. Spinning .

Maybe I haven’t put my whole heart and soul into my commentary on these stories that make up Ficciones, and I apologize to the spectre of Borges for this seeming lack of proper respect.  Believe me, I love the guy.  My heart and soul were actually there but it was my brain that failed.

There’s so much to write about when you read Borges that it threatens to turn into essays longer than the stories themselves.  Borges is not a writer’s writer perhaps–his use of language (though this is based upon what may be bad translations) is not something to make you swoon with envy.  His stories–when they exist in some manner of connected form–are vehicles for more philosophical notions.  His ideas, his conceptions and therefore his plotting and planning to weave a story around them are brilliant.  He is a puzzlemeister, giggling I’m sure, as he imagines how to lead the reader into his traps and yet allow him to find his way out.

Borges brings in his recurring ideas of how man repeats for all time his actions–something that’s not quite clear to me yet, but obviously very important to Borges.Or is it?  Are these the thoughts of a philosopher disguised safely within his characters–in most cases authors as well.   Or is it all a giant joke, a man’s spoof of mankind for attempting to speculate at what can never be known.

Borges is not what I would call a weaver of words, but rather of paths.  His stories are the quintessential Premise and Plot.  I find myself wondering if his thought process starts at the entrance of A to seek the exit of E, or if he rewinds–as I know I’ve done with a pencil in Sunday puzzle section mazes–going from E to A.  Does he conceive of an idea and ask what if? or does he find a spot and look backward to see how it got there?

Borges has piqued my curiosity, forcing me to think once again on that which I try so hard to ignore.  Fanciful need not always be a paradise wrought from the known, but need be allowed to go where it wanders, this way or that; this way and that.

Here the story seems to need careful perusal and thought above the rather simple narrative plot.  A man whose family is both Argentinian and German, plans to leave his job in Buenos Aires eventually to live at his homestead, a ranch down in the South. 

He reads a few stories of One Thousand and One Nights, takes ill after hitting his head on a newly painted door, ends up with septicemia in a hospital for a long time, is released and stopping to collect some things at his apartment, takes a train for the South and his family home. He reads a bit more of the book, but is generally happy to see the land going by from his window seat. He is told by the conductor that he must get off at a stop prior to that which he’d planned to reach his destination by carriage.  He gets off at a station, goes to a general store where he is bullied into a knife fight, for which he is unprepared but an old gaucho tosses him a weapon and he is compelled to go out into the street and face down his challenger.  Oddly enough, he is not completely unhappy with the possibility of his death, perhaps thinking of his grandfather’s own proud struggles in obtaining the land. 

They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear.  As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle.  He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.  (p. 174)

In the prologue to these last nine stories Borges suggests that there is meaning beyond the narrative here (duh!).  After meandering through his labyrinth of stories and picking up clues here and there (or at the same place simultaneously) I am suspicious of all that has occurred to the character since leaving his bed at the sanitarium.  Memory = Dreams = Unreality. 

There is a carefully outlined family history of the freedom of the plains, the land steeped in memories down south that still live on, despite the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the big cities up north, such as Buenos Aires.  There appears to be a borderline drawn between two times, two lives, and Borges himself hints at a melding of the two:

Tomorrow I’ll wake up at the ranch, he thought, and it was as if he was two men at a time: the man who traveled through the autumn day across the geography of the fatherland, and the other one, locked up in a sanitarium and subject to methodical servitude. (p. 170)

My guess is that he doesn’t hit the street outside and face a fight for his life with a knife he barely knows how to hold properly.  But this thought is preferable to the reality of his existence.

The End is an oddity in this anthology, and yet I suppose it fits in the manner of a return in time and a meeting of adversaries.  A shopkeeper lies paralyzed on his cot listening to the guitar-playing of a black man who has lost a singing contest, whose brother has been murdered long ago, and who seems to just wait. A man rides in and challenges the black man to a knife fight.  The black man wins and walks away, his mission (to kill the man who killed his brother?) complete, his life now without purpose.

There is something to this story that I seem to have missed, even in a second reading.  There is the spirit of one man, unable to move and yet accepting his fate to lie helpless on his bed for the rest of his days.  There is the patience of another, biding time with his playing of the guitar, waiting for the man with whom he must fight.  And there is the man who has murdered, comes to murder again.  I’m not sure what Borges is symbolizing here, what he is presenting.  Since he claims that the story is based upon an Argentine folk poem but continues the story from there, it is indeed of a twists and turns nature, the change of the victim into victor (as a murderer now himself) may be in keeping with Borges’ line of thinking in that all men do all things. Eventually.

In The Sect of The Phoenix, the first person narrator attempts to discover the background and purpose of a scattered group of people tied together by a secret passed down through generations. Borges compares the group first to the gypsies, as this is one of the group’s inconsistencies with others of religion or country of origin.  It doesn’t fly as an answer.  He relates that a certain rite of initiation is always performed, but usually by slaves, beggars, lepers, or children. Without revealing in full the secret as such, Borges leads me to believe that it is a human trait, a belief or an emotion that binds these individuals who are of every race and religious persuasion, normal and relative to where they abide. 

The Secret is sacred, but it is also somewhat ridiculous.  The practice of the mystery is furtive and even clandestine, and its adepts do not speak about it.  There are no respectable words to describe it, but it is understood that all words refer to it or better, that they inevitably allude to it, and thus, in dialogue with initiates, when I have prattled about anything at all, they have smiled enigmatically or taken offense, for they have felt that I touched upon the Secret.  In Germanic literature there are poems written by sectarians, whose nominal theme is the sea, say, or the evening twilight; but they are, I can hear someone say, in some measure symbols of the Secret. (p. 165)

Life perhaps?  A recognition within mankind of it’s own image magnified?  I really don’t know.  Whatever I think now, I’m sure I’ll think differently with another reading at another time.

Despite a lack of commentary on Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, I have gotten a couple of chapters into it, enjoyed it, and will continue reading and initiate postings on it shortly.

In the meantime, Borges has claimed my mind.

This is unreal.  Not what I thought at all, but a path that Borges rolls out to ponder at each step.  It is impossible to comment on this story before reading it much, much deeper, except to perhaps cover some of the Borges technique.

How could I have possibly been so naive, so egotistical, so smug?

One thing that Borges has not mentioned, and yet I considered in my reading, was the theory of Jesus having arranged with Judas for his betrayal and crucifixion.  Traitor and Hero implies that history is both arranged and rewritten for the benefit of itself; the line between reality and fiction then becomes blurred, leaving us with…what?

And so slow.  I was one page into this next story before I realized what I was reading:

To Runeberg, they were the key with which to decipher a central mystery of theology; they were a matter of meditation and analysis, of historic and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation, and of terror.  They justified, and destroyed, his life. (p. 152)

The title of this story is: Three Versions of Judas.

The story: An author is arrested and sentenced to be executed on March 29th at 9:00 a.m.  He is scared and dreadful of the mechanics of death, and starts to think of what he has left behind in his writings.  Wanting to be remembered for a well-written piece, he begs God to grant him a year to finish what he considers will be his best.  In a dream, his appeal is positively confirmed.  Nevertheless, the next morning, on the appointed day, he is brought before the firing squad.  And time stands still.

Except that is, for his mind.  Standing in place, nothing moving:

He had asked God for an entire year in which to finish his work; His omnipotence granted him the time.  For his sake, God projected a secret miracle: German lead would kill him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would elapse between the command to fire and its execution.  From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.  (p. 149)

The fiction upon which this author is working involves a switch in characters from one who believes himself to be a victor in claiming the prize of love, into that victor himself.  The players are plotters, the plot kills then reincarnates the players.  It is as the author calls it, a labyrinth in time.

There is usually a focus to Borges’ stories, a single point illuminated.  Yet while he himself claims the stories represent a labyrinth, it is one that is set up with paths leading through the known and unknown elements of time.  Stopping time, moving about in time, time in life and beyond it–this last of which necessity must include the spiritual–all figure in to Borges’ obsession.

There is also the theme of dreaming woven into this story.  In the opening paragraphs, the author dreams of a chess game that is played over centuries by two opposing families.  Here again, I feel that Borges enjoys naming the plot of the story in the beginning of same.  Life has often been referred to as a game of chess and Borges uses it here to foreshadow the author’s same maneuvering for his life.  Even within his ongoing work of fiction, the protagonist wonders if he is dreaming.

Meanwhile, I wonder if Borges has added another path to his labyrinth, that of real versus unreal by way of dreams.  In a previous story I noted his comparison of memory to unreality.  Borges, I believe, gives us much more than story or something to think about in this anthology; he give us a peek into his own stream of consciousness.

Not as impressive, this detective story, with murder contrived within numerical calculations left in clues for Detective Lonnrot to plot out to its sequential conclusion.   Beginning with indications of alphabetical hints and messages left at the scene of the crime, stating, "The First Letter of the Name has been spoken" the clues are then geometrically resolved in Lonnrot’s research as a triangle turns into a four-sided figure.

The murderer, a ne’er do-well named Scharlach, is correctly assumed by Lonnrot as being involved in the puzzle-play, and Lonnrot arrives at the strange mirrored, mazed residence of Scharlach only to find he has been duped into following a trail meant to entrap him. Scharlach’s carefully laid out mapping of clues has been precisely all done for the single purpose of killing Lonnrot in revenge for the death of his brother.

Borges seems to enjoy most his revelation of the intricacy of the plan in this storyline.  A bit overtelling for me.  The plot is fairly simple: killer leads victim on a merry path to his death.  The elaborate structure appears to be overdone to accomplish this.  But there is this bit of wonder that is pure Borges:

(Lonnrot): "In your labyrinth there are three lines too many," he said at last.  "I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line.  Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too."  (p. 141)

The simplest becomes complex; anything can be a question. And this:

(Lonnrot): "Scharlach, when in some other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, (etc.)

"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."  (p. 141)

Borges, for me, often brings in the question of the spiritual soul or mind–whichever it may (or not) be–as another layer of his unusual world.  Perhaps he is a believer in an afterlife of some sort; perhaps he believes it runs not after, but concurrent.

While I’m likely to do a Finale on this anthology, a thought struck me after writing up that last post.

Borges is what I had considered a "namedropper" in these stories and there are so many mentioned, as well as places, that it irks me a bit to not quite know what is real and what is not.  I’m a fanatic on knowing the difference and this bothers me in all areas of life but Borges is truly being a prick about sliding one into the other (BTW, I mean he’s pricking my consciousness–totally allowable reference then, no?). By placing his own name within one of the stories I think I’m safe in any definition of the previous statement.

With the concentration required in reading Borges, I’m too lazy to research each name and place to see exactly where the line is drawn.  So I breeze along through the book, determined to overlook this peccadillo of Borges, and it hits me:  The whole purpose to Borges’ labyrinth, his melding of time and space is to eliminate that border between that which we call real and that which we cannot.  Fiction and memory to Borges, may be the same. 

And who am I to say it is not?  This is truly an idea that is going to haunt me further in my efforts to understand my world.

I’m going to go about commenting on this one a bit differently; Borges once again enters the realm of time warps and questions, but it is an intriguing premise that follows the axiom of art imitating life, and its reverse, life imitating art.

Borges begins with the statement that this is a proposal of story, or at the least, that facts are not fully available.  Hence, he sets the story of a young man named Ryan who is seeking facts about an ancestor, Fergus Kilpatrick, a leader of a rebellion in Ireland in 1824.  Kilpatrick’s sepulcher is mysteriously violated, 100 years after his death and Ryan sets about clearing up certain mysteries of how Kilpatrick came to his death, having been shot in a theater box only days before the victorious end of the revolution.

What Borges brings to light is that Kilpatrick, in ordering a comrade named Norton to discover the identity of a spy within the ranks, is found to be that spy himself.  Norton plans, with Kilpatrick, the assassination of Kilpatrick so that history will instead show him to have been a noble leader of the rebellion.

Borges brings up the fact that Norton was a reader of Shakespeare, so certain similarities with the death in Julius Caesar and in MacBeth will occur in the murder of Kilpatrick.  Thus, life imitating art.  Then he also mentions Abraham Lincoln–with the obvious link of the war and Lincoln’s assassination while in theater attendance; Lincoln’s assassination occuring several decades later.

Borges is not only playing with time in this repetition or plagiarizing of historical drama, but he intimates that all is carefully planned out to have truth discovered eventually, and the truth again disguised for the good of the populace.

One thing that Borges has not mentioned, and yet I considered in my reading, was the theory of Jesus having arranged with Judas for his betrayal and crucifixion.  Traitor and Hero implies that history is both arranged and rewritten for the benefit of itself; the line between reality and fiction then becomes blurred, leaving us with…what?

Another great opening:

His face was crossed with a rancorous scar: a nearly perfect ashen arc which sank into his temple on one side and his cheek on the other.  His real name is of no importance: in Tacuarembo everyone knew him as the Englishman of La Colorada.  (p. 117)

Of the elements of writing, Borges hits quite a few right here.  There is a question immediately posed by the horrendous scar, and our curiousity is piqued by this mystery. As innocent as the next two sentences may seem, they are the crux of the mystery.  Borges provides a cover for the twist of the ending by not naming this character.  How everyone "knew" him, is not who he must be–just who everyone thought he was and this turns out to be untrue. As a matter of fact, Borges cleverly clarifies this misconception within a few paragraphs:

I said that a country with the spirit of England was invincible.  My interlocutor  agreed, but he added with a smile that he was not English. (p. 118)

The story then switches to the point of view of the "Englishman" as he tells the original first person narrator the story of his scar.

This section of the tale is one of war and rebellion, and the Englishman tells of meeting a sardonic, opinionated yet cowardly young man named John Vincent Moon.  The two are caught up in the action, and while the narrator takes the initiative Moon obviously avoids any physical danger, though he is injured slightly and is assisted by the Englishman.  Moon, in order to secure his own safety, betrays the Englishman and arranges for his assassination but is overheard and attacked by him prior to his own arrest.

Borges has in fact given away the twist of the ending in the opening lines of his story but as with other of his stories, the puzzle pieces you are handed at the beginning don’t make sense until the image is complete.  While the story is not all that unusual in its premise of misindentification, the way Borges handles it is what makes it shine, the structure, the plotting, the ease with which the reader is pulled into the story unwittingly knowing the ending.  Another terrific little technique he employs here is the naming of the narrator (original) as himself as the Englishman finishes his account:

From one of the general’s mounted sets of arms I snatched down a cutlass; with the steel half-moon I sealed his face, forever, with a half-moon of blood.  Borges, I have confessed this to you, a stranger.  Your contempt will not wound me as much.  (p. 122)

Stranger still, Borges gives the reader more credit than he gives himself as writer.  The reader has caught on at the point above, and yet Borges, as narrator, asks the "Englishman", "And Moon?"

Barthes probably would have loved that.

The opening line intrigues:

I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long.  (p. 107)

It is not until the end of this story that we realize how much information this sentence holds of the story, the characters, and the theme.  The plot that follows the introduction is of the narrator meeting a strange young boy, Ireneo Funes, who seems to be uncommunicative, perhaps antisocial, but who oddly always knew the exact time.  The narrator goes away for a while, comes back to the area and inquires about the boy–both are now young men.  He is told that Funes suffered serious, paralyzing injuries in a fall from a horse.  There is a communication from Funes that he wishes to borrow the narrator’s Latin texts, and the narrator obliges. 

When the narrator is called away, he visits Funes to retrieve his books and here is the Borges seed of wonderment: Funes has the capacity to remember everything in his own experiences as well as everything he reads and so, sees all at one time:

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine.  He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines of spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. (p. 112)

Funes then, absorbs all men’s experiences and in remembering them, allows that they happen simultaneously. The reference in the opening paragraph of the story is of course to Funes himself as being the only one who truly has the right to remember.  A nice twist too, the tie-in with Funes’ former ability to know the exact time is transformed into a one-time-fits-all in his new capacity.

One more nice poke from Borges to think about things:

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything. (p. 113)

I love that first part: "The truth is that we all live by leaving behind."

I am fascinated by the rest of that phrase.  It begs exploration.  Does t hint at reincarnation?  Does it instead simply say that forever is constant, and that time in our scientific definition of it, means nothing at all.

As I’ve noted before, reading the story a few years later and with whatever experience I’ve managed to retain and utilize since, and in view of the previous stories in this collection, I enjoyed the adventure of the story as much as the twists and questions with which Borges infuses his tales.

The idea of a labyrinth represented by a book is of course, pure hypertext without the ease of highlighted words to click upon.  There were some other things I noticed this time around that I missed in the initial readings. 

"I do not think that your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with variations.  I do not find it believable tht he would waste thirteen years laboring over a never ending experiment in rhetoric.  In your country the novel is an inferior genre; in Ts’ui Pen’s period, it was a despised one.  Ts’ui Pen was a fine novelist but he was also a man of letters who, doubtless, considered himself more than a mere novelist."  (p. 99)

This struck me particularly because of the intimacy with which this anthology is written; Borges has inserted himself as first person narrator in most cases.  Is he then, aside from his usual unusual treatment of what we take for granted and Borges instead questions, telling us as well that this is in fact how he considers his own work? 

Borges may be clearly pointing out to the reader by this commentary by one character on the work of another that the idea of the labyrinth, the idea of different endings that change and grow in number as each decision in life is made much as a reverse pyamid effect, is the purpose of the story.

The spy adventure is merely the medium or vehicle.  Luckily, it is nearly as engrossing and interesting as the ideas that Borges explores in the labyrinth of his mind.

This is one of my favorites–likely because my comprehension of it changed with each new branch of information brought in a paragraph, and because I should have written all those ideas down for what I’m left with at the end of a single reading is an image of the network of human life.

And that changed from an original image of a single human brain.

A library, labyrinth of hexagons perfectly formed and perfectly nearly endless.  All knowledge that can be known, past and future, in every language, innumerable books relating to each other and somehow making nonsense into sense; sense to nonsense. 

Men seeking the answers to the mysteries, though it be impossible for any single one man to know it all.  Separately, there is an organization to it if it can all be brought together. But maybe it’s humanity itself that keeps the rooms adjacent yet apart from each other.  Maybe it’s just human nature or maybe government or maybe war.  Or maybe the library is God.

A fun story, a make-you-think story.  Another Borges-question: Why, whatever does he mean?

In this piece, Borges as first person narrator plays reviewer, critiquing the work of the dead Herbert Quain.

I’m not sure that even after a couple readings that I can give an intelligent commentary on this one.  Quain appears to be self-deprecating, but to a degree, correct in his evaluation.  There is what I suspect a tongue-in-cheek by Borges in a breakdown of 9 chapters that need be read in reverse order.  This is both a question of time sequence as well as reader ability to accept non-traditional structure.  Referencing other works, the narrator raises the question of linearity not only in writing, but perhaps in life as well.

According to the narrator, Quain has geared his work towards the curious and openminded reader and subtley hints that Quain is way beyond the comprehension of his reviewers.  Perhaps he is with Barthes on theory:

"Every European," he reasoned, "is a writer, potentially or in fact." He also affirmed that of the various pleasures offered by literature, the greatest is invention. (p. 78)

He further goes on to reveal writer manipulation of the reader, enabling his audience to get what they want out of the reading:

For these "imperfect writers," whose name is legion, Quain wrote the eight stories in Statements.  Each of them prefigures or promises a good plot, deliberately frustrated by the author.  One of them–not the best–insinuates two arguments.  The reader, led astray by vanity, thinks he has invented them.  (p. 78)

Sounds like something Jorge Luis Borges would do.