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Vol. 151
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Nataly Tcherepashenets
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tcherepashenets, Nataly.
Place and displacement in the narrative worlds of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar /
Nataly Tcherepashenets.
p. cm. — (Currents in comparative Romance languages and literatures; v. 151)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899– —Criticism and interpretation.2. Cortázar, Julio—Criticism
and interpretation. 3. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899– —Settings. 4. Cortázar, Julio—Settings.
5. Displacement (Psychology) in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ7797.B635Z933 868’.6209—dc22 2005024268
ISBN 978-0-8204-6395-7
ISSN 0893-5963
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
Printed in Germany
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Conclusion 129
Translations 135
“The Sealed Door” 135
“Letters from Mother” 141
Prologue to “Letters from Mother” by Jorge Luis Borges 156
Notes 159
Bibliography 183
Index 199
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to give special thanks to Efraín Kristal for a constructive and inspiring
dialogue at all stages of my work on this manuscript. I would also like to express
my gratitude to several individuals for their support during this project and for
their valuable advice: Suzanne Jill Levine, Donald Yates, Michelle MsKay
Aynesworth, Brian Morris, late John Kronik, Malva Filler, Ivan Almeida,
Cristina Parodi, Kim Hewitt, Linzi Kemp, and Julie Shaw.
During my work on this book, I was given several opportunities to present
and discuss my work at professional conferences that helped me to put the pre-
sent version in its final shape. I am most grateful to the dean, Dr. Meg Benke
and to the Office of Academic Affairs of the Empire State College, State
University of New York, for their generous support of my initiatives. I would
also like to thank George Guba and Tony Costa for their technical assistance
in preparation of this manuscript.
A debt of gratitude is also owed to my family for helping me organize a
working routine, and for encouragement. I am grateful to my father, Yuri
Tcherepashenets, for giving me the idea for the book cover, and to Linda
Shaw for its graceful realization.
Stuart Wald is responsible for many improvements in this book. I greatly
appreciate his intelligent help and understanding. I also would like to offer my
gratitude to a wonderful staff at Peter Lang Press, especially to Dr. Heidi Burns,
Brittany Schwartz and Richard Atkins for their patient assistance, and to
Michael Paulson for his insightful comments.
My thanks to Penguin Group, New Directions, Random House, and
Carmen Balcells Agencia Literaria for giving me permission to quote from their
English-language versions of Borges’s Labyrinths, Collected Fictions, Selected
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Non-Fictions; Cortázar’s Hopscotch, End of the Game and Other Stories; and
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Different portions of the mate-
rial of this book were first published in Variaciones, Semiotica, and the Romanic
Review. I thank the publishers of these journals for permission to reprint mate-
rial here.
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INTRODUCTION
Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar are among the writers who have brought
an international fame to the Latin American literature. Borges himself played
a crucial role in the recognition of Cortázar, for as an editor of Los anales de
Buenos Aires, he published Cortázar’s first story “Casa tomada,” [“A House
Taken Over”] in 1946. Borges proudly recalled this episode on numerous occa-
sions and referred to Cortázar’s expressions of appreciation manifested during
their meetings in Paris and Buenos Aires: “Él, cada vez que venía a Buenos Aires
pasaba a saludarme” (105) [“Each time when in Buenos Aires, he came to meet
me”].1 Furthermore, in an interview for Status magazine, Borges emphasized that
an irreconciliability regarding their political views did not prevent him from
having respect towards Cortázar as a writer: “Más tarde, en París, él recordó el
episodio y me confesó que siempre me había estado muy agradecido. Después
se hizo comunista, y como soy enemigo del comunismo esas circunstancias nos
enemistaron. Pero a mí las opiniones políticas de Cortázar no me preocupan
mucho, y si él viniera a conversar conmigo, me encantaría poder hacerlo.” (qtd.
in Alazraki 52–53) [“Later in Paris, he reminded me this episode and confessed
that he was always very grateful to me. Afterwards he became a communist, and
I am the enemy of communism; these circumstances put a barrier between us.
But I am not very much interested in Cortázar’s political opinions, and if he
would come to talk to me, I would be delighted”].
For his part Cortázar acknowledged his literary debt to Borges. In a
conversation with Omar Prego, Cortázar referred to Borges and Roberto Arlt
as the most influential Argentinean authors in his literary career: “en que
clase de estupidez caería yo si negara la doble influencia, muy específica cada
una, de Borges y de Roberto Arlt. A los que he citado siempre” (62–63)
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[“I couldn’t tell in which class of stupidity I would fall if I would deny a
double influence, each of which is very specific, of Borges and Roberto Arlt.
I have quoted them always.”]. In an interview with Evelyn Picon Garfield, he
also expressed sincere admiration for the laconic and dense language which
Borges’s texts manifest: “Mis lecturas de los cuentos y de los ensayos de Borges;
en la epoca en que publicó El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, me mostraron
un lenguaje del que yo no tenía idea” (83) [“My readings of Borges’s stories and
essays; in the epoch when he published The garden of the forking paths, showed
me language which I had never dreamed about before”]. Moreover, in spite of
the radically different political positions, he mentions “una influencia moral”
[“a moral influence”] of Borges: “Lo que creo que Borges me enseñó a mí y a toda
nuestra generación fue la severidad, ser implacable con uno mismo, no publicar
nada que no estuviera muy bien cumplido literariamente” (12) [“What I think
Borges taught me and our whole generation was a severity, to be merciless with
oneself, not to publish anything that would not be highly accomplished from
a literary point of view”].
Borges’s and Cortázar’s works have attracted attention and influenced both
European and American literary critics and philosophers.2 Such leading schol-
ars as Jaime Alazraki and Saúl Yurkievich have perceptively compared the
Argentine writers’s texts with each other.3 In his influential article “Tres for-
mas de ensayo contemporáneo: Borges, Paz, Cortázar” [“Three form of con-
temporary essay: Borges, Paz, Cortázar”], Alazraki discussed the impact of these
authors on the formation of the essay genre in Latin America. He observes that
both writers renovated the genre by transgressing its limits in their hybrid
constructions. The rigorous structure of Borges’s essays hardly differs from that
of his stories; the dialogical qualities of Cortázar’s essays make them almost indis-
tinguishable from the novelistic discourse. Alazraki has also offered a pioneer-
ing study of the influence of kabbalistic conception of the world as a system of
symbols of writing on Borges’s oeuvre; and he developed the notion of “neo-
fantastic” in relation to Cortázar’s stories, where the major puzzle is a human
being.
Yurkievich is responsible for an illuminating insight into the differences
between Borges’s and Cortázar’s approach to the genre of the fantastic. In his
“Borges/Cortázar: mundos y modos de la ficción fantástica” (1994) [“Borges/
Cortázar: Worlds and Modes of Fantastic Fiction”], the critic perceptively
observes that the fantastic in Borges’s stories is an expression of awareness
of literature as a tradition, a world of fantasy and dream created throughout
past centuries. In contrast, in Cortázar’s literary universe, he discerns the
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introduction xiii
introduction xv
In his recent book Invisible Work. Borges and Translation, Efraín Kristal
observes that there is a popular view in criticism that considers Borges’s
philosophical insights among the major achievements of his literary work.
He perceptively suggests that Borges is a “fabulist” (141) whose philosophical
concerns serve literary purposes. One may also add that, rather than offering
a particular stand or position, Borges’s texts transfer to his readers their author’s
own interest in philosophy, and his curiosity about finding parallels, continu-
ities and juxtapositions between ideas from various trends of knowledge.7
My reading of Borges’s and Cortázar’s writings are informed by assumption
of the mutually enriching relationship between literature and philosophy.
