Author Archives: owen chernikhowsky

Week 13: Conclusion

I don’t entirely understand what I’m supposed to write about in this conclusion. I can offer my overall feelings on the course and return to some of my early ideas about Latin American literature, but on the whole, not very much has changed. This isn’t to say that I didn’t gain anything, however, far from it: it was one of the most enjoyable courses I’ve taken in my five years of university. It was possibly the most I have ever had to read for a single-semester class, but it didn’t feel overwhelming at all. I’m somebody who likes reading anyways, but something about a book being assigned for a class usually seems to decrease its potential for enjoyment; here, however, there was a perfect balance between reading for fun and reading for academic achievement that made it more enjoyable than either on their own. This was aided by the option to choose between texts for most of the weeks and the fact that some I had already read either in whole or part (Borges and Campobello) or were on my reading list anyways (Carpentier, Rulfo, García Márquez, Lispector, and Lemebel). While my favourite of the books remains Labyrinths, which I loved long before this class started, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hour of the Star have also solidified themselves among my favourite books over the course of the class, and I hope to return to them and other books by García Márquez and Lispector in the future. There were times that I had trouble figuring out what to write about for blog posts (this one most of all) but, ultimately, I always managed to come up with something.

I feel obligated to return to my original statement about the playful, self-aware element of irony I have found in a lot of Latin American literature. Though there were obvious exceptions (especially Rigoberta Menchú, who was clearly divorced from any broader Latin American canon), this did seem to hold true for most of the books we read, most prominently those following Borges and García Márquez. I was never particularly attached to this claim, though; it’s little more than a vague generalization pointing to a recurring theme in a handful of well-known classics, a bit like how Russian literature is so often characterized as “depressing” or “existential.” A lot of this seems to derive from the huge presence of Borges and García Márquez (I couldn’t imagine Lemebel or Bolaño writing the way they did without their influence), but it also preexists them in writers like de la Parra and Carpentier, arguably finding its real origin in a mixture of the influence of Cervantes and the peculiar position of Latin America as an oft-forgotten bastard child of imperialism in the twentieth-century world. However, I do wonder to what extent this preconception influenced my reading of these books and whether I would have thought the same if any of them had been written by a writer from elsewhere.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on whether themes of irony or self-awareness play any special place in Latin American literature, or is this simply a matter of perspective?

Week 13: Fever Dream

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I sympathize better with people who had trouble with Borges after reading Fever Dream; I had no idea what was going on for large sections of the novel. I didn’t mind too much, though, and disorientation was obviously Schweblin’s intent. While I was mostly able to follow along with the main narrative, I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the structure of the book as a dialogue between Amanda and David. I thought that it had something to do with their souls being migrated to the same body via the woman in the green house, but also considered that they could just be in parallel beds in the hospital. At some points, it even seemed that they were conversing beyond the grave a la Pedro Páramo, a book that shared a lot of similarities with this one; I wonder whether Rulfo was a conscious influence on Schweblin while writing.

A couple people commented last week on the cinematic elements of My Tender Matador, how it felt as if it were written to be made into a movie. Though I myself didn’t get that impression from Lemebel, I felt something similar in Fever Dream. Maybe this is just because “psychological thriller” is a genre I’ve been exposed to through film more than literature, but this felt like something that could have been directed by David Lynch or Darren Aronofsky: a confusing flash of images that the reader is mostly left to piece together. Of course, Pedro Páramo does something similar, but Schweblin’s style seemed far more contemporary and visual than Rulfo’s writing. The use of the present tense helped in this: rather than recounting the story as something that happened in the past, its presentation makes it feel as if it is taking place in front of you, even while the narrators’ commentary makes it clear that these are memories. This cinematic feeling really reflects how new this book is compared to everything else we’ve read; I couldn’t imagine a 20^th-century author using a style so obviously influenced by modern film techniques.

As for the central theme of the story: I think my prior knowledge that the book was about water pollution lessened the disorienting effect (it was clear what the cause of the sickness was) while increasing anxiety in those scenes where water is present. Despite my expectations that this theme would be used in an explicitly political, environmentalist way, however, it really didn’t feel like a “political” story, at least not in the same way as other books we’ve read (basically everything except Borges and Neruda in my case). While these books have scaled from implicit (Hour of the Star) to explicit (I, Rigoberta Menchú) in the ways that they address the intersections of individual lives with broader social and political issues, Fever Dream’s political content was so implicit that I never would have guessed that such themes were even a concern if I didn’t know that background. This could also reflect the book’s relative recency; rather than taking place in an era of revolutions, dictatorships, and “modernization” where politics are obviously front and center, it comes at a time when political and economic forces are increasingly invisible and insidious, even while remaining as powerful as ever.

