Few themes are as eternal in the works of Jorge Luis Borges than obsession, save perhaps the theme of eternity itself. In The Zahir, it takes center stage in the form of a twenty-centavo coin (or perhaps a tiger, a blind man, an astrolabe, a compass, a vein of marble, or the bottom of a well), which the narrator Borges1 finds and finds himself unable to forget. In many ways, the coin is itself a mirror for this story and for JLB’s stories in general: once one encounters them, it is difficult to dislodge them from the mind. In this story, though, there is one detail that seems to have stuck in my mind that others have passed over, his brief diversion to old Germanic mythology2. In the story, Borges tries to distract himself from the Zahir by “composing a tale of fantasy.” Details are added to this story gradually until it is revealed that the story features Fafnir guarding the Nibelungen hoard and that “[t]he appearance of Sigurd abruptly ends the story.” While he claims that this is “a piece of trivial nonsense” meant only to distract him from the coin’s ever-presence in his mind, any seasoned reader of JLB’s stories will know that red herrings seldom, if ever, feature. What then, might this oblique allusion signify? What does it tell us about obsession and love, the central themes of this story?

In short, I propose a parallel between Borges’ Zahir and Wagner’s Ring; the latter work also has obsession and love as central themes and the parallel between them in Borges’ work, even if it is accidental, is so resonant that it is nonetheless worth considering. It is clear, though, that Borges knew the music of the German Romantics well. Brahms features in several works of JLB — the collection that includes The Zahir also includes Deutsches Requiem, and he even features in the present story — Borges in his reflections on money compares its temporal element to “an evening just outside the city, a Brahms melody, or maps, […]” a much more fleeting reference than some of the other musical references in JLB’s oeuvre (perhaps chief among them the aforementioned Deutsches Requiem). More important for our purposes is the realization that these thoughts were “a first manifestation of its [the coin’s] demonic influence.” Neither Borges nor Wagner invented the idea that gold(/money/etc.) is a corrupting or a demonic influence, this theme is surely as old as money itself3. That said, the corruption of obsession, and especially of obsession with money/wealth, is certainly a salient theme for both.

Before I outline these parallels, though, it’s worth laying out the case that this connection isn’t intended (which you may find convinces you that it isn’t relevant). Simply put, Borges doesn’t use Wagner’s names for the people, places and events of the “Sigurd slays Fafnir” story: Wagner calls Gnitaheidr Neidhöhle, Sigurd Siegfried, Fafnir Fafner, Gram Nothung; he never uses the kennings “sword-water” for blood or “dragon’s-bed” for gold, apt as they may be; Fafnir kills his father, but Fafner kills his brother. It is abundantly clear that Borges’ reference for this fantastic diversion was a source much older than Wagner (probably the Völsunga saga).

However, of all the differences between the older sources and the Ring, the most relevant difference is one that points the other way. To put it simply, why does Borges mention these mythological elements at all? Any reader with knowledge of Wagner could readily answer that the tale referenced is also one of obsession. The ring is a locus of obsession from before the moment it appears (one might argue that the Rhinemaidens’, and especially Flosshilde’s, obsession with the gold is what clues Alberich in to its presence and ultimately results in its taking), even before Alberich delivers his fateful curse. It is that curse that most directly ties Wagner to Borges:

“Just as its gold once endowed me
with might beyond measure
so shall its spell now deal
death to whoever (sic) shall wear it!
No joyful man
shall ever have joy of it;
on no happy man
shall its bright gleam smile;
may he who owns it
be wracked by care,
and he who does not
be ravaged by greed!
Each man shall covet
its acquisition,
but none shall enjoy
it to lasting gain;
its lord shall guard it without any profit,
and yet it shall draw down his bane upon him.
Doomed to die,
may the coward be fettered by fear;
as long as he lives,
let him pine away, languishing,
lord of the ring
as the slave of the ring:
till the stolen circlet
I hold in my hand once again!”4

Like the Zahir, the Ring’s curse is that of obsession. Borges describes the Zahir as having “the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad”, and that a previous incarnation was “constructed in such a way that any man that looked upon it but once could think of nothing else, so that the king commanded that it be thrown into the deepest depths of the sea[!!!!], in order that men might not forget the universe.” The parallels with Alberich’s curse are obvious, not only the way that Alberich describes the curse above but in the way that it plays out later in the cycle. Fafner, Wotan, Alberich, Hagen — the list of characters in the cycle whose obsession with the ring becomes their downfall is about as long as the list of all the characters therein, and this obsession continues until the Ring is eventually returned to the Rhinemaidens5.