While mapping out the dynamics of place and displacement, I will bring dis-
tinct literary and philosophical world versions into a dialogue.8 This heuristic
device will shed light on the construction of the different, yet ultimately related,
narrative worlds of Borges and Cortázar, and would make one weight and
[re]consider apparently familiar philosophical concepts.
Putting into practice the network relationship between literature and phi-
losophy, the first chapter brings kabbalistic, phenomenological and decon-
structionist approaches to bear on an exploration of Borges’s ironic elaboration
of the concept of place as revelation; it gives special attention to the follow-
ing stories: “El Aleph” (Aleph), “Las ruinas circulares” [“The Circular Ruins”]
(Ficciones), “Libro de arena” [“The Book of Sand”] and “El disco” [“The Disk”]
(Libro de arena).9 Engaging existentialist, metafictional and metaphysical per-
spectives, as well as the carnivalesque, Chapter 2 delineates place as displace-
ment in Cortázar’s Rayuela [Hopscotch], and unravels a presence of Borges’s
metaphysical-artistic city in a gestation of the novel. Chapter 3 explores the
controversial relationships between ‘fictional’ and ‘real’ places as it examines
the concepts of utopia, dystopia and heterotopia both reflected and challenged
by Borges’s stories “Utopía del hombre que está cansado” [“A Weary Man’s
Utopia”] and “La casa de Asterión” [“The House of Asterion”] and Cortázar’s
novels 62: Modelo para armar [62: A Model Kit] and Los Premios [The Winners].
Whereas the first three chapters focus on the notion of place as consistently
linked with displacement, the last two give special attention to displacement
as it shapes thematic developments and aesthetics in these authors’ works.
Chapter 4 studies displacement, from a psychoanalytic point of view, as it
informs both deconstructionist and postmodern approaches that overlap with
Borges’s anthropological views in essays such as “La muralla y los libros” [“The
Wall and the Books”] and “El sueño de Coleridge” [“Coleridge’s Dream”].
Bringing to bear phenomenological, postmodern anthropological, and feminist
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·1·
PLACE IN BORGES ’ S STORIES
AND THE IRONY OF REVELATION
At different stages in his career, Borges was interested in the Kabbalah, which
he called “una suerte de metáfora de pensamiento” (Obras 3:274) [“a
lucky metaphor of thought”].1 In his lecture “La cabala” [“The Kabbalah”], for
instance, he referenced his readings of the Zohar, a major literary work produced
by Jewish mystics, and Gershom Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism.
In contrast to other religious thinkers, kabbalists intend to decipher and inter-
pret the world as a reflection of divine mysteries. This interweaving of two
realms, the divine and the mundane, Scholem observes, is unique for Jewish
mysticism. They converge in a biblical notion of place as a locus where God
might be worshipped and apparently encountered, and in that of an object-place
as revelation, a mystical experience by itself, a theological synonym for God.2
I would like to bring kabbalistic, phenomenological and deconstructionist
approaches to bear on Borges’ ironic elaboration of a biblical notion of “place”
in “El Aleph” [“The Aleph”], “Las ruinas circulares” [“The Circular Ruins”],
“El libro de arena” [“The Book of Sand”], and “El disco” [“The Disk”]. I con-
tend that, in these texts, ‘place’ has a triple function. First, it is a locus where
revelation happens, or is supposed to happen. Second, it is a pseudo-realistic
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accounts of their visions are recognized and ironized by the text, which, as
I will discuss below, evokes kabbalistic and deconstructionist depictions of
revelation, as vacillating between “presence” and “absence.” These notions are
found both in kabbalistic interpretations of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet
and Derrida’s metaphorical interpretation and use of the ambivalent Pharmakon.
“El Aleph,” “uno de los puntos del espacio que contiene todos los puntos”
(Obras 1:623) [“. . . one of the points in space that contains all points” (280)],
has been discovered by Carlos Daneri in the cellar of his childhood home.
According to Bachelard, the cellar is “the dark entity of the house, the one that
partakes of subterranean forces” (Bachelard 18). He emphasizes that in the
house one has been born, “dream is more powerful than thought” (Bachelard
16). Being located in the house which possesses “one of the greatest powers of
integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams” (Bachelard 6), a cellar is
a place which awakes the “unconscious” mind and stimulates the work of
human imagination. It is a chronotope associated with the mysterious.4 As
Bachelard observes, “when we dream [in a cellar], we are in harmony with the
irrationality of the depths” (18), and he continues that “the cellar dream
irrefutably increases reality” (20).
In line with Bachelard’s phenomenological approach, Daneri characterizes
the Aleph as “inajenable” [“inalientable”] as an imaginary complement to exis-
tent reality, and refers to it using the possessive pronouns “mi” (Obras 1:623)
[“my” (281)] or “mío” (Obras 1:623) [“mine” (281)]. Daneri himself admits that
an individual’s ability to imagine, which he believes he possesses, brings the
Aleph into presence. As Naomi Lindstrom points out, “the Aleph suggests that
the magic sphere is brought into being by force of desire and enjoys no existence
unless sought” (56).
Daneri’s perception of the cellar of his home as a place that evokes mem-
ories of his childhood also corresponds to its symbolic functioning, as defined
by Bachelard. Recalling his memories, Daneri tells the narrator “Borges” about
his mysterious discovery of the magic Aleph—the world in its totality, which
dates back to his childhood: “yo lo descubrí en la niñez, antes de la edad esco-
lar. La escalera del sótano es empinada, mis tíos me tenían prohibido el descen-
so, pero alguien dijo que había un mundo en el sótano. Se refería, lo supe después,
a un baúl, pero yo entendí que había un mundo. Bajé secretamente, rodé por la
escalera vedada, caí. Al abrir los ojos, vi el Aleph” (Obras 1:623; italics added)
[“I discovered it in my childhood, before I ever attended school. The cellar stair-
way is steep, and my aunt and uncle had forbidden me to go down it, but
somebody said you could go around the world with that thing down there in
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the basement. The person, whoever it was, was referring, I later learned, to a
steamer trunk, but I thought there was some magical contraption down there.
I tried to sneak down the stairs, fell head over heels, and when I opened my eyes,
I saw the Aleph.” (280–281)].
According to Daneri, the only place where his Aleph can be encountered
is in his childhood home. Therefore, the intention of the businessmen to
destroy that home means, for him, the destruction of his private universe.
This causes his anger and despair: “—La casa de mis padres, mi casa, la vieja
casa inveterada de la calle Garay!—repitió, quiza olvidando su pesar en la
melodía” (Obras 1:622) [“The home of my parents—the home where I was
born—the old and deeply rooted house on Calle Garay!” (280)]. Also, in their
conversation, Daneri confesses to the narrator “con esa voz llana, impersonal,
a que solemos recurrir para confiar algo muy íntimo” (Obras 1:622) [“in that flat,
impersonal voice we drop into when we wish to confide something very private”
(280)], that he needs the house because the Aleph is necessary for him to com-
plete the poem that he is writing.5 The narrator refers to his words: “dijo que
para terminar el poema le era indispensable la casa, pues en un ángulo del sótano
había un Aleph” (Obras 1:622–623) [“. . . he said he had to have the house so
he could finish the poem—because in one corner of the cellar there was an
Aleph.” (280)]. In this way, Daneri’s account of the discovery of his Aleph as
possible only in the cellar of his childhood home exemplifies the psychological
aspect of place as discussed by Bachelard.
