Literature: Alienation and Decentering in Borges’ “El Aleph
Source: https://www.bookdepository.com/es/Aleph-Other-Stories-Jorge-Luis-Borges/9780142437889
By: Nazreen Shivlani
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao
Common, I hope, is the feeling of detachedness from daily chores that taints everything with grotesque oddness. While brushing my hair, I may stare at myself in the mirror and see that body as so strange, those arms as so alien. At a stranger time, I decided the touch of the soil under my feet to be a most captivating feeling. Each time the enchanted moments pass, I recall having been thinking about something greatly important, though I am unable to identify even the character of such great thoughts and so resume my day with an aftertaste of strangeness. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges talks about similar moments in some of his short stories. This text picks up on small sections from Borges’ “El Aleph” about experiencing things from outside of ourselves, resulting in a form of alienation and decentering.
“El Aleph” is the last short story in Borges’ book of the same title. Aleph is a Hebrew letter written “א”, used in set theory to denote “the size of infinite sets that can be well-ordered” – take this definition, retrieved from Wikipedia and by someone who knows little maths, lightly. The short story tells the tale of a man, Borges, who goes to visit Carlos Argentino Danieri, the cousin of his deceased love interest. Danieri, a snobby aspiring poet, is about to be kicked out of his house. While pleading with a nostalgic Borges for help, Danieri says he doesn’t want to lose his house because it has the Aleph, a point in space which contains every point in space. When a reluctant Borges goes to see this mysterious object, he ends up astounded as he is indeed able to see every point in the universe:
“Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo” (Borges, 8).
“Everything (the surface of the mirror, for instance) was an infinite number of things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the universe”.
This remarkable experience took place when the fictional Borges lay down, as instructed by his friend, in the darkness of Danieri’s basement while staring at the nineteenth step of the staircase. In the middle of an entrancing description of all of the Aleph’s sights, Danieri interrupts our protagonist, humouring the reader at the realization of our own annoyance at Borges’ friend:
“– ¡Qué observatorio formidable, che Borges!
(...) En la brusca penumbra, acerté a levantarme y a balbucear:
–Formidable. Sí, formidable.
La indiferencia de mi voz me extrañó. Ansioso, Carlos Argentino insistía:
–¿Lo viste todo bien, en colores?” (Borges, 9).
“‘What a formidable observatory, hey Borges!’
(...) In the abrupt gloom, I was able to get up and mumble, ‘Formidable. Yes, formidable.’ The indifference of my voice surprised me. Anxious, Carlos Argentino insisted, ‘You saw it all well, in colour?’”.
Borges, the author, takes us through the perfect journey. First, a fast-paced multiplicity of descriptions of the Aleph which makes us feel as though we are ourselves experiencing all the points of the universe at once. The fact that we are reading a description, which reminds us that we are not actually experiencing the Aleph, is now mixed with the feeling of experiencing it through the eyes of character-Borges, itself a further point of view encapsulated by this mythical Aleph. This self-awareness of the reader as distinct from the protagonist enables us to notice that the transcendence of character-Borges happens in part because he is able to see reality outside of himself. He finds himself so detached that the world he sees cannot even see him:
“Vi todos los espejosdel planeta y ninguno me reflejó” (Borges, 9) / “I saw all the mirrors of the world and none of them reflected me”.
The viewpoint from the Aleph “corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which (we are) simultaneously effecting” (Sartre, 255). We get a feeling that at this point, indeed, in his alienation, character-Borges transcends himself. Could it be that when the point of view shifts and the world becomes decentralized, we can realize some eternal truths? Could it be that when we are so alienated that we don’t recognize our bodies as our own and seem to be discovering some external vague truth, the self transcends?
Such a transcendence from the self is something we will never experience– not only because we cannot possibly see first-hand the parts of the world that we do not go to or because we will not experience feelings from the perspective of another person, but because we may never get to know if there is something out there and if it is as we see it. When we stare at nature and absent-mindedly believe to have found a truth about it, could we really have experienced it as it truly, pristinely is? And could the Aleph finally free character-Borges of the fixed point of view that so excruciatingly traps us? Author-Borges expertly escalates our claustrophobia when alluding to other limits of our experience such as language. Only when he is interrupted by Danieri is the protagonist forced to descend back inside of himself, dazedly stepping into his encapsulating point of view to utter a response. This interruption marks the end of Borges’ reverie, as he is called back to reality.