In context, the first paragraph of the story seems almost like a non sequitor. The connection as a preamble is obvious from the timeline of dates he lists, but what one has to do with the other is never made explicitly clear in the story except perhaps to describe Borges’ state of mind as he acquired the Zahir. Even so, Borges is more concerned with the ritual of grief than with its emotional content, and with the benefit of hindsight the reader can see this as another facet of the Zahir obsession. Remembering love more than he experiences it, Borges cannot help but to refer to his infatuation through the detached lens of a former obsession6. His admission of love is much less obvious to the reader than he purports it to be — his descriptions of his supposed beloved are not necessarily flattering: “the very epitome of ‘tackiness’… Her life was exemplary, and yet an inner desperation constantly gnawed at her… [her] image began to grace advertisements for face creams and automobiles — face creams she never used and automobiles she could never afford” — her death is described not as a tragic event but as a “breach of decorum.” The somewhat odd digression into Borges’ love life is made clearer in the following meditation on the coin and on the nature of money:


“Posessed, without a trace of sleepiness, almost happy, I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin (a twenty-centavo piece, for instance) is, in all truth, a panoply of possible futures. Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time… It is unforeseeable time, not the hard, solid time of Islam or the Porch. Adherents of determinism deny that there is any event in the world that is possible, i.e., that might occur; a coin symbolizes our free will.”

The great irony of both Teodelina’s death, given this context, and of the Zahir as a coin is that both have done nothing but narrow Borges’ future. The Borges writing this story five months after the events described has no future, he is committed to his obsession: “Perhaps by thinking about the Zahir unceasingly, I can manage to wear it away; perhaps behind the coin is God.” Knowing that his committment will ultimately result in his committment7, he takes a philosophical position that ironically presages that of Derek Parfit, claming that his future self is distinct from his current self: “Calling that future terrible is a fallacy, since none of the future’s circumstances will in any way affect me.” Would the previous Borges have said this? One cannot help but think that Borges has gone through a textbook transformative experience8 and that his claim that he is a different Borges, upon further reflection, is actually quite resonant. To me, Wotan’s transformative experience also comes to mind. In many ways, the Wotan who sings “Der Wonne seligen Saal” is not the same as the one who sings “Der Augen leuchtendes Paar” is not the same as the one who sings that “Ein Vög’lein schwatzt voll manches,” let alone the one whose silence hangs over Götterdämmerung. Wotan’s earthly concerns, including and perhaps especially love, are eventually replaced with his single-minded desire to fulfill Erda’s prophecy, even if the whole world is undone by the ring’s return to the depths.

So, The Zahir is about obsession and references the Völsunga Saga, which Wagner uses as a basis for the Ring. Because one of the key elements that Wagner adds in his own version is the theme of obsession, one can draw a tentative link between The Zahir and the Ring cycle. The real connection, though, is in some ways one step removed from the actual text of the Ring: not only is the ring an object of obsession, but so is the Ring. What Wagner called “the world’s lullaby” woke up the world to a new way of hearing music, and a cultural phenomenon that pervaded the culture of the late 19th and early 20th century in the Western world in a way that few have since. Since the mid-20th century Wagner’s co-opting by Nazis has made it unlikely that his work would ever rise to the status it once had, it might be difficult to imagine the cultural ubiquity that his work had at the turn of the 20th century9.