Irony, however, as a ludic and demystifying discursive strategy, challenges
the stable symbolic connection between the place and the individual described
by Bachelard and maintained in Daneri’s account of his “mystical” experi-
ence. Both Daneri’s “creative process,” as well as its result, the poem “La
Tierra” [“The Earth”] inspired (Daneri insists) by the vision in the cellar are the
objects of satire. The function of the cellar as a stimulator of human imagina-
tion, according to Bachelard’s phenomenology, is parodized in the text: Daneri
is mistaken in his belief that his Aleph will make him a good poet.
Indeed, emphasizing the descriptive characteristics of the poem, the nar-
rator is skeptical about Daneri’s work. He characterizes Daneri’s writing as a
result of a collaboration of “la aplicación, la resignación y el azar” (Obras
1:619) [“Application, resignation, and chance . . .” (277)]. In contrast to
Daneri’s own belief, Borges’s readers realize that the poem does not reveal the
character’s imagination or incorporate his fantasy, but rather only contains obser-
vations framed within the conventions of Spanish prosody, which the author
recites to the narrator with “sonora satisfacción” [“. . . ringing self-satisfaction”]:
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As the author himself points out, the poem is an eclectic combination based
on his own readings, which include the creations of Homer, Hesiod and
Goldoni. The trip which it describes, therefore, takes place within Daneri’s own
room, where he has been engaged in reading texts by these authors. In his own
eyes, literary allusions, in which the strophe abounds, make the poem particu-
larly sophisticated. As the author proudly observes, “Estrofa a todas luces intere-
sante” (Obras 1:619) [“A stanza interesting from any point of view . . .” (276)].
The conflict of beliefs evokes irony. As Wayne C. Booth observes, “we are
alerted whenever we notice an unmistakable conflict between the beliefs
expressed and the beliefs we hold and suspect the author of holding” (15).
Indeed, Daneri is a character who belongs to an ironic mode, a talentless yet
ambitious poet whose poor poetry is mocked by the text. According to Northrop
Frye, a character belongs to the ironic mode “[i]f inferior in power or intelligence
to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage,
frustration, or absurdity” (34). Daneri’s frustration, caused, as he explains, by
the impossibility of finishing his poetic description of the universe in its totality
because his house and his Aleph will be destroyed, provokes laughter.
Moreover, defying both the owner’s and the narrator’s expectation, as the lat-
ter mentions in “posdata,” after the destruction of the house, Daneri becomes par-
ticularly successful in his work. As the narrator comments, “A los seis meses de la
demolición del inmueble de la calle Garay, la Editorial Procusto no se dejó arredar
por la longitud del considerable poema y lanzó al mercado una selección de ‘tro-
zos argentinos.’ Huelga repetir lo ocurrido Carlos Argentino Daneri recibió el
Segundo Premio Nacional de literatura” (Obras 1:626) [“Six months after the
demolition of the building on Garay Street, Procrustes Publishers, undaunted by
the length of Carlos Argentino Dineri’s substantial poem, published the first in its
series ‘Argentine pieces.’ It goes without saying what happened: Carlos Argentino
Daneri won second place in the National Prize for Literature.” (284)]. And he
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continues, “los diarios dicen que pronto nos dará otro volumen. Su afortunada
pluma (no entorpecida ya por el Aleph) se ha consagrado a versificar los epítomes
del doctor Acevedo Díaz” (Obras 1:627) [“. . . the newspapers say he’ll soon be giv-
ing us another volume. His happy pen (belabored no longer by the Aleph) has been
consecrated to setting the compendia of Dr. Acevedo Díaz to verse.” (285)”].
Further, although the narrator interprets Daneri’s and his own experiences in
the cellar as mystical, their communication with the divine remains doubtful for
the readers of Borges’s story. On the one hand, the narrator’s intent to reduce the
distance between himself and the divine the “aleph,” “la ilimitada y pura divinidad”
(Obras 1:627) [“the pure and unlimited godhead” (285)] by claiming to experience
it in the house on the street Garay, evokes a burlesque ethos. On the other hand,
the characters’ encounters with the divine can be interpreted as acts of will and
subjective truth. As Scholem notes, “[e]ach man has his own unique access to
Revelation. Authority no longer resides in a single unmistakable ‘meaning’ of the
divine communication, but in its infinite capacity for taking on new forms” (13).
Support for both of these assumptions can be found in the epigraphs to the story.
One of them is from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: “But they will teach us that
Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nuncstans (as the Schools call
it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic
stans for an Infinite greatness of Place” (Leviathan, IV, 46).7 In this quote, “an
Infinite greatness of Place” stands for “the Incomprehensible Nature of God”
(693), which remains distant and enigmatic. Moreover, Hobbes suggests that
“inhabiting” the divine diminishes it. In Part IV of his work, for instance, enti-
tled “Of the Kingdome of Darknesse,” the English author observes that: “To wor-
ship God, in some peculiar Place . . . implies a new Relation by Appropriation to
God . . . . But to worship God, as inanimating, or inhabiting, such Image, or place;
that is to say, an infinite substance in a finite place is Idolatry: for such finite Gods, are
but Idols of the brain, nothing real” (692; italics added). Likewise, the narrator refers
to the discovery in the cellar, which he and Daneri share, as “un falso Aleph”
(Obras 1:627) [“a false Aleph” (285)], for the divine cannot be reduced to a finite
object “el diametro sería de dos o tres centímetros” (Obras 1:625) [“two or three
centimeters in diameter” (283)], which human beings can possess and inhabit.
Another reason for the narrator’s characterization of Daneri’s Aleph as false
can be found in a source familiar to Borges, Baruch Spinoza’s concept of the
Divine, probably influenced by Hobbes’ idea of the parallelism between the
notions of God and Place, both of which are infinite and not totally accessible
by people. According to Spinoza, a person can understand the realms of extension
and thought, but other infinite divine attributes remain unknown to humans.
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creation, the narrator nevertheless accepts for the moment the existence of the
Aleph when, after following Daneri’s advice, he descends to the cellar and later
attempts to describe his experience.12 The narrator’s account of his attempt to
capture the totality of the universe incorporated in “el microcosmo de alquimis-
tas y cabalistas” (Obras 1:624) [“The microcosm of the alchemists and
Kabbalists,” (282)] reveals both presence and absence: the tiny Aleph incor-
porates in itself “el espacio cósmico . . . sin disminución del tamaño” (Obras
1:625; italics added) [“. . . universal space was contained inside it, with no
diminution in size” (283)] and brings it all into a center of simultaneity.13 The
pharmakon-like ambivalent experience explains the narrator’s incapability to
communicate his vision, as he confesses: “¿cómo trasmitir a los otros el infini-
to Aleph, que mi temerosa memoria apenas abarca?” (Obras 1:624) [“How, can
one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can
scarcely contain?” (282)]. The narrator “Borges” refers to his experience as the
“instante gigantesco” [“unbounded moment” (282)] full of contradictions,
when limited becomes unrestricted and simultaneously multifocused: “Cada
cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la
veía desde todos los puntos del universo” (Obras 1:625). [“Each thing (the glass
surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it
from every point in the cosmos.” (283)]. The correspondence between the
names of the author and the narrator, recurrent in Borges’s fiction, provokes a
double effect. On the one hand, it evokes a burlesque ethos. As Bakhtin also
mentions, “[p]lay with a posited author is also characteristic of the comic
novel . . . a heritage from Don Quixote” (312). On the other hand, it empha-
sizes the author’s personal preoccupations, described by Barranechea as the
“unutterable” (80) nature of non-shared experiences and the boundlessness
of the universe, of the infinite.
