The Aleph and the space of Shakespeare

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The Aleph and the space of Shakespeare

Carla Della Gatta Department of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA.

Abstract In this article, I use the work of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as a heuristic for engaging with Shakespeare and challenging established notions of universality. In Borges’s short story ‘The Aleph,’ the narrator sees a small sphere that encapsulates all of the spaces and time of the entire world at once. Whereas conceptions of Shakespearean universality are premised on the possibilities of Shakespeare’s language, Borges affirms the limits of language and its impossibility of describing the human experience. Despite language’s constraints, Shakespeare is an interlocutor for Borges to engage with the world. I demonstrate a Borgesian praxis for attending to Shakespeare creatively and critically, one that embraces cultural and linguistic identities and experiences that Shakespeare’s canon decenters or excludes. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 236–242. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00170-z

I think I have seen an Aleph. Or at least heard one humming. Not an Aleph that encompasses the universe, but my own personal Aleph. Perhaps I even have been living inside of one for the last decade or so, though I know sadly this is not possible. The Aleph is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, as it is in Arabic, Phoenician, Sumerian, and Aramaic. It also signifies the number One. The Aleph of ancient Hebrew signaled strength and power, and its symbol was modeled after an ox head and later in the shape of what appears to us as a sideways letter ‘A,’ becoming the inspiration for the first letter of the Greek alphabet, Alpha. In mathematics, and in Kabbalah, it is the infinite sign, denoting the cardinality of Ó 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 11, 2-3, 236–242

The Aleph and the Space of Shakespeare

infinite sets in the former and the origins of the universe in sacred textual writings in the latter. My introduction to an aleph came not from my Jewishness (I never studied Hebrew) or from my career in forecasting and finance (I only worked within finite math), but from Jorge Luis Borges, the twentieth-century Argentine writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Borges’ oeuvre offers mediations on time, paradox, language, symbols, labyrinths, the problematic notion of a unified Argentine cultural nationalism,1 and yes, Shakespeare. In his short story ‘The Aleph,’ Borges writes of a space in which the narrator (also named Borges) can see the world from all perspectives and simultaneously see himself within it. It is ‘the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist’ (Borges, [1949] 1998, 281).2 The Aleph of his story is compact and spherical, found deep in the cellar of his friend, Daneri. The narrator realizes that he cannot describe the Aleph because there is no one language or syntax to symbolize a