Borges’ use of the Ring, if one accepts this link, suggests not only an intra-narrative link between the content of The Zahir and that of the Ring, but also of its reception and interpretation. In the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, every sentence (perhaps every word) is loaded with referential meaning. Fleeting references to tigers, mirrors, the number 14, and many other details that might at first glance seem insignificant reveal a wealth of information informed not only by the passage in question and the sources that might have inspired it, but also by the rich philosophical content of other stories with which a given referent is shared. This recalls the Leitmotif of Wagnerian composition10 in its way of suggesting concepts, and recalls one of Wagner’s most important dramatic innovations: the Leitmotif allows the orchestra to advance the story rather than the singers (which they formerly did primarily through recitative, a practice already seen as stale in Gluck’s time a century earlier). JLB’s literary motifs, in textbook modernist fashion, allow the reader to glean as much interpretive meaning from the construction of the text and from its stylistic elements as from its narrative beats. Some of JLB’s finest stories, like The Library of Babel or Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, contain little narrative information and are equal parts story and philosophical thought experiment. Similarly, the shift of dramatic information in Wagner’s music from the spoken and sung texts to the musical subtexts allow the texts to act as commentaries on the story rather than to tell it. It should be no wonder then, that both creators’ works have inspired generations since their inception to pore them over, looking for any errant details to tie together loose ends and to extract whatever meaning they can.

Shall I confess that — moved by the intricacy and depth of Wagner’s music and of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges — I became obsessed with them? Perhaps the reader had already suspected that.

  1. In Borges’ stories, the fictionalized version of the author as a narrator is a common trope. Invented texts are often presented as historical, and almost-plausible situations are sprinkled throughout these stories. Perhaps the most famous example of such a story is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, at least among those narrated directly in the first person. Throughout this essay I will refer to the author as JLB and say Borges when referring to the narrator or to either figure. ↩︎
  2. Perhaps this is inevitable as someone who, for better or worse, has studied a lot of Wagner’s music. The passage is briefly discussed in Humberto Núñez-Faraco’s essay on the story, though only in its slight connection to the theme of love (especially erotic love) that is secondary to the story. Quinn Bidmead’s essay on the story on Medium also mentions it briefly but appears to misunderstand the context, also misreading an earlier passage — in Bidmead’s summary the narrator “dreams of being a gryphon guarding a pile of gold[,]” whereas in the original the narrator “dreamed that I was a pile of coins guarded by a gryphon[,]” a small but quite relevant difference (what does it mean to dream to be a pile of coins? what qualia can such an object/pile of objects have? does a dream rely on qualia? these are but some of the many prototypically Borgesian questions raised by the sentence in the original). Quotations of the original story throughout are from Andrew Hurley’s translation in the Collected Fictions published by Penguin. This essay appears to mention it but it looks more like an abstract and I can’t find the whole essay if that’s the case. This essay is promising, mentioning other Germanic classical works but fails to mention the one that will be key to my essay. This article has some interesting ideas that in some small part hinge on the passage in question but don’t interrogate the passage itself in much depth. ↩︎
  3. One can plausibly read this theme in the epic of Gilgamesh, though there it is perhaps moreso civilization than money that has this influence. ↩︎
  4. Stewart Spencer’s translation in his and Barry Millington’s Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion“
    I have preserved their translation exactly, though in the tenth line quoted I think “worry” is a more apt translation of “sorge” (this is far from the only instance of this translation — I think consistency of translation was desired as it pertains to this word). The translation in this book is generally excellent though, and I would recommend it despite occasional minor quibbles. ↩︎
  5. Actually, Hagen’s final plunge into the depths of the Rhine shows that it keeps going afterwards. ↩︎
  6. Borges admits as much later in the piece: “Anything that is not the Zahir comes to me as though through a filter, and from a distance — Teodelina’s disdainful image, physical pain.” ↩︎
  7. That is, to a mental institution — he says that “Before the year 1948 [i.e. in the next month or two], Julia’s fate [a mental clinic] will have overtaken me.” ↩︎
  8. This is a specific philosophical term about a type of experience which, simply put, causes one’s values to shift after one has had the experience. For a very accessible explanation by a great show, listen to the Hi-Phi Nation podcast episode on Vampires. ↩︎
  9. See Alex Ross’ excellent book on the subject for more on the history of the Wagnerian phenomenon. ↩︎
  10. I use this term because it is widely recognized, though Wagner himself didn’t favor the term and what constitutes a Leitmotif and what meaning can be drawn from its use changes drastically throughout Wagner’s compositional career. ↩︎

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