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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 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?