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I have long admired Terry Eagleton’s elucidations, his article on Derrida not excepted (‘The anti-Philosopher King’, The Liberal, December / January 2005). Interestingly, all that volatility in the world of text we inhabit is sometimes overtly brought to our attention in the texts themselves. Some, in particular, of Borges’s texts are a case in point. In his short fiction ‘The Book of Sand’, the book he describes assumes monstrous proportions, and is one that its owner surreptitiously transports to the Argentine National Library, and evading its staff ‘loses’ on a shelf in the basement – a book engulfed by a good many others.

Here already a fictive Borges is cast in the same blur as his biographical senior, writing as narrator of ‘The Book of Sand’. In a dream of himself, in a dreamed apartment in a dream of Buenos Aires, ‘volumes’, or books that the wraith called Borges is accustomed to handle, include encyclopaedias, maps, sacred tomes, the world’s fantasies concerning itself.

Someone very like him, whose domicile is Belgrano Street, in Buenos Aires, receives a caller who initially introduces himself as someone selling bibles. But bibles aren’t of interest, so the salesman, who is a Presbyterian from the Orkneys, instead sells him an octavo volume, bound in cloth, on whose spine are the words ‘Holy Writ’, and ‘Bombay’.

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