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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’. On opening the book, the pages appear – just as in a bible – in double columns and ordered in versicles. The bookseller advises a close look at the page, since it will never be found or seen again. He goes on to say that he acquired it in exchange for a handful of rupees and a bible, from an owner who didn’t know how to read. It is impossible to find its first and last page, and is called The Book of Sand because it has no beginning or end – its very pages are terms in an infinite series. As to the bookseller’s conscience, it is clear. He is sure of not having cheated the native in exchanging the Word of God for this, a diabolic trinket.

Hume is now mentioned, one suspects in opposition to George Herbert, whose ‘Thy rope of sands’ forms the epigraph to Borges’s story about this miraculous book. Herbert, we know, balanced a secular career with a life of theological contemplation, and as poet might be said to have been in pursuit of what Derrida has called a ‘transcendental signifier’, God’s summarising logos, the last syllable of recorded time, all as the divine extension of Genesis (In the beginning, God said…), a suspiration that renders as revealed and knowable everything that has been uttered and written in between – life and the world as a sacred inscription. ‘Thy rope of sands, / Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee / Good cable, to enforce and draw, / And be thy law, / While thou didst wink and would not see.’

Above all, Herbert wants us to see God’s revealed truth – which the Presbyterian bookseller believes is written in a book, in the book. To this end his evangelism extends even to the Hindu caste system in Bombay, where he has found what to him must be the opposite of incontestable writ, what with its textual flickers, its Derridean presences and absences. One imagines that for him God’s truth is a simple truth.

By contrast one can’t ever imagine this being the case for Hume, himself a son of Presbyterianism, whose want of religion shook the conviction of Boswell, and provoked Dr Johnson into some particularly unpleasant comments. Hume, apparently, had never read the New Testament with much attention, and anyway for him evidence for the truth of Christianity was less than the evidence for the truth of our senses.

It can be by no means accidental that Borges as author (as author of ‘The Book of Sand’) has passed into the simplified hands of an evangelical Presbyterian an object to undermine his faith in a Christian eschatology. Derrida has pointed out that a structure always presumes a centre, and himself finds only suspect evidence for such a co-ordinate. What we call a centre is a place where contents, elements or terms are forbidden, and therefore is the very thing within a structure that escapes structurality. Paradoxically, the centre is and isn’t the centre. Any one page of an infinite book, for that moment while we contemplate it, is the central term of an infinite series, yet is merely engulfed by that infiniteness during those other moments while we don’t. One might go further and say that this counter-Book posited by Borges is in fact an interpretation of the Book, to whom he has called Herbert, Hume and a Presbyterian bible-vendor as first witness. The Book of Sand is the book of the basis of Western Christianity, decentred.

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