Did others notice further ways in which this book feels more recent/contemporary than other books we’ve read?

Week 12: My Tender Matador

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I remember being told last week that we had made it to the end of the “linguistically difficult” texts. After reading this, I’m not sure about that. I’m certainly not complaining, though: my favourite part of this book was the way it was written, however hard it may be to follow along with the dialogue at times. There were several points at which I wished I could check the Spanish original for comparison, since even in translation the language is complex and full of subtle details. In the conversation video, Juan Poblete refers to the style as “popular baroque” in how it integrates “high” and “low” language, but this is hardly a binary opposition of two discrete modes; rather, it’s written on a strange continuum of poetic, conversational, romantic, political, confessional, comedic, and pornographic, each of which is coloured with heavy irony. As any literary critic would point out, it really brings out the artificiality of all language and social performance while simultaneously revealing the absence of any essential core hiding beneath these performances.

Though attention isn’t drawn to it in the same way as in Lispector or Menchú, I found the voice of the narrator played an interesting role throughout this book. Due to the lack of quotation marks or line breaks during dialogue, it can be hard to tell where the characters’ voices end and the narrator’s begins, but there were points where the narrator seemed to take a partisan position in the story’s conflicts. For instance, the topic everyone seems to stumble over when discussing this book: the Queen on the Corner’s gender identity. Going by her description throughout the majority of the story, it’s hard to imagine her as anything but a transgender woman, however anachronistic the term may be. The way she is portrayed, both through her own voice and the narrator’s, is so overwhelmingly feminine that it can be extremely jarring when other characters address her as “mister” or with “he/him” pronouns (which she always takes in stride, showing far less discomfort than I felt). Yet, there is an interesting exception near the beginning, where she is briefly referred to with masculine pronouns in the narrator’s voice for what I believe is the only time in the book (“All he needs is his Prince Charming, whispered the old ladies standing on the sidewalk across the street, watching him through an open window as he flitted about like a hummingbird”). If it weren’t for this one slip, it would be far easier to interpret the narrator as objective, but here it is revealed that the narrator is as susceptible to social perceptions (such as those of the old ladies) as any other character. As such, the Queen’s femininity becomes not a hidden yet inherent aspect of her identity confirmed by the objective voice of the narrator but an interested, asserted, even revolutionary position, understanding of which is reserved to an exclusive in-group including her, her loca friends, the narrator (for most of the book), and, towards the end, Carlos (there’s an interesting parallel here: as the Queen builds revolutionary consciousness through her association with Carlos, he too is introduced into her own world of revolutionary sexual politics). And, for a brief moment, this revolutionary assertion is successful, as Pinochet is “fooled” into perceiving her as a woman, again paralleling the momentary revolutionary assertion by the Patriotic Front that later takes place on the very same road.

Did others notice points at which the narrator intervened in the story in an active, interested way?

Week 11: Distant Star

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I found Distant Star to be deceptively easy to read, maybe the easiest in this class so far, yet extremely ambiguous in its themes. It’s clearly another book that the shadow of Borges looms large over, both as an influence and a foil. Bolaño has a similar way of writing to Borges, full of literary name-dropping that blends real-world figures with fictional characters and speculation on the nature of writing with a first-person narrator who mostly serves as a stand-in for the author. I was fully expecting the ending to echo the twist in “Death and the Compass” by revealing that Romero’s contract was an elaborate hoax by Wieder himself in the hopes of leading the narrator into one of his traps; however, while it’s quite possible that Wieder was the unnamed employer, the book ends without any major shakeups. Yet Bolaño also seems distinctly anti-Borges at times, not least in his political themes and skepticism towards the avant-garde. Considering Borges’s infamous support for Pinochet’s regime, I have to wonder whether he had any influence on the character of Carlos Wieder.

Wieder/Ruiz-Tagle is clearly the centerpiece of this book: the mysterious poet/pilot with uncertain motives, the pioneer of fascist art, or, as I would argue, artistic fascism. “Fascist art” (if such a thing could be called art) brings to mind propaganda glorifying the supremacy of the fatherland (e.g. Triumph of the Will), and, though Wieder does partake in this (as in his “Antarctica is Chile” stunt), I got the impression that straightforward ideological faith wasn’t his guiding motive. He seems to understand fascism less as a program to be strictly upheld than as an aesthetic object free from moral judgement, valuable primarily as a spectacle representing the extremities of humanity – which is to say, his artistic values influenced his politics rather than the other way around.

Though the avant-garde is typically associated with the political left (understandably so, considering their shared critique of existing norms and the very fact that some degree of tolerance is a precondition for artistic experimentation), it isn’t unheard of for right-wing figures to make waves in otherwise forward-thinking art: Richard Wagner, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalí, even Borges himself. It’s hard to make sweeping generalizations about such figures, but they generally seem to see in fascism a bulwark against “degeneracy,” an elitist tradition that aggrandizes the role of the “higher arts” that must be upheld in order to be transgressed (but only so far as such transgressions are agreeable right-wing ideology). In the lecture, fascism is described as strictly separating art from politics; while this is sometimes the case, as with those “apolitical” artists who quietly supported brutal regimes (Dalí and Borges), it doesn’t account for the importance of figures like Wagner or Pound in inspiring nationalist pride, or Wieder himself, for whom politics and art are directly linked. If anything, fascism is the aestheticization of politics by way of propaganda, the reduction of complex multifaceted societies to the image of a shared national spirit based on an imagined tradition and contrasted against an antagonistic other. When fascism turns against art, it is because it questions the supremacy of this universal aesthetic, suggesting that there are other ways of living in contradiction to the state narrative. Thus, if Wieder was ultimately cast out of fascist circles and forgotten by Chile, this was because he took this aestheticization too far: he found artistic value in even the parts of Pinochet’s regime that weren’t meant to be made public. Whether he himself realized that his aesthetic adherence to fascism ultimately ended in its implicit critique is uncertain.

What do others think of the distinction between “fascist art” and “artistic fascism”? Which side do you think Wieder falls on?

Week 10: I, Rigoberta Menchú

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I can’t say that I enjoyed reading I, Rigoberta Menchú. This was easily the most difficult read of the class so far and the only book that was a struggle to finish. However, “enjoyability” was hardly its intent, and I can’t imagine Menchú was considering literary interest while telling these stories to Elizabeth Burgess. If anything, the greatest strength of this book is how direct it is, minimally concerned with the norms and restrictions of broader literary practices. Of course, this isn’t to say that it’s completely unmediated, as is evident in her adoption of the Spanish language and references to untellable indigenous secrets. However, for the sake of movements to decolonize literature, it’s hard to imagine a more decolonial text than one by an illiterate indigenous revolutionary from the global south.

Given this distance from “literature” as I’m used to thinking about it, I really can’t evaluate this on the same terms that I’ve approached other books in this class. The most I can say is that it is a clearly a historically, anthropologically, and politically valuable text. Of course, we could get into debates over how all literature is all of these, but this clearly addressed these themes far more explicitly than even the most historical, anthropological, and political works of fiction we’ve discussed. And, insofar as it managed to spread awareness about the Guatemalan civil war, mobilize international aid, and document indigenous life in late twentieth-century Guatemala, it seems to have been quite successful in these departments.

However, as far as my own immediate reactions go, I, Rigoberta Menchú really didn’t move me as much as it seems to move others, though I wish that it did. The descriptions of exploitation, torture, and colonial injustices were certainly harrowing, and the accounts of indigenous traditions occasionally appealed to my anthropological interests, but, for the most part, I don’t feel like I actually gained all that much from reading this book. In some respects, it reminded me of how I felt while reading Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, another book that I respect more than enjoy: it was extremely effective at convincing me of something that I already believed. If I had read this book 5 years ago, it probably would have had a significantly stronger effect on me, yet, having read a fair amount of leftist and anthropological literature since then, it didn’t tell me much that really shocked me. Global capitalism has had disastrous effects on the third world and minority populations, with Latin America having been particularly hard struck; ideologies of racism and imperialism can destroy any semblance of morality in governing bodies and lead to horrific cruelties; collective organization of the exploited classes is the most effective tool for resistance to these economic, political, and ideological forces of oppression. I suppose the most interesting thing about this book was hearing all these familiar ideas from someone so far removed from the academic writers that I’m used to hearing them from, put into practice in such a concrete historical context. But, considering the sheer amount of controversy surrounding this text (and how obviously ideologically motivated many of its critics are) I would prefer to abstain from participation in broader discussion over a testimonial that I personally just didn’t find all that exciting, however much I may respect it.

Do others feel that this book changed their mind on any major points, or did it just reinforce or augment existing beliefs?

Week 9: The Hour of the Star

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I’ve always been fascinated by the country of Brazil. It’s the largest country in Latin America in terms of both area and population and is in some ways the South American equivalent to the United States: similar size, multiculturalism, and political/economic/racial divides. Yet, despite its huge population and international influence in the domains of music and sports, Brazil seems to have a surprisingly small international literary presence. There really aren’t any Brazilian writers with the same level of global success and canonization as Márquez, Borges, or Neruda (maybe with the exception of Paulo Coehlo, who could hardly be considered capital L “Literature”). Plus, it stands out to me that Lispector, both the only Brazilian representation in this class and one of the few Brazilian authors I had previously heard of (alongside Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado), wasn’t even Brazilian by birth but a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated at a young age – which I suppose further supports the parallel between Brazil and the United States, another country defined by immigrants.

Now, onto the actual text: I could tell from the opening sentence I was going to love this book. There were so many themes throughout that appealed to me immensely: the blending of the cosmic and the mundane, the ambiguous relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist, the existential tension between affirmation and nihilism, the ironic narrative style where nothing can be taken at face value, social commentary that doesn’t explicitly make its position clear, and so many seemingly throwaway lines with massive implications. Despite its short length, the sheer complexity of it all has honestly made me feel like I’m not qualified to give any general interpretation after only one reading, so the most I can offer are initial impressions that barely even touch on some of the themes that I found most intriguing.

The portrayal of capitalism in this book was very different from what I had expected. In contrast to One Hundred Years of Solitude and next week’s I, Rigoberta Menchu, both of which show capitalist exploitation from the perspective of production, Lispector instead focuses on the psychological effects of capitalist consumption. Perhaps Macabea is exploited in her work as a typist, yet the real sense of exploitation comes instead as her role as a mindless consumer whose personality and ideals are shaped by market propaganda. Yet she herself hardly seems distressed by this situation, so lacking in self-awareness that “she didn’t even know she was unhappy” – so who are we to make that judgement for her?

Adding further complexity to Macabea’s ambiguous position is the odd figure of the narrator, Rodrigo S.M. If Macabea is completely lacking in self-awareness, Rodrigo is self-aware to a fault, so self-aware that he can barely write without losing track of his narrative in questions about himself in relation to it. At many points where his narration came to the forefront, he reminded me of the similarly neurotic narrator from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground who also seems to stumble over himself in an attempt to justify the act of writing at all. Yet, Rodrigo is clearly not Lispector, as is ironically alluded to in his dismissal of female writers near the beginning (the story of a woman told through the voice of a man written by a woman!). His biases call the entire character of Macabea into question: she is only ever portrayed through his mediation and it can be hard to tell whether any aspect of her description can be taken as more than Rodrigo’s own reflection or counterpart.

I’m already well over the word limit so I’ll have to cut my thoughts short here. As for a question: do you think there is any theme, statement, or message in this book that can be taken at face value as the voice of Lispector, or is everything called into question by its ironic, ambiguous style?

Week 9: One Hundred Years of Solitude II

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Since I already addressed the whole book in my first blog post instead of splitting it up into two halves, I’m going to take a different approach this week: comparing Márquez’s style and themes against Borges’s. Whether it’s justified or not, the two often get paired together as the two great authors of Latin America and I certainly went into this book expecting something comparable to the otherworldly sensation of reading Borges. While they are obviously wildly different in countless ways, this expectation was satisfied even better than if the novel were truly Borgesian: it presents a picture of the world as original as Borges’s, yet so different that it’s almost as shocking as reading Borges for the first time was. Plus, I always find it interesting to compare my favourite books to each other in an attempt to extract which shared themes appeal to me.

One of the first differences I noticed between Borges and Márquez was their opposing authorial voices: Borges usually writes from a first-person perspective and includes the narrator in his stories, while Márquez is detached and absent from his subject matter. As the interview with Gerald Martin indicates, however, this technique of Márquez was a trick; though he takes the position of a distant observer, he is truly writing about his own life and memories as alienated from himself, comparable to the situation Borges explores in “Borges and I.” Relating to this, Borges has a tendency to spell out the possible implications of his stories, at times reading like a critic of his own work. Márquez, in contrast, leaves the wider themes of One Hundred Years of Solitude largely unspoken, or at most only vaguely hinted at; even later in life, he refused to elaborate on his intentions with this book. Despite Borges’s reputation as enigmatic and impenetrable, Márquez almost comes across as the more mysterious figure in this contrast.

In my post on Borges, I described his works as an attempt to illustrate infinity. Perhaps infinity isn’t the scope of Marquez – a hundred years isn’t all that long in the grand scheme of things – yet this book gave me a similar feeling a vastness. While Borges manages to condense theoretical conceptions of infinity into stories no more than a couple pages long, Márquez paints a concrete world teeming with intersecting threads full of more detail than anything Borges ever wrote. The endless variation of minute differences that Borges imagines in “The Library of Babel” is realized in a story in which it’s practically impossible to keep track of everything at once, even while everything always seems to repeat. It’s only in the final chapter that this history is totalized, condensed into a moment through Melquiades’s manuscript. In the lecture video, this was compared to climactic scene in Borges’s “The Aleph,” a connection I also noticed. “The Immortal” (also not included in Ficciones) occurred to me as well as another story of a people as lost in time and doomed to repetition as the Buendias.

Did others notice further similarities and differences between Márquez and Borges? Or do you think comparing the two is even justified or worthwhile?

Week 8: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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I read One Hundred Years of Solitude during the winter break two months ago – spoiler warning for those who haven’t finished since it’s hard to separate the first half from the second in retrospect. Some of the details of the plot have faded from my mind, yet the overall effect remains: this is a beautiful book. This didn’t fully hit me until the last chapter; though I enjoyed it immensely the full way through, the final scene was like waking up from a dream and discovering that I had practically been in a trance for the past few weeks. As cliché as it is, there really is no better word to describe it than “magical.” The whole thing is infused with this sense of playful wonder and it has quickly cemented itself among my favourite books ever.

A defining characteristic of many of my favourite books is the elevation of the mundane to incredible through literary elaboration; Ulysses is my favourite book of all time yet almost nothing actually happens in it. Márquez does the opposite and achieves a similar effect. So much takes place throughout the century this book covers, yet it can feel like nothing happens at all. Even the most marvelous events are portrayed in the same deadpan historical tone and no character is given much inner development; at times, it barely feels like a work of fiction at all. Despite this, it is one of the most imaginative books I’ve ever read. There really is something childlike about it all; it’s like seeing the world without all those preconceptions that we’ve picked up, freed from expectations of reality, morality, modernity and narrative for a smooth plane in which everything is equally possible and nothing is elevated above anything else.

While reading, I kept trying to figure out who the real protagonist of the story was. Early on I figured out that José Arcadio Buendía and Colonel Aureliano Buendía were decoys; as important as they are in certain sections, both are absent for too much of the narrative to fulfill this role in the bigger picture. I then convinced myself that Úrsula was the real hero for how long she persisted and kept order while others came and went. This theory was also disappointed when she too died well before the ending. My next option was Pilar Ternera, who, though seemingly marginal, lives longer than anyone else, first appearing in chapter 2 and not dying until the last chapter. Or was it Melquiades, the mysterious traveller from the opening chapter who survives two deaths to reappear as a spirit and ultimately predict the demise of Macondo in the final scene? None of these possibilities was really satisfying. Ultimately, a book as decentered as this one has no need for a protagonist; if anything, Macondo itself is the protagonist. Or, if we can permit a bit of pretension, maybe that titular spirit of Solitude who comes to visit everyone sooner or later is the real central figure. Maybe a stretch for any other book, but for one such as this where anything is possible, why not?

Who or what do others think could best be characterized as the “protagonist” of this book?

Week 6: The Kingdom of This World

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I broke the rules a bit this week and ended up reading both Pedro Páramo and The Kingdom of This World since they were both on my reading list anyways. I enjoyed both, but I’m writing about the latter since I read it more recently so it’s fresher in my head. Though I don’t want to spend too much time comparing the two, I do have to comment that I find it surprising that, between the two books, Pedro Páramo is the one most often regarded as the precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both in style and content, Carpentier seems far closer to García Márquez; he shares the same neutral, matter-of-fact tone and the blending of history with myth, while Rulfo’s writing is more intimate and dramatic with a focus on characters rather than historical events.

Otherwise, The Kingdom of this World was not what I expected it to be. Having read about the Haitian Revolution in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, I expected any fictionalized account to focus on the dramatic shifting of political alliances and the violent warfare that took place across the island. As it was, the novel almost jumped over the actual revolution – it depicted the first stirrings of revolution in Voodoo rituals, then skipped straight to the rule of Henri Christophe after independence had already been achieved. Toussaint L’Ouverture, easily the most famous figure in the revolution, was mentioned only once in passing, as was Jean-Jacques Dessalines; on the other hand, names like Dutty Boukman and Henri Christophe were as important in Carpentier’s fictional narrative as they were James’s historical one.

There’s a way in which this is an accurate representation of the way one experiences history through their own personal memories. I think we’ve all had moments when we found out that some major event that everybody else seemed to know about somehow just passed us by, only discovering it after it has already become enshrined as part of history. Other historical events can dominate our lives as much as they do a history textbook. However, even when we are aware as historical events take place contemporaneous to us, there’s still a kind of alienation between our own experience and history as such, that grand narrative stretching back to the origins of human storytelling. Perhaps we can intellectually accept that we are part of the same temporal sequence that included such historic events such as the Haitian Revolution, but those semi-mythical moments never really exist in the same way our daily affairs do.

Yet, as Carpentier would suggest, we do not all participate in the same history, but only a limited number of many histories. It’s somewhat like Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, but the paths don’t only fork; they twist over and under each other, some reaching outwards and others turning back on themselves. It’s not just that Macandal either died or survived, or even both; each story only has significance insofar as it is remembered, transmitted, and acted upon. If one version of the story is “true,” that is because, from our position, that is the story that has been transmitted to us and appears most relevant, but alternative stories are still exercising their own subterraneous influence under and against it.

How do others feel about the way you experience history in your own lives? Do you ever feel as if you are really taking part in history or is it always something distant and inaccessible?

Week 5: Labyrinths

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It is practically impossible to condense everything I think about Jorge Luis Borges, in competition with James Joyce as my favourite author, into 500 words. The man can do more in five pages than most writers could do with their entire lives; nearly everything I have read by him has left my mind swimming and permanently imprinted itself on my consciousness. I first read Ficciones (in Collected Fictions translated by Andrew Hurley) over two years ago, and, even before rereading for this class, I remember every story vividly. Some of the mock-academic details, such as the early works of Pierre Menard, obviously faded from my memory, but I don’t think I could ever forget some of the problems raised by his stories. He deals with philosophical topics in a more thought-provoking way than most philosophers, never concerned with upholding an argument so much as with proposing questions without truly satisfactory answers.

The first time I read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” still my favourite of all his stories, it felt like I was rewiring the fundamental structures of my mind. It touches on every element I love in his writing: mysterious investigations into arcane topics, the blending of reality and fiction, moments of surreal comedy, and philosophical speculations with implications that go far beyond the fourteen pages (unusually long for Borges) of the text. I feel like I could adequately summarize many of his other stories in a couple sentences, but Tlön in its entirety always escapes me; every sentence is packed with ideas to the point of overflowing and attempting to summarize it feels a bit like crafting the map in his “On Exactitude in Science” (pg 325 in Collected Fictions).

As someone who can sometimes have trouble suspending disbelief while reading fiction, Borges demolishes any boundaries separating the reader from the text. It frequently feels while reading him as if I am literally within the story, that life as we live it is simply a higher level of metafiction, and that we too are as imagined as the protagonist of “The Circular Ruins” in an infinite sequence of impermanent, contradictory realities. Many of his stories – “The Library of Babel,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Aleph” (unfortunately not included in Labyrinths) – are like attempts to illustrate infinity, effectively implicating the reader within that. But this is not done in a nihilistic way; human existence is not denigrated for its insignificance so much as expounded for its finitude. This is demonstrated nowhere better than in “Funes the Memorious,” where the burden of infinity crushes the titular character’s mind and renders him incapable of abstract thought. The infinite exists for us only as finite observers; Borges is not referring to some abstraction somewhere out there, but something that exists within us and that we are inextricably bound up in. If the questions he raises have no satisfactory answer, this is because the only possible answer is this inexpressible infinite that can only vaguely be alluded to in writing but stretches into every aspect of our lives and beyond.

As a question, where else do people see the concept of infinity in Borges’s writing?