The story ends with the narrator questioning whether the Aleph in the
cellar and that in a Sacred Book are one and the same, whether there is a “true”
Aleph, and the entire substance of his vision: “¿Existe ese Aleph en lo íntimo
de una piedra? ¿Lo he visto cuando vi todas las cosas y lo he olvidado?” (Obras
1:627; italics added) [“Does that Aleph exist, within the heart of a stone? Did
I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and then forget it?” (286)]. The
rhetorical nature of this interrogative leaves the reader with a variety of inter-
pretations as to where the concepts of the Aleph, “el En sof” (Obras 1:627) [“the
En Soph” (29)], and the Pharmakon, “the movement, the locus, and the play:
(the production of) difference” (Derrida 27), converge. Like “el aleph” in both
Jewish mysticism and in Borges’s story, “[t]he pharmakon,” Derrida writes,
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 10
“keeps itself forever in reserve . . .. We will watch it infinitely promise itself and
endlessly vanish through concealed doorways that shine like mirrors and open
onto a labyrinth. It is a store of deep background that we are calling pharmacy”
(127–128).
The ludic use of the phenomenological symbolism of the house and the
cellar in staging the characters’ encounter with the Aleph can be considered
a parodic reference to the mystical revelation as described by kabbalists, as well
as its insightful interpretation by Borges inspired by Jewish mystical thought.
Both Borges’s ironic elaboration of the biblical notion of place as a locale
where revelation occurs, and of the notion of object-place as an embodiment
of the divine, manifest the lack of a single ‘unmistakable’ meaning of revela-
tion and show place to be a stage for a potential mystical experience which
is “fundamentally amorphous” (Scholem 8) and closed to precise definition
and univocal interpretation. This approach to the notion of place can be con-
sidered another example of the influence of kabbalistic thought on Borges’s
writings.
In accord also with the phenomenological theory developed by Bachelard,
Borges’s object-place, the Aleph, is both brought to existence by, and acts as
a reflector of, human imagination.14 The coexistence of ‘familiar’/‘realistic’
places and a “magic” place/object in “El Aleph” illustrates Bachelard’s obser-
vation that a ‘house’ is a “cradle” (7) which cherishes human daydreams, and
also manifests a symbolic functioning of place as defined by Jewish mystics.
Indeed, in his study of the symbols of the Kabbalah, Scholem points out the
importance of the psychological aspect of traditional symbols as “means of
expressing an experience that is in itself expressionless” (22), an observation
literalized in Borges’s text.
The phenomenological approach to place as a symbol, however, is both
recognized and ironized in the story. The irony undermines the stable symbol-
ic connections between the place and the individual described by Bachelard,
and displays the intellectual affinity between Borges’s texts and the decon-
structionist celebration of the play of differences that denies any idea of stability.
The simultaneous perception of the universe in its totality, inspired by an
impossible object which hovers between presence and absence, is closed to any
logical proofs or objective explanation. Revelation is present, and at the same
time dissipated, by the ludic movement of the pharmakon, which suggests
that an endless search is the only way to find it, to access the divine: “God is
in the making. Dios está haciéndose” (Shaw qtd. in Borges Obras 3:273).
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 11
a place separated by time and distance from the world where the actions of the
story take place: “el hombre taciturno venía del Sur y . . . su patria era una de
las infinitas aldeas que están aguas arriba, en el flanco violento de la montaña,
donde el idioma zend no está contaminado de griego y donde es infrecuente la
lepra” (Obras 1:451) [“the silent man came from the South . . . his home was
one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent mountainside, where the
Zend tongue in not contaminated with Greek and where leprosy is infrequent”
(45)]. Similarly, “las caras de [los alumnos] pendían a muchos siglos de distan-
cia y a una altura estelar, pero eran del todo precisas” (Obras 1:452). [“the faces
of the [students] hung many centuries away and at a cosmic height, but were
entirely clear and precise” (46)]. In this way, distance in time and space is anni-
hilated both in the place of narration and in that of dream: the contrast between
past and present and far and near is undermined in the temple/amphitheater.
The linguistic peculiarities of the text also emphasize the reflective rela-
tionship between the ‘reality’ and the dream. For instance, parallel syntactic
constructions describe the actions of the magician both during the time he is
awake and while he is dreaming: “Quiso explorar la selva, extenuarse; apenas
alcanzó entre la cicuta unas rachas de sueño débil, veteadas fugazmente de
visiones de tipo rudimental: inservibles. Quiso congregar el colegio y apenas
hubo articulado unas breves palabras de exhortación, éste se deformó, se borró”
(Obras 1:452; italics added) [“He tried to explore the jungle, to exhaust him-
self; amidst the hemlocks, he was scarcely able to manage a few snatches of fee-
ble sleep, fleetingly mottled with some rudimentary visions which were useless.
He tried to convoke the college and had scarcely uttered a few brief words of
exhortation, when it became deformed and was extinguished” (47)]. The effect
of the alliteration might in addition contribute to the confusion between the
magician and his dream that manifests essential “phantasmagoria” (Barranechea
122) of being: “En el sueño del hombre que soñaba, el soñado se despertó” (Obras
1:453) [“In the dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke” (48)]. Thus, “Las
ruinas circulares” [“The Circular Ruins”] exemplifies the interrelation between
the “dream”/ “existence” realms in Borges’s fiction, where “[d]reams are another
way of suggesting the undefined boundaries between the ‘real’ and the fictitious
worlds. Within the economy of his tales they hold roles which are premonitory,
labyrinthine, cyclically repetitive, and allusive to infinity. At times, they are
clearer than life itself and existence tends to become somnolent for that
reason” (Barranechea 126).
The process of creation also undermines the inside/outside opposition, for
it makes “[E]l espacio entero de su alma [del mago]” (Obras 1:451; italics added)
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 13
[“the entire space (better then content) of his soul” (46)] and “el templo inhab-
itado y despedazado, porque era un mínimo de mundo visible” (Obras 1:451)
[“The uninhabited and broken temple suited him, for it was a minimum of vis-
ible world” (46)] to become one. Being completely absorbed by his task, the
dreamer ignores his other life experiences because the round temple is a suffi-
cient world for him. Commenting on roundness, Bachelard observes that this
is a form that “guides and encloses . . . dreams” (Bachelard 239). As the nar-
rator points out, “si alguien le hubiera preguntado su propio nombre o cualquier
rasgo de su vida anterior, no habría acertado a responder” (Obras 1:451) [“if
someone had asked him his own name or any trait of his previous life, he would
not have been able to answer” (46)]. The dream acquires a spatial dimension,
for it is equivalent to the desert in the narrator’s description of the insomnia
which the magician tries to overcome: “El hombre, un día emergió del sueño como
de un desierto viscoso, miró la vana luz de la tarde que al pronto confundió con
la aurora y comprendió que no había soñado. Toda esa noche y todo el día, la
intolerable lucidez del insomnio se abatió contra él. . . . En la casi perpetua vig-
ilia, lágrimas de ira le quemaban los viejos ojos” (Obras 1:452; italics added)
[“The man emerged from sleep one day as if from a viscous desert, looked at
the vein light of afternoon, which at first he confused with that of dawn, and
understood that he had not really dreamt. All that night and all day, the intol-
erable lucidity of insomnia weighed upon him. . . . In his almost perpetual
sleeplessness, his old eyes burned with tears of anger” (47)].17
The temple chosen by the magician for his project, considered by the
narrator as “sobrenatural” but not “imposible,” is not, however, unique. Already
at the beginning of the story, the narrator mentions “el otro templo despedaza-
do de dioses incendiados y muertos” (Obras 1:451), which alludes to the idea
of the eternal return suggested by Nietzsche. In “La doctrina de los ciclos” [“The
Doctrine of Cycles”], Borges insists on the logical fallacies of Nietzsche’s
approach: “¿Basta la mera sucesión, no verificada por nadie? A falta de un arcán-
gel especial que lleve la cuenta, ¿qué significa el hecho de que atravesamos el
ciclo trece mil quinientos catorce, y no el primero de la serie o el número tre-
scientos veintidós con el exponente dos mil? Nada, para la práctica—lo cual
no daña al pensador. Nada, para la inteligencia—lo cual ya es grave” (Obras
1:391). [“Is mere succession enough, unverified by anyone? Without a special
archangel to keep count, what does, what does it mean that we are passing
through the 13,514th cycle, and not the first of the series or number 3222?
