BORGES, CABBALA AND "CREATIVE MISREADING"

"the always wandering meaning of all literary representation, according to which meaning wanders, like human tribulations, like error, from text to text, and within the text, from figure to figure." Harold Bloom: Kabbalah and Criticism The importance of "Borges and the Cabbala " has been well recog-nized by several critics. The two major works in this field are by Saúl Sosnowski (1976) and by Jaime Alazraki (1972). The former sees Borges's interest in the Cabbala as a means to discover the true secret of the universe and man's position within it. Alazraki reaches an opposing conclusion, suggesting that for Borges Cabbala is symbolic of "the agonizing history of mankind, played out between two stories — one imagined by God and the other fancied by man".1 In this article I shall develop Alazraki's idea of "story", focussing more specifically on Borges's use of the Cabbalistic theme of the world as an infinitely speculative text whose meaning wanders, subject to permanent displacement by renewed meanings. The Cabbalists, as Borges knew, were not bound by the idea of communicable meaning; for them the significance of a text lay mainly in its incentive to further thought: "Sé que esos libros no están escritos para ser enten-didos, están escritos para ser interpretados, son acicates para que el lector siga el pensamiento " (Borges 1980a: 16). "I, a Jew " was the title of an article Borges wrote in the magazin