Next in this expedition, the author humours us with hindsight. If author-Borges tried, as I implied, to show that character-Borges (or more broadly perhaps, the subject) transcends himself by annulling the “I” as the starting point, it seems nothing remarkable after the description-induced hypnosis. Naturally, the subject should transcend their subjectivity in order to experience objectivity – which was framed in the present text as the absolute freedom of experiencing a pristine world. Re-reading the previous paragraph, we realize that what to me felt as epiphanies when reading, were quite obvious all along. Of course, there are points in Borges’ writing that draw us into the story and points where we get distracted and realize that we are distinct from character-Borges; surely, not pondering over how we can only see reality from our own point of view for the best part of our lives reflects that this is a plainly obvious fact and not that our minds have not reached the grand depths. Still, in the context of “El Aleph”, Borges’ writing is incredibly ingenious because it is able to take us through the loopiest of thoughts only to drag us back to our living rooms, making us feel like the snobby Danieri that so annoyed us.
Finally, we reach the last stage of Borges’ trip: forgetting. Because character-Borges is fully immersed at every step of his journey, unable to think himself at any step other than the present one, his life after the Aleph feels absolutely normal. This is much like our feelings as we accompany the protagonist in his journey, aided by the author’s magical realism which makes everything appear wholly natural. Natural, yes, but it appears absurd too, from the outside, that such a mind-blowing event should be followed by the same good old daily chores as always. At the end, character-Borges forgets the specificity of what he recalled when looking at the Aleph, remaining only with the memory of an indescribable intensity. This touches upon the possibility that reality is limited and that it is created in its totality by language and memories.
Borges’ “El Aleph” takes us through a journey similar to what we feel during those moments of detachedness from what surrounds us. We may personally relate to character-Borges when we enter those strange and somewhat happy feelings of alienation that come to us under peculiar circumstances, the short minutes when we feel that we experience things from outside of ourselves, as if some thoughts feel awkward when experienced from our own point of view and they would rather be outside of us. When our eyes, perplexed, must begin to understand every part of what they are seeing, getting us bewildered at the novelty of normal views because we truly see things as if for the first time, it seems to me that we may experience something like Borges’ Aleph.
Nazreen is a KCL student interested in development, philosophy, and literature, focused on Latin America.
Four Pillars of New Latin American Narrative (part II): Macedonio Fernández and Roberto Arlt
By: Luisa Ripoll Alberola
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao
Note: This is the final portion of a two-part piece on the pillars of Latin American Literature. To read the first part, please refer to: Four Pillars of New Latin American Narrative (part I): Felisberto Hernández y Horacio Quiroga
Where does Latin American literature come from? What gave birth to its voice? The modern Latin American literature is genuine and differs notably from the occidental tradition. This was first globally manifested with the Latin American Boom–the literary movement that united many young Latin American novelists in the 60s and spread their work around the globe. The Latin American Boom seems to be the beginning of the assertion of this new voice in the literary world. And thiscould be the reason why Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar – among others – are so popular.
I wondered if these authors had been some kind of geniuses to create such a new and original form of written expression unexpectedly. What did they read? What was their inspiration? What features were picked up from other literary movements? One day, I found the answers to these questions hiding in a prologue in the words of Carlos Fuentes. His opinion shows these influences in four essential Latin American authors. According to Fuentes; Felisberto Hernández, Roberto Arlt, Horacio Quiroga and Macedonio Fernández are the four fundamental pillars to the renewal of the 20th century narrative.
To satisfy my curiosity, I started reading one important book per each author –these were written around the 1920s. Hereafter, I will tackle my reading experience with these not-widely-known classics of the Latin American literature.
Macedonio Fernández
The other day I was asked which was the strangest book I have ever read; my answer was Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (The Museum of Eterna’s Novel) by MacedonioFernández (1874-1952). Macedonio Fernández is an Argentinian author–known for being quite eccentric. In all his life, he never stood foot outside of his beloved Buenos Aires. Fernández collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges in many magazines and had a good friendship with Borges’ father.
The influence of Fernández in Borges is irrefutable. As it is pointed in the summary of Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, “Two intuitions sufficed: the obsession for the work inside the work itself, and the dreamlike conception of reality.” A basic recurrence in all of Fernández’s work,also taken by Borges, is the idea that ‘the true nature of the literary condition of the writer is the reader itself.
Macedonio Fernández was an avant-garde writer. He took part in the Argentinian ultraist group of writers, who continued dadaism and other avant-garde movements. Una novela que comienza (A Novel that Starts) is part of this experimentation. Ironically, this is precisely a novel that doesn’t start–it is an aggrupation of prologues about a story and some characters that will never be real in any novel. The vanguard naughtiness, that provocative spirit, stayed in later literature. The avant-garde is the total rupture of stablished rules. Authors of the next generation, such as Cortázar, made this ‘game’ their main source of inspiration. The game is focused precisely on this: the invention of new rules. The destructive vanguardist aspect was necessary to wake up the destructive impulse of the game.
