Tag Archives: borges

Week 11: Distant Star

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 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 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?

Week 1: Introduction

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Sorry for the late submission – I got a bit lost on the course website. My name is Owen Chernikhowsky and I’m an anthropology major with a minor in music. It’s hard to say which year I’m in exactly, but I started university at UVic in 2018, switched to UBC anthropology in 2020, and expect to graduate at the end of 2023. I’m taking this course for my second literature requirement since the topic is already an interest of mine. I first became interested in Latin America because of an ethnographic field school in Cuba that was set to take place in 2020 but was cancelled; thankfully, it will be this summer instead and I’m quite looking forward to it. Last year I took SPAN 280 on Revolution in Latin American Literature with Brianne Orr-Álvarez, and the region has also shown up in several anthropology courses I’ve taken. Additionally, I’ve already read some of the authors on the syllabus – Campobello, Borges (one of my favourite authors of all time), Rulfo, and García Márquez – while others I had been meaning to read anyways.

Since watching the lecture video, I’ve thought a bit about something that I said in class – that I associate Latin American literature with a kind of playful irony. This comes up against what Prof. Beasley-Murray said in the lecture – that we should not attempt to force any single overarching theme for a region that is already loosely categorized as a unity. Insofar as “Latin American Literature” is an arbitrary generalization, I agree entirely – but so is practically any presumed unity, all of which begin to disintegrate if prodded at. It seems as if it’s a duty for any arts course on a given subject to begin with the statement that said subject does not exist. While this point is always important to recognize, I don’t find it particularly interesting. Maybe “Latin American literature” is as arbitrary a category as the set of authors with names beginning with D, but is either really all that absurd? Obviously neither “Latin American Literature” nor “authors with names beginning with D” exist as unities unless we treat them as such, but both could serve as an excuse for a fun experiment, a way to extract through comparison themes that could otherwise be missed. I’m reminded of the critics in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” who “often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…” Maybe we cannot reach any external, transcendent principle of unity through such methods, but we can produce new ways of looking at things – only, however, through constantly keeping in mind that the frameworks we use to do so are temporary and fluid. I accept any suggestions for further arbitrary categories to play with until they run dry and must be abandoned for something new.

As for a question, I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on the categorization of something like literature – do you find literary labels such as “Latin American Literature” more useful or restrictive?