost completely broke, and my original idea—that we might have stayed at the Montreux Palace—appeared, in retrospect, laughable. I had gone as far as to book a room (375 ₣ per night) but cancelled it well within the terms necessary to avoid any payment.
At the train station in the airport, we bought return train tickets from Geneva to Montreux for our family of four (90 ₣). The train doubled, for the most part, the curve of the lakeshore. When we arrived in Montreux, we had lunch at McDonald’s (37 ₣) to please the children, and then stood on the lakeside promenade watching the swans glide over the water. The lake, like the sky, was grey, and we were nearly the only tourists. It was late in January 2018.
When we entered the apartment we had rented (at 110 ₣ per night), we found it dirty, with beer cans strewn around the deck that overlooked the lake. Over the two days of our stay, we took two long walks along the promenade. The first of these was east, to see the Château de Chillon, where we inspected the castle dungeon that inspired Lord Byron to write The Prisoner of Chillon. There, near a portcullis door opening directly onto the surface of the lake, I bought a small bottle of spring water (4 ₣). Afterwards, I climbed the ladder down into the family crypt beneath the castle, only recently opened to the public, and found it was more like a dank and dimly-lit cave than even a dungeon. Feeling a childlike chill, I returned to my family.
The following morning, alone, I connected my headphones to my phone and went for a walk, listening to the Nash Ensemble’s performance of a septet arrangement of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen while I climbed the steep hillside to the Église Saint-Vincent. When I reached the top, I turned around and took pictures of the city and the lake from the little churchyard. Later, at a bookstore closer to the water, I bought a tiny, cheap edition of Nietzsche’s aphorisms “on love” (9 ₣).
We had planned to spend Sunday walking west, to Clarens, to visit the grave. The day was damp, cold, and bleak. The walk should have taken less than an hour, according to Google Maps. However, our plans for the day were upended when it became clear that neither did I remember what day of the week it was, nor that no grocery store within walking distance of Montreux was (or would ever be) open on a Sunday. We had entirely run out of food; thus it came about that our walk that day was to a gas station – the only store open – to buy apples, bananas, and chilled, miserable sandwiches (11 ₣). (What I further did not realize until years later was that the gas station in question was less than a kilometre from Nabokov’s grave.)
I thought of Nabokov and the money Lolita brought him as we walked past the Montreux Palace – twice: once on the way to the gas station, and once on the way back from it. I was happy for him, but I pitied myself, and imagined asking him to borrow money. This dispassionate Nabokovian shade refused me with neither hesitation nor remorse, and I smiled to myself. “‘No man knows who he is,’ affirmed Léon Bloy,” affirms Borges. Bloy was as famously broke as he was resentful – that much he (and everyone) knew. Per St Paul, “later we shall see face to face.” When, exactly? (And when will we see the Red King come back, I might have liked to have asked—but that would not be possible, as I had not yet heard of him. Perhaps I will ask Alice.)[8]
The second time we passed the famous hotel, I looked into its storefront windows at street level. It seemed that the restaurant was closed. Winter night had fallen, and at first, I saw only myself, my wife, and our children, wrapped in winter clothes, dimly outlined in the phantom orange of the sodium lights, with the black expanse of Lac Leman reflected behind us in negative image. As I stopped, turned, and approached the windows, my own expanding reflection gave way to darkness and empty chairs on a tile-checked floor.
[1] I Corinthians 13:12.
[2] Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Mirror of Enigmas.” Labyrinths. Translated by James Irby. 1962.
[3] The ancient Greek root of ‘enigma’ is related toαἰνίσσομαι(ainíssomai,to “speak in riddles”).
[4] Gezari, Janet K., and W. K. Wimsatt. “Vladimir Nabokov: More Chess Problems and the Novel.” Yale French Studies, no. 58 (1979): 102–15.
[5] Prioleau, Elizabeth. “Humbert Humbert Through the Looking Glass.” Twentieth Century Literature 21, no. 4 (1975): 428–37.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Please understand that the foregoing is scrupulously true.
[8] While I write this, a terrible crash is heard from upstairs, through the floor: my daughter has dropped a glass-topped chessboard—my wife’s—upside down. When it hits, it shatters, sending jagged bits of frosted-checked glass flying across the dining room floor. None of the (glass) pieces receives so much as a scratch.
Jeremy Stewart is the author of the forthcoming I, Daniel: An Illegitimate Reading of Jacques Derrida’s “Envois,” as well as the experimental novellaIn Singing, He Composed a Song,and the poetry collectionsHidden Cityand(flood basem*nt.He once dropped a piano off a building.He lives in Vancouver, Canada. Twitter: @jeremydstewart