Nothing, as far as practice goes—which does not harm to the thinker. Nothing,
as far as intelligence—which is serious” (71)].18 He attacks Nietzsche’s idea that
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 14
“el universo tiene que repetirse” (Nietzche qtd. in Borges Obras 1:385) [“the
universe must repeat itself” (65)] with Cantor’s theory of series, which asserts “la
perfecta infinitud del número de puntos del universo” (Obras 1:386) [“[t]he per-
fect infinity of the number of points in the universe” (66)]. However, Borges’s
conclusion is that “[l]a prueba es tan irreprochable como baladí” (Obras 1:386)
[“[t]he proof is as irreproachable as it is worthless” (67)], and he recognizes that
“[a]lguna vez nos deja pensativos la sensación ‘de haber vivido ya ese momen-
to’ ” (Obras 1:390) [“[a]t times the sensation of having already lived a certain
moment leaves us wondering” (70)].
In “El tiempo circular” [“Circular Time”], while outlining three ways of
interpreting the idea of the eternal return originally suggested by Plato,
Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius, Borges agrees with the last one, with “la
concepción de ciclos similares no idénticos” [“the concept of similar but not
identical cycles”] as “el único imaginario” (Obras 2:394) [“the only one that is
conceivable” (226)].19 Analyzing Aurelius’s approach to the eternal return, he
makes observations that define this doctrine as well as appear to be determi-
nant for Borges’s own aesthetics. These observations are “negar la realidad del
pasado y del porvenir” [“a negation of the reality of the past and the future”
(227)], to view history as a block, and to “negar cualquier novedad” (Obras
2:395) [“negat[e] all novelty” (227)]. “Las ruinas circulares” exemplifies Borges’s
ideas about eternal return through the reference to the cyclical development
of human history, analogous to the destinies of individuals.
The presence of repetitive architectural structures is emphasized by the
syntactic parallelism which introduces the idea of circularity in time and space:
“Sabía que ese templo era el lugar que requería su invencible propósito; sabía
que los árboles incesantes no habían logrado estrangular, río abajo, las ruinas
de otro templo propicio, también de dioses incendiados y muertos” (Obras
1:451) [“He knew that this temple was the place required by his invincible pur-
pose; he knew that, downstream, the incessant trees had not managed to choke
the ruins of another propitious temple, whose gods were also burned and dead”
(45)]. The repetition of places (temples) is inevitably connected with the
concept of circular time, because for Borges “[e]l espacio es un incidente en el
tiempo” (Obras 1:200) [“space is an incident in time”]. This idealist vision is
also prominent in Plato’s Timaeus, whose argument Borges summarizes in
“El tiempo circular” [“Circular Time”]: “si los períodos planetarios son cíclicos,
también la historia universal lo será” (Obras 1:393) [“if the planetary periods
are cyclical, so must be the history of the universe” (225)]. In his comment
about “Las ruinas circulares” which appears in Aleph and Other Stories, Borges
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 15
asserts that “[t]he title [of the story] itself suggests the Pythagorean and Eastern
idea of cyclical time” (267).
The ideas of eternal return and infinity coexist in “Las ruinas circulares.”
On the one hand, the magician experiences a sense of repetition in the process
of creation for “[a] veces, lo inquetaba una impresión de que ya todo eso había
acontecido . . .” (Obras 1:454) [“[a]t times, he was troubled by the impression
that all this had happened before” (49)]. Moreover, the repeated symbols of fire
and architectural structures (temples) are explicitly mentioned in the text.
Interrupting the magician’s meditations, fire approaches the temple, as had hap-
pened many years before: “Primero . . . una remota nube en un cerro, liviana
como un pájaro; luego . . . el cielo que tenía el color rosado de la encía de los
leopardos; luego las humaredas que herrumbraron el metal de las noches;
después la fuga pánica de las bestias. Porque se repetió lo acontecido hace
muchos siglos” (Obras 1:454) [“First . . . a faraway cloud on a hill, light and rapid
as a bird; then . . . the sky which had the rose color of the leopard’s mouse; then
the smoke which corroded the metallic nights; finally, the panicky flight of the
animals. For what was happening had happened many centuries ago” (50)]. The
association of fire with the cyclical development of history dates back to
ancient mythologies to which Borges refers in his “La doctrina de los ciclos”
[“The Doctrine of Cycles”]: “En la cosmogonía de los estoicos, Zeus se alimenta
del mundo: el universo es consumido cíclicamente por el fuego que lo engen-
dró, y resurge de la aniquilación para repetir una idéntica historia” (Obras
1:387) [“In the Stoic cosmogony, “Zeus feeds upon the world”: the universe is
consumed cyclically by the same fire which engendered it and rises up again
from annihilation to repeat an identical history” (68)]. According to Donald
Shaw, the repetition of the temples, which occur successively along the banks
of the river, also “symbolizes human history” (26).
On the other hand, the use of such phrases as “las infinitas aldeas” (Obras
1:451) [“the infinite villages” (45)], “los árboles incesantes” (Obras 1:451) [“the
incessant trees” (45)], “el vasto colegio” (Obras 1:452) [“the vast . . . college”
(47)], and “la enorme alucinación” (Obras 1:452) [“the enormous hallucination”
(47)] indicates the presence of the infinite, an issue Borges was passionate about
throughout his life. The magician’s thoughts and actions bridge the ideas of eter-
nal return and infinity. Meditating about the difficulties involved in creating
into a substantial existence someone who is first conceived in a dream, he real-
izes that “el empeño de modelar la materia incoherente y vertiginosa de que se
componen los sueños es el más arduo que puede acometer un varón, aunque
penetre todos los enigmas del orden superior y del inferior: mucho más arduo
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 16
que tejer una cuerda de arena o que amonedar el viento sin cara” (Obras 1:452)
[“the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of
was the most arduous task a man could undertake though he might penetrate
all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weav-
ing a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind” (47)].20 The magician’s successful
realization of his project, which turns out to be just a link in a chain of creations
(none of which is realized in exactly the same way), however, exemplifies the
possibility of giving form to the unlimitable and reconciles the ideas of repeti-
tion and infinity.
