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.