Borges is a writer from Argentina who has used the technique of magic realism to startle and delight the readers. His work deals with history, metaphysics of Schopenhauer and Berkeley, the cult of his ancestors, the imagery of mirrors, mazes and swords and imagination that arouses curiosity, fear and suspense. As a universalist, he writes ,“ why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. ... in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans.” ("A Conversation With Jorge Luis Borges", Artful Dodge (April 1980)
In
the story ‘The Other ‘, one finds the
meeting between the young self and the old self of a writer on a bench beside
the Charles River in Cambridge , north of Boston. Both of them share their childhood memories, house they
lived in, furniture they had, books and
writers they liked . The young self thinks of it as his dream
and the old self replies that the
dream could end and goes on telling about the deaths of their parents and grand mother , the future of the young self as a teacher
, the second world war, the ascendancy of Russia , the complacency of America ,
the knowledge of the labyrinthine soul of the Slavic people by Dostoyevsky. The old self realizes that there has also been divergence
despite the future of the young man as himself. After the parting also, the old
self claims the encounter was real since the young could forget him since he spoke to him in a
dream whereas he spoke to him while he was
awake and is still tormented by memory.
Dream of
the future and memory of
experience represent the young and the old selves and the line between reality and illusion are thin.
His ‘Ulrikke’ starts with ,”My story will be faithful to reality, or at
least to my personal recollections of reality, which is the same thing.” He
meets her, a Norwegian feminist in the
Northern Inn . She was light and tall , with sharp features and gray eyes, aim
of calm mystery and enchanting smile and
spoke a Colombian. When she asks him
what is’ being Colombian,’ he replies
that he’s not sure but “it’s an act of faith.”
Both of them are scholarly and
after new experience. They go on long
walk , converse in literary allusions. She promises happiness in
Thorgate Inn and Javier Otarola, a
celibate and middle aged man thinks “proffered love is a gift that one no
longer hopes for; a miracle has the right to impose conditions” (14) Their
union was eerie,line between reality and memory is blurred and the story ends with the words, “ for the first and last time, I possessed
the image of Ulrikke.” (16)
Another story ‘A Weary Man’s Utopia’ imagines
a world where language is Latin, printing and media have disappeared , present
more important than past , the obsoleteness of
national states and professional politicians who took to honest work, disappearance of possessions, inheritance, poverty , wealth, space
travel etc. When the seventy year old professor of English and American
literature known as Eudoro Acevedo also
comes to know that every one has to produce his own art or science, he remarks,
“In that case, every man must be his own
Bernard Shaw, his own Jesus Christ, his own Archimedes.” In the utopia man faces his old age in solitude and healthy
pursuits of contemplation and games and dies in peace and grace. The man from
Utopia tells that man will be the master of his life as well as death. At the
end the narrator sees the utopian man collects all his art and other things in
the house with four of his friends and enters the crematory.In his study on Calle Mexico, the
old professor and writer of fantasy tales
finds himself alone with the
painting to be done after many millennia.
In the story
‘The Book of Sand’ one evening
the narrator is sitting alone in his room in a fifth –floor apartment on
Calle Bagrano. A stranger from Orkneys
of Scotland comes in and offers to sell a book. He claims that he has
got a holy book from an Indian Dalit called the Book of Sand or the Book of Books that has no
beginning page or no final page in
exchange for a few rupees and a Bible. The peddler “If space is infinite, we are anywhere, at
any point in space. If time is infinite, we are at any point in time.”( 91)
when the stranger offers to sell the book
for a huge sum, the narrator expresses his inability to but it. At last
the stranger parts with the book for the full sum of pension and Wycliffe’s
black-letter Bible offered by the narrator. He
becomes the prisoner of the book
hidden by him behind some volumes
of Thousand and One nights. He attempts
to preserve the book from being stolen or discovery that it might not be truly
infinite, turns into a recluse an dreams of it . He finds that both himself and the book have
become monstrous in his He felt that “it was a nightmare thing , an
obscene thing , and that it defiled and
corrupted reality“ (93) He doesn’t want
to burn the infinite book
causing infinite pollution and smuggles it
onto one of the shelves of the basement of the National library and
avoids going there afterwards. Does the author criticize the circular
notion of time in vogue in India while progress is associated with the linear
sense of time prevalent in the wish? What does the enigma of time mean here?
Does the fault lie with time, socio-economic and political structure in
India for not making lack of progress? Which does determine meaning of life -- the time or
history or the human agency?
In
the story ‘There are More Things” makes us remember Hamlet’s words . “in the world than your philosophy dreams
of.” Borges’s stories contain short and
precise lines revealing deep study and reflection, literary allusions
and starting definitions and build up an ambience of terror that creates suspense and terror in
the moment of truth. The narrator’s words
“ If we truly saw the universe,
perhaps we would understand it.”(42) The narrator, A university student comes to know about his beloved uncle’s death
and visits the place . his uncle taught
him many things related to philosophy, science in a playful manner. He was an
agnostic and after his death his house
has been bought by one Max Preetorius . The narrator refers to the oppressive air of the Norfolk pines and a peaked
roof of slate tiles and a square tower
with a clock which seemed to weigh down the Red House , he writes , “As a boy,
I accepted those facts of ugliness as one accepts all those incompatible things
that only by reason of their coexistence are called “the universe.” One day the sheep dog of the uncle was found
dead in a grotesque manner. The nephew
meets Alexander Muir, the builder and friend of his uncle and another tough guy Daniel Iberra and Mariani,
the carpenter who tell him about the
abnormal temperament of Preetorius. One rainy night the narrator enters the house
by chance and also by curiosity ,
searches the rooms for the monstrous creature and while coming down the ladder from the upstairs he hears heavy
steps. The last line “Curiosity got the
better of fear ,and I did not close my eyes” terrifies the reader.
In the story ’Congress’ Alexander Ferri who comes up hard in life relates as the delegate the memory of a mysterious
congress which used to discuss various things under the Sun. Borges ‘s dry humour comes out in sentences
such as “Indecisiveness or oversight
or perhaps other reasons led to my never marrying , and now I am
alone. I do not mind solitude ; after
all, it is hard enough to live with one self and one’s own peculiarities.” (17)
the members from different backgrounds meet periodically under the chairmanship
of one Don Alejandro , a man of means and generosity. The congress embarks on
becoming a representative body of all
the people and to develop an international language .The narrator Ferri and
Eguren , the nephew of Alejandro are sent to London and Paris where they mix up business and pleasure. Don Alejandro
who arranges a bonfire of the
mound of books painstakingly collected claiming that the Congress includes every thing in time
and space and it’s not a handful of persons prattling on ranch. He says, “ There is no place it is not. The
Congress is the books we have
burned. It is the Caledonians
who defeated the Caesar’s legions. It
is Job on the dunghill and Christ
on the Cross. The Congress is even that worthless young man who is
squandering my fortune on whores.”(33)
The narrator remarks that the night of
realization remained unforgettable and occasionally he “caught a snatch of it
in a song, in love making , in uncertain memory, but it has never fully come
back to me save once, one early morning, in a dream.”(35)
Borges’s story ‘Avelino Arredondo’,
based on the real incident shows the nurturing of the anger and purpose by the apparently
reserved person who goes into seclusion to do away with the dictator. Arredondo ‘s sticking to prayer in spite of
his agnosticism is based on the writer ‘s own life-long experience
of prayer at the behest of his mother. The story evokes many historical
associations through childhood memories of the Arredondo.’ The Disk’ shows the
futility of greed and murder by a wood-cutter
who wants to possess another man’s royal fortune supposedly lying in the one side disk in his hand which is
never found.
‘The Bribe’ shows the academic rivalry in a
university department that leads to many
stratagems and academic esoteric articles in the name of research and
exhibition of vanity to settle scores . At the end of the story, Winthrop, the head who prefers
Einarsson to Locke to represent university in a conference at Wisconsin tells after the latter’s confession, “we
share one sin, at least—vanity. You’ve
come to my office to throw in my face your ingenious stratagem; I gave
you my support so I could boast of my
integrity.” (79)
The story ‘Undr’ tells how one has to live
and seek his life on his own and utter something different from the traditional one. The story is narrated as part of writing by one Adam of Bremen who tells the story of an Icelander called Ulf Sigurdarson . The latter has visited the land of the Urns and its king. . The people of the Urns are mainly shepherds,
ferrymen, sorcerers, swordsmiths and rope makers and the land has been supposed
to have a poetry of a single word.
Sigudardarson has been asked to
flee and save his life by another person named Thorkelson . Sigudarson
tires to know the single word but told to seek it on his own. He passes
through a life of vicissitudes and again
revisits Thorkelson who in his last moment gives the word ‘Undr’ which means
‘wonder.’ When Sigurdarson is asked to repeat the word, he utters a different
word.
The story , “The Sect of the Thirty” tells about a
group unconverted to the
Christian ethics. The group also embraces
the ideals of equality, lack of private property, unbridled lustfulness. The
name could have come from their number or the height of the Ark or the number
of nights with in a lunar month or out
of the conventicler known as the Thirty Pieces of Silver .The narrator
doesn’t give the Word to save and leaves
it to the wiser people and the act of crucifixion, “there is not one lone
guilty man; there is no man that does not carry out, willingly or not , the
plan traced by the All-Wise. All mankind now shares in Glory” (47). The
sect revered the redeemer and the
betrayer equally and the members
resorted to crucifying them selves on
reaching a certain age. The entire
story is told as if it were found
from document in Greek dating from fourth century AD and even referred to
by Gibbon.
‘Shakespeare’s memory’ is another
collection in which Borges reveals the quality of invisible and enigmatic connection
between magical memory of a dead poet
and . The narrator Hermann Sorgel gets
Shakespeare’s memory which needs to be ‘discovered ‘ in the wakeful as well as sleep
states and takes an uncertain time. The narrator reread Shakespeare’s volumes and enters “the palaces and the
caverns of memory ‘ and memory offers
“the chaos of vague possibilities(128)he realizes that circumstances alone can’t explain away the greatness. Shakespeare’s
gift was to change “trivial terrible things that all men know into fables,
lively characters and abiding
verses with music. When Shakespeare’s memory was inundating him , the
narrator becomes afraid of losing his
parental language and sanity. For
a week, he thinks of himself as Shakespeare and finally one day gets rid of his
burden by passing on that memory to another wiling person on Phone. He tries
hard to redeem himself through study of Blake’s mythology and Bach’s music but
at dawn in sleep and in the twilights , he gets disturbed by small. Fleeting
and genuine music.
In the ‘Rose of Paracelsus’, a person called Grisebach comes to him
be taken as a disciple and asks him to make rose into ashes appear again
as rose. The teacher refuses to do so but the latter persists for a proof
to allow him to spend some years as a
student and says perhaps he has been a fraud as some of his critics say. The
disciple leaves him forever in remorse and promises to come back when he has
more faith. But after he’s gone , Paracelsus turns ashes into rose. The story
tells how faith is prerequisite in learning.
In the story, ‘August 25,1983’ the narrator
enters a hotel and gets surprised to
find his name already in the register and a look alike occupying the room.
There he sees his older self and talks
to him and two talk of dreaming each other. The older Borges
talks of suicide and asks of the most
terrible moment in their lives and smiles at reply saying that they feel as two though they are one. The older one talks of visit to Rome,
reciting of Keats’ s poetry, elegy on the beloved, the masterpiece to be
written, the criticism of it being imitative of Borges, the old age , the
humiliation and other things leading to the present condition on the verge
of suicide. The older self understands the
annoyance felt by the younger one and says, “ The stoics teach that we
should not complain of life—the door of the prison is open. I
have also understood that; I myself saw life that way, but laziness and
cowardice held me back.” (104) then the older self realizes the thing to be done while giving a lecture on Aeneid ,and that has led to him the
final moments. When the younger self raises his head, he finds nothing there or
outside except other dreams awaiting him. In Borges, we find this technique of
conversation between double selves , the
thin line separating life from dreams and intra-communication seems powerful and demanding .
Borges often employs the method of mixing
history, mythology and suspense. Timothy McGrath writes, “ Borges’ stories subtly and without
mal-intent, demand a reexamination of the way we collectively relate to the
world... questions the reliability of the past – something by which
individuals, ethnicities and nations define themselves.” (http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_criticism.html).verything becomes just another
story.”
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