The temple, “el recinto circular” (Obras 1:451) [“the circular enclosure”
(45)], where the magician feels the presence of the sacred forces necessary for
creation, is also a place that reveals that the intent to level the distance
between the magician and God is an act of self-deception. In the ruins, the tem-
ple, the place where “dios no recibe honor de los hombres,” [“god no longer
received the homage of men” (45)] the magician is treated almost like a god
by the native people: “los hombres de la región habían espiado con respeto su
sueño y solicitaban su amparo o temían su magia” (Obras 1:451) [“men of the
region had respectfully spied upon his sleep and were solicitous of his favor or
feared his magic” (46)]. The magician is also introduced to the story as a part
of the legend, by means of the mythical discourse, full of suspense and appar-
ent contradiction that creates an aura of mystery over him: “Nadie lo vio desem-
barcar en la unánime noche, nadie vio la canoa de bambú . . . Lo cierto es que el
hombre gris besó el fango” (Obras 1:451; my italics) [“No one saw him disem-
barking the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe . . . .The truth is
that the obscure man kissed the mud.” (45)].
The magician, a man, seems to obtain divine knowledge, for he makes pact
with the God of Fire who breathes life into the magician’s creation; together they
bring the magician’s dream to “reality”: “Ese múltiple dios le reveló que su nom-
bre terrenal era Fuego, que en ese templo circular (y en otros iguales ) le habían
rendido sacrificios y culto y que mágicamente animaría al fantasma soñado, de
suerte que todas las criaturas, excepto el Fuego mismo y el soñador, lo pensaran
un hombre de carne y hueso” (Obras 1:453) [“This multiple god revealed to him
that its earthly name was Fire, that in the circular temple (and in others of its
kind) people had rendered it sacrifices and cult and that it would magically give
life to the sleeping phantom, in such a way that all creatures except Fire itself
and the dreamer would believe him to be a man of flesh and blood” (48)].
Further, the interaction between the magician and his pupil, identified
in the story as father and son, has both human and divine connotations. The
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 17
characters have intrinsic similarities. Physically, the boy resembles his ‘father’:
“Era un muchacho taciturno, cetrino, díscolo a veces, de rasgos afilados que
repetían los de su soñador” (Obras 1:452) [“He was a silent boy, sallow, some-
times obstinate, with sharp features which reproduced those of the dreamer”
(47)]. The boy is also a part of the legend, of a mythical elliptical discourse
which refers to an indefinite but long time: “Al cabo de un tiempo que ciertos nar-
radores de su historia prefieren computar en años y otros en lustros, lo despertaron
dos remeros a medianoche: no pudo ver sus caras, pero le hablaron de un hom-
bre mágico en un templo del Norte, capaz de hollar el fuego y de no quemarse”
(Obras 1:454) [“After a time, which some narrators of his story prefer to com-
pute in years and others in lustra, he was awakened one midnight by two boat-
men; he could not see their faces, but they told him of a magic man in a
temple of the North who could walk upon fire and not be burned” (49)]. The
similarity culminates in the revelation of the ontology that they share, namely
that they are both creations of someone else’s dream. The magician discovers
that he himself, like his own pupil, is just somebody’s dream: “Con alivio, con
humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro
estaba soñándolo” (Obras 1:455) [“With relief, with humiliation, with terror,
he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another” (50)].
By means of his own creation the magician reveals himself to be “[un] mero sim-
ulacro” (Obras 1:454) [“a mere image” (50)] that challenges the Christian
idea that “el Hijo es la reconciliación de Dios con el mundo” (Obras 1:210)
[“the Son is God’s reconciliation with the world” (85)]. His attempts to rec-
oncile the existence of his son with the ‘real’ world result in the magician’s
recognition of his own distance from it due to his own dream-like ontology.
The magician’s revelation undermines the uniqueness of his project. The
magician’s activity as a creator echoes Schopenhauer’s idea that the “world is
the objectification of the will” (IX). A similar idea is suggested by Lewis
Carroll, whose Through the Looking Glass Borges quotes in the epigraph: “And
if he left off dreaming about you . . . .” In his prologue to Carroll’s Obras
Completas, Borges refers to the “sueño recíproco” (Obras 4:102) [“a reciprocal
dream”] described in this book which undermines the hierarchy between the
creator and the creation. A similar principle functions in Borges’s own text:
though the dreamers do not dream each other, they are both dream-creations
in the narrative, creation.
The image of ruins introduces the motifs of destruction and nostalgia to the
text. On the literal level, the ruins of the temple symbolize both the absence and
presence of God. Indeed, in this mutilated place, the God of Fire is no longer
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 18
worshipped but still can be evoked. The magician’s dream, inspired by his
vision of the “ruinas” of the temple, and the monument that is both a tiger and
a horse (and dedicated to the God of Fire), brings that divinity into “presence”:
“[el mago] soñó con la estatua. La soño viva, trémula: no era un atroz bastardo
de tigre y potro, sino a la vez esas dos criaturas vehementes y también un toro,
una rosa, una tempestad. Ese múltiple dios le reveló que su nombre terrenal era
Fuego” (Obras 1:453) [“. . . he dreamt of the statue. He dreamt of it as a living,
tremulous thing: it was not an atrocious mongrel of tiger or horse, but both these
vehement creatures at once and also a bull, a rose, a tempest. This multiple god
revealed to him that its earthly name was Fire” (48)].21 The temple, devoted to
the God of Fire, is first ruined by fire and then is brought to ashes: “Las ruinas
del santuario del dios del Fuego fueron destruidas por el fuego. En un alba sin
pájaros el mago vio cernirse contra los muros el incendio concéntrico” (Obras
1:454–455) [“The ruins of the fire god’s sanctuary were destroyed by fire. In a
birdless dawn the magician saw the concentric blaze close round the wall” (50)].
The ruins also function as a metaphor for incompleteness in this text.22 The
physical incompleteness of the magician’s creation is emphasized throughout
the story. The boy has been created from the fragments: “Lo soñó activo,
caluroso, secreto, del grandor de un puño cerrado, color granate en la penum-
bra de un cuerpo humano aún sin cara ni sexo” (Obras 1:453) [“He dreamt it
as active, warm, secret, the size of a closed fist, of garnet color in the penum-
bra of a human body as yet without face or sex” (47–48)]. The similarity
between the magician’s creation and “un rojo Adán” from clay emphasizes the
dependence of the created boy on the magician. With this parallelism, the nar-
rator introduces the golem motif to the text: “En las cosmogonías gnósticas, los
demiurgos amasan un rojo Adán que no logra ponerse de pie; tan inhábil y rudo
y elemental como ese Adán de sueño que las noches del mago habían fabrica-
do” (Obras 1:453) [“In the Gnostic cosmogonies, the demiurgi knead and
mold a red Adam who cannot stand alone; as unskillful and crude and ele-
mentary as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams fabricated by the magi-
cian’s nights of effort” (48)].23 In addition to physical imperfections and
incompleteness, the created boy has essential cognitive gaps: he is lacking in
knowledge about his origin and his past “para que no supiera nunca que era un
fantasma, para que se creyera un hombre como los otros” (Obras 1:454) [“So
that he would never know he was a phantom, so that he would be thought a
man like others” (49)].