Museo de la Novela de la Eterna torn its readers in two. In my opinion, Fernández’s book was dull. But it is this same boredom that marvels me the most. At the same time, Fernández achieves to give us both dull repetition and intrigue. This book, however, is very important for its influence in Cortázar’s Rayuela: a short chapters structure with no lineal connection between them, fragmented so it looks like a collection of pieces of text. The main difference is that Cortázar was concise, he invented concrete brilliant characters and worlds. Fernández, on the other hand, is more abstract. Other similarities are the pretentiousness of Fernández, comparable to Morelli’s style in “De otros lados” chapters of Rayuela; the metaphysic awareness; the structural experimentation of concatenating footnotes and parenthesis inside parenthesis.
‘It is nowadays common to recognise in the fragmentarism of Rayuela, the print and presence of Fernández; but it is this fragmenting that transforms in into the rhetorical instrument that best adapts to the inherited attitude inherited in historical avant-gardes, being Dadaists, surrealists… regarding the old desire that emerged in the romanticism of presenting the writer as a provocative agent of the collective drowsiness, a rebel without more cause than himself or the mysticism.’ 1
The legacy of Macedonio Fernández, I believe, is the importance of the reader. He gets this argument to the absurd: writing a novel with insubstantial characters, with a radically abstract discourse, so it is not eclipsed by the limelight of the reader in the act of reading. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna is a mirror of four hundred pages: it is as boring as staring to oneself in a mirror for four hours. He himself affirms it in the words of one of his characters: ‘what occupies me is the reader: you are my topic, your fading existence; the rest is an excuse to have at reach from my process.
In the new Latin American narrative, although not in such a drastic way, the relation between author and reader wins importance. It becomes more dynamic, a true exchange. The author will want to move the reader in new, undiscovered ways. Consequently, the interpretation of the reader in the facts of the novel starts to be more interestingin the reading experience.
Roberto Arlt
My favourite of the four authors, Roberto Arlt was anArgentinian author, porteño (born in Buenos Aires) frombirth to death (1900-1942). According to Ricardo Piglia, Arlt inaugurated the modern Argentinian novel with his new style. Many fellow-native writers still recognise in Arlt his mastery and consider themselves followers of his school.
His novels Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) and the follow-up Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers), were in my opinion, like reading Quentin Tarantino. Although I would have loved to, I didn’t get to read the next book El amor brujo (The Wicked Love). Hence, I will share my feelings with the first two novels aforementioned. If I compare Arlt with Tarantino it is because of their similarities: the presence of the sleaze and the street, the importance of dialogues that touch on any imaginable topic, and the banalization of death–all covered in profound sarcasm, and an existential irony. Arlt drives the reader to a very entertaining universe, in which it reins the contrast in the personalities of the characters, the insanity and a sincere nonsense.
I don’t need to read more of his novels to know that Arlt dominates literary styling, which is characterised by the orality expressed in the spirit of the Latin American conversation. He masters it with such a naturality, avoiding all the time literary rigidity, that he is told to ‘write badly’. In that moment, he coexisted in Argentinawith a current of literary academicism, whose memberscriticised Arlt sharply. Arlt even addresses this criticism: ‘…it is said about me that I write badly. It is possible.”2And it is more than possible, as he makes grammatical and orthographical mistakes constantly, however he proves that not all the literary enchantment is in an impeccable style.
....
To sum up, these four authors are all very interesting. I would like to encourage all readers, literature enthusiasts or beginners, to start their own literary investigations. Ask questions and dig deeper about any topic that interests you, any genre that connects with that specific moment you are living, or any group of authors you want to know more about.
Latin American literature plays, in my opinion, in another league in the panorama of world literature. For me, the feeling it transmits is not comparable to any other written thing. If you start reading these authors I–or any other great Latin American authors–I welcome you to aNew World.
Luisa is a Spanish 3rd Year Industrial Engineering student at the Technical University of Madrid. She is passionate about literature and philosophy.
Bibliography
1 Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente, “Prólogo” a Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, p. 65-66. Editorial Cátedra, Madrid, 1995.
2 Roberto Arlt, “Prólogo” a Los lanzallamas, ArchivosALLCA XX, Barcelona, 2000.
Four Pillars of New Latin American Narrative (part I): Felisberto Hernández y Horacio Quiroga
Sources: https://sujetos.uy/2012/01/05/felisberto-hernandez-en-el-canon-narrativo-uruguayo/ and http://librosquearden.com/biografia-horacio-quiroga/
By: Luisa Ripoll Alberola
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao
Where does Latin American literature come from? What gave birth to its voice? The modern Latin American literature is genuine and differs notably from the occidental tradition. This was first globally manifested with the Latin American Boom–the literary movement that united many young Latin American novelists in the 60s and spread their work around the globe. The Latin American Boom seems to be the beginning of the assertion of this new voice in the literary world. And thiscould be the reason why Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar – among others – are so popular.
I wondered if these authors had been some kind of geniuses to create such a new and original form of written expression unexpectedly. What did they read? What was their inspiration? What features were picked up from other literary movements? One day, I found the answers to these questions hiding in a prologue in the words of Carlos Fuentes. His opinion shows these influences in four essential Latin American authors. According to Fuentes; Felisberto Hernández, Roberto Arlt, Horacio Quiroga and Macedonio Fernández are the four fundamental pillars to the renewal of the 20th century narrative.
‘Renewal that connects with the coexistence of imagination and critique, ambiguity, humour and parody, and the generating capacity of myths–whose encounter converts these aesthetic operators in disruption of the language and literary history. Also because of the establishment of a diversifyingmovement, critical and ambiguous, radically different from the perspective and aesthetic approaches of the old naturalist novel.’ 1
To satisfy my curiosity, I started reading one important book per each author –these were written around the 1920s. Hereafter, I will tackle my reading experience with these not-widely-known classics of the Latin American literature.
Felisberto Hernández
Inspired by my local bookseller, who did his doctoral thesis about him, Felisberto Hernández was the first author I approached. Uruguayan musician and writer (1902-1964), he spent all of his life in Montevideo. I read one of his more popular storybooks: Nadie encendía las lámparas (No One Lit the Lamps). His short stories are homely, calm and without overdone, dramatic effects. The characters seem to be sleeply taken by a great dream.
The style of the renewed Latin American narrative is vivid, visual, colourful and sincere. These attributes are usually related with childhood because when we were young, we received the gift of life purely and happily. As we explored the world for the first time, everything had a new colour, a new taste. Life was marked by these feelings and by the illusion of discovery. The writer, in his adultness, can get close to these memories by a combined act of remembering and imagining. Latin American writers often use this literary resource and make their readers feel alike. The genres that get closer to this innocent and childlike view of life are poetry and specially the tale. Hernández mostly explored this genre, publishing nine storybooks.
From my point of view, his definitive contribution is the intimal link between his literature and his music. Hernández himself was a pianist and a composer. The lifestyle and music in the American continent dictate a rhythm that only him was able to transcribe. It is said that his book Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling (By the Time of Clemente Colling) achieves the ‘painting of piano lessons’. This relation between sound and written word is more profound than just alluding to famous singers, as it happens in other more modern books like Rayuela(Hopscotch) with jazz.
Horacio Quiroga
I followed by reading Historia de un amor turbio (A Murky Love Story), a short novel by Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937). Quiroga is Uruguayan, but he lived most of his life in Misiones, Argentina, close to nature. He died in Buenos Aires, but his legacy lived on in the works of BioyCasares, who he influenced. In Quiroga’s work I already recognised that sincere, shoddy way of expression, that had only been used by children until then. Just as Hernández, he devoted himself to tales such as Cuentos de la selva (Jungle Tales), Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Stories of Love, Madness and Death), among others.
Quiroga was a cinema passionate, just like Jorge Luis Borges. He was one of the first silent films critic of his generation, and he wrote articles in different magazines (Caras y caretas, El Hogar, La Nación…)2. Films had a great influence in the visual richness of his stories and inhis notorious experimentation with time –he makes use of ellipsis of time, just as cinema does.
One characteristic that caught my attention is that he introduces nature so decisively that it seems just like another character of the story. On many occasions, the forest, the jungle, or the river, accompany the leadcharacter in his successes and his death. In others, the main characters are animals, making notorious his influence by Kipling. Definitely, his work is deeply rooted and embedded with Latin American landscape and the tropical forest.
But the main theme of many of his stories is love. He portrays tradition, courtship, social classes, and all the conventions surrounding love. They are stories of tangible realities. Edgar Allan Poe was another of his influences; in his stories one can take notice of his sharply descriptive style. Quiroga already has some brilliant moments in the use of metaphor and anticipation and retrospection.
By the time I read Quiroga’s books, I had already connected deeply with my experiment. Inside me, there was plenty of energy to continue reading and reviewing Carlos Fuentes’ chosen authors. Soon you will be able to read the second part of my journey with them and share my impressions about Macedonio Fernández and Roberto Arlt.
Bibliography
1 Enriqueta Morillas, “Prólogo” a Nadie encendía las lámparas, p. 18. Editorial Cátedra, Madrid, 2010. (Thetranslation is mine)
2 Many of these articles are collected in Horacio Quiroga, Cine y literatura, editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 2007.
Luisa is a Spanish 3rd Year Industrial Engineering student at the Technical University of Madrid. She is passionate about literature and philosophy.