As the last paragraph of the story indicates, the magician himself displays
similar ontological and epistemological limitations. His desire to escape the fire
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 19
displays him as living in the fallacy of thinking that he would be burnt as would
any human being. As the fire approaches, however, he realizes that it cannot
harm or hurt him because his existence, as that of his creation, the golem-boy,
is (a part of) somebody’s dream: “En un alba sin pájaros el mago vio cenirse con-
tra los muros el incendio concéntrico. Por un instante, pensó refugiarse en las
aguas, pero luego comprendió que la muerte venía a coronar su vejez y a
absolverlo de sus trabajos. Caminó contra los jirones de fuego. Estos no
mordieron su carne, éstos lo acariciaron y lo inundaron sin calor y sin com-
bustión. Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también
era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo” (Obras 1:455) [“In a birdless
dawn the magician saw the concentric blaze close round the walls. For a
moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he knew the death
was coming to crown his old age and absolve him of his labors. He walked into
the shreds of flame. But they did not bite into his flesh, they caressed him and
engulfed him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with ter-
ror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another” (50)].
There are several allusions, however, on the fictional nature of the magi-
cian—of which he was not aware—that make irony a discursive strategy and
illustrate its demystifying function in this text. The story evokes a burlesque
ethos, particularly when, in the narrator’s meditations about father-son human
relationships, metafictional references are embedded: “A todo padre le intere-
san los hijos que ha procreado (que ha permitido) en una mera confusión o feli-
cidad; es natural que el mago temiera por el porvenir de aquel hijo, pensado
entraña por entraña y rasgo por rasgo, en mil y una noches secretas” (Obras
1:454; italics added) [“All fathers are interested in the children they have pro-
created (they have permitted to exist) in mere confusion or pleasure; it was nat-
ural that the magician should fear for the future of that son, created in thought,
limb by limb and feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret nights”
(50)]. The text mocks the magician’s worries that his son will discover that he
is a phantom, as opposed to ‘real’ people among whom the magician includes
himself: “Temió que su hijo . . . descubriera de algún modo su condición de mero
simulacro. No ser un hombre, ser la proyección del sueño de otro hombre ¡qué
humillación incomparable, qué vértigo!” (Obras 1:454) [“He feared his son
might . . . discover in some way that his condition was that of a mere image.
Not to be a man, to be the projection of another man’s dream, what a feeling
of humiliation, of vertigo!” (50)]. The magician’s erroneous consideration of
himself as a human being and God’s rival may provoke the reader’s
retrospective laughter, as the magician himself turns out to be a reflection,
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 20
“un fantasma,” [“a mere image”] and his knowledge about himself and human
beings is limited by his creator’s ability to dream. The magician inherits both
the ability to dream and the limitations of the human-dreamer; he turns out to
be a false embodiment of the divine. The circularity provides the reconcilia-
tion and the leveling of the apparent dichotomies of dream/reality, eternal
return/infinity and creator/creation.
consciousness. Typically for the latter, as described by Ernst Cassirer, the object
“is not a fixed form that imprints itself into consciousness but is a product of
formative operation” (Cassirer 29). Indeed, the narrator is unable to see the
disk: “Abrió la palma de la mano que era huesuda. No había nada en la mano.
Estaba vacía” (Obras 3:67) [“He opened his hand and showed me his bony palm.
There was nothing in it” (478)].
The existence of the disk appears to be a matter of belief and magic. As the
king explains, there is no other object of this shape in the universe. The nar-
rator’s attempts to trade the disk inevitably fail, as his conversation with the
king illustrates: “—En la choza tengo escondido un cofre de monedas. Son de
oro y brillan como la hacha. Si me das el disco de Odín, yo te doy el cofre. Dijo
tercamente:—No quiero” (Obras 3:67) [“ ‘In my hut I’ve got a chest full of
money hidden away. Gold coins, and they shine as my ax . . . If you give the disk
of Odin to me, I will give you the chest.’ ‘I will not,’ he said gruffly.” (478)]. The
disk lacks any material value and cannot be exchanged. For this greedy wood-
cutter, a representative of the generation and religion that have replaced those
of the king, the medal is associated only with materialistic advantages:
“Entonces yo sentí la codicia de poseer el disco. Si fuera mío, lo podría vender
por una barra de oro y sería un rey” (Obras 3:67) [“It was then I felt a gnawing
to own the disk myself. If it were mine, I could sell it for a bar of gold and then
I would be a king” (478)]. Though the narrator never obtains the disk (as the
universe cannot be limited to a geometrical form accessible to people), he never
abandons his aspiration to possess this symbol of the world in its totality. The
search for the disk becomes the main preoccupation of his life: “Al volver a mi
casa busqué el disco. No lo encontré. Hace años que sigo buscando” (Obras 3:67).
[“When I got back to my house I looked for the disk. But I couldn’t find it.
I have been looking for it for years” (479)].
The story takes place in the almost ‘realistic’ archaic setting where the nar-
rator lives, and his self-introduction emphasizes the contrast between himself
and the king Isern who possesses, or believes he possesses, the magic disk, an
impossible object. The references to the narrator’s ascetic house breathe with
antiquity, a remoteness in time and space, and introduce the ideas of unifor-
mity and circularity which the man’s life and the shape of the world have in
common: “La choza en que nací y en la que pronto habré de morir queda al borde
del bosque. Del bosque dicen que se alarga hasta el mar que rodea toda la tier-
ra y por el que andan casas de madera iguales a la mía” (Obras 3:66; italics added)
[“The hut I was born in, and where I’m soon to die, sits at the edge of the woods.
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 22
They say these woods go on and on, right to the ocean that surrounds the entire
world; they say that wooden houses like mine travel on that ocean” (477; italics
added)]. From the first paragraph, which gives the story the tone of legend and
incorporates metafictional elements, the narrator points to his cognitive and
physical limits: “Del bosque dicen que se alarga hasta el mar que rodea toda la
tierra y por el que andan casas de madera iguales a la mía. No sé; nunca lo he
visto. Tampoco he visto el otro lado del bosque.” (Obras 3:66; italics added)
[“They say these woods go on and on, right to the ocean that surrounds the
entire world; they say that wooden houses like mine travel on that ocean.
I wouldn’t know; I’ve never seen it. I’ve not seen the other side of the woods,
either.” (477, italics added)]. As with his cabin, located somewhere in medieval
Scandinavia, the woodcutter is one among many: “Soy leñador. El nombre no
importa” (Obras 3:66) [“I am a woodcutter. My name doesn’t matter” (477)].
The king, however, is unique. He is associated with the physical and spir-
itual strength of the person-prophet-god: “Abrí y entró un desconocido. Era un
hombre alto y viejo, envuelto en una manta raída. Le cruzaba la cara una cica-
triz. Los años parecían haberle dado más autoridad que flaqueza “ (Obras 3:66)
[“I opened the door and a stranger came in. He was a tall, elderly man all
wrapped up in a worn-out old blanket. A scar sliced across his face. The years
looked to have given him more authority than frailty” (477)]. The appearance
of Isern, as described by the narrator, echoes some elements of the scene of the
appearance of Odín before Olaf Tryggvason, the king of Norway, to which
Borges and Mariá Esther Vázques refer in Literaturas Germánicas medievales: “a la
corte de Olaf Tryggvason, que se había convertido a la nueva fe, llegó una noche
un hombre viejo, envuelto en una capa oscura y con el ala del sombrero sobre
los ojos” (109) [“One night an old man wrapped in a dark cloak and with the
brim of the hat on his eyes arrived to the court of Olaf Tryggvason, who has
been converted to the new religion”].
The narrator’s simplistic vision of the world, constructed around his
personal needs and weaknesses, is also contrasted with the glorious past of the
king, which reminds the reader of the bravery and passion of the Eddic
(medieval) heroes: “Muchas veces los llevé a [los Secgens] a la victoria en la dura
batalla, pero en la hora del destino perdí mi reino” (Obras 3:66) [“Many times
did I lead them [the Secgens] to victory in hard combat, but at the hour that
fate decreed, I lost my kingdom” (478)]. Isern, who possesses “the dramatic
strength” and “absolute courage” of the epic character (Ker 20), has lost every-
thing except the disk and his self-esteem. Echoing the folkloric motifs of the
wanderer seeking a night’s lodging and the classical image of the barefoot
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 23
poet/bard, the king has been able to go over the whole of Saxony by foot, as
he tells the narrator: “—No tengo hogar y duermo donde puedo. He recorrido
toda Sajonia” (Obras 3:66) [“ ‘I am without a home, and I sleep wherever I can.
I have wandered all across Saxony’ ” (477)].
The king is in exile because of his faith, which is different from the accepted
one: “Ando por los caminos del destierro pero aún soy el rey porque tengo el
disco” (Obras 3:67) [“ ‘I wander the paths of exile, but still I am king, for
I have the disk’” (478)]. Even in banishment, he continues to worship Odin.
The narrator, in contrast, is Christian. As he tells the king, “Yo no venero a
Odín . . . . Yo venero a Cristo” (Obras 3:22) [“ ‘I do not worship Odin. . . . I wor-
ship Christ’” (478)]. The symbolic meal of bread and fish (“pan y pescado”)
which the narrator offers to the king also has explicit Christian connotations,
as it echoes the biblical story of the loaves and the fishes: “And he [Jesus]
commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves,
and the two fishes . . . and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to
the multitude” (Matthew 20:16). In this way, the contrast between the wood-
cutter and the king, and the topos of the king’s exile, reflect the conflict
between Christianity and Paganism, a recurrent theme in medieval Germanic
literatures, as Borges et al. observe in Literaturas Germánicas Medievales (see, for
instance, p. 117).
In spite of the radical difference between the characters, both fail to obtain
the divine power of possession and control over the universe which is embod-
ied in the impossible object-place, the disk. This makes the story oscillate
between “inevitably ironic” (Frye 42) and moralistic fairy-tale. Already in the
first paragraph of the story, which, like the disk, has a circular structure, the nar-
rator euphemistically refers to his endless search for the disk: “y ahora es otra
cosa la que busco y seguiré buscando.” (Obras 3:66) [“and now it’s something
else I’m after, and always will be” (477)]. The fact that the disk is not explic-
itly mentioned in the first paragraph creates an aura of mystery around this unat-
tainable object. The king loses his medal with his life, which turns out to be
as vulnerable as that of any human being, and displays the disk to be a false
embodiment of the divine protector. As the narrator confesses, “Un hachazo
en la nuca bastó y sobró para que vacilara y cayera” (Obras 3:67) [“One ax blow
to the back of his head was all it took; he wavered and fell” (478)].26 Although
the narrator says that he saw “un brillo” [“the gleam” (478)] in the moment of
the King falling down, and that he marked the place where the disk fell, the
medal and the world of Odin which it embodies seem to disappear together
with Isern and his beliefs.27
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elements associated with the infinite book to emphasize that the form of the
Book of Sand both evokes and deviates from a typical literary format.
Further, the narrator’s experience in examining the Book leaves him
astonished: its physical qualities do not conform to three dimensions or the
conventional characteristics associated with linearity. As the narrator’s play-
ful metacritique of the beginning of his story suggests: “No, decididamente no
es éste, more geométrico, el mejor modo de iniciar mi relato.” (Obras 3:68)
[“No—this, more geometrico, is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale”
(480)]. Any geometric description of the book titled “Holy Writ,” produced in
remote India, and brought by the mysterious salesman of bibles to the protag-
onist’s house, will remain insufficient.
The Book’s magic structure and nature echo those of the Torah. The
narrator explicitly mentions the similarity between these two works: “Las páginas,
que me parecieron gastadas y de pobre tipografía, estaban impresas a dos colum-
nas a la manera de una biblia.” (Obras 3:68–69) [“The pages, which seemed
worn and badly set were printed in double columns, like a Bible” (481)].
Indeed, the book literally subverts the notion of conventional page order, for
one can never return to the page one has read, as the narrator’s attempt to fol-
low its pages illustrates: “Me llamó la atención que la página par llevara el
número (digamos) 40.514 y la impar, la siguiente, 999. La volví; el dorso esta-
ba numerado con ocho cifras.” (Obras 3:69) [“I was stuck by an odd fact: the
even-numbered page would carry the number 40,514, let us say, while the
odd-numbered page that followed it would be 999. I turned the page; the next
page bore an eight-digit number.” (481)]. This characteristic of the Book of
Sand might lead readers to think about the Bible. Similarly, while comment-
ing on Job 28:13, Rabbi Eleazar declares that any reconstruction of the origi-
nal order of the Torah demands absolute/divine knowledge inaccessible to
people: “No man knoweth its order . . . . The various sections of the Torah were
not given in their correct order. For if they had been given in their correct order,
anyone who read them would be able to wake the dead and perform miracles. For
this reason the correct order and arrangement of the Torah were hidden and are
known only to the Holy One” (qtd. in Scholem 37). Moreover, the kabbalistic
identification of the Torah with the universe and the “living organism”
(Scholem 44) which possesses “manifold”/“infinite meanings” (Scholem 50)
can easily be extended on to the Book of Sand. The book grows before the nar-
rator’s eyes; the pages of the book, like sand itself, seem to be in constant
motion, making it impossible to count or order them. As the narrator describes,
“Apoyé la mano izquierda sobre la portada y abrí con el dedo pulgar casi pegado
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 26
al índice. Todo fue inútil: siempre se interponían varias hojas entre la portada
y la mano. Era como si brotaran del libro” (Obras 3:69; italics added) [“I took the
cover in my left hand and opened the book, my thumb and forefinger almost
touching. It was impossible: several pages always lay between the cover and my
hand. It was as though they grew from the very book” (481)].
The infinite number of pages implies infinite meanings, the fact that the
bible salesman desperately tries to rationalize: “El número de páginas de este
libro es exactamente infinito. Ninguna es la primera; ninguna, la última. No
sé por qué están numeradas de ese modo arbitrario. Acaso para dar a entender
que los términos de una serie infinita admiten cualquier número.” (Obras
3:69). [“ ‘The number of pages in this book is literally infinite. No page is the
first page; no page is the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbi-
trary way, but perhaps it’s to give one to understand that the terms of an infi-
nite series can be numbered any way whatever.’ ” (482)]. However, his attempt
to interpret the book’s infinite value in terms of logic does not persuade the nar-
rator, who prefers to think about this object in terms of its possible sacred nature:
“Sus consideraciones me irritaron. Le pregunté:—¿Usted es religioso sin duda?”
(Obras 3:69) [“His musings irritated me. ‘You,’ I said, ‘are a religious man, are
you not?’” (482)].
As with the Bible, it is unknown when exactly the Book of Sand was
written. Whereas the narrator supposes that the book dates back to the 19th
century, the salesman insists that it is impossible to know when it was printed:
“No sé. No lo he sabido nunca” (Obras 3:68) [“ ‘I don’t know . . . Never did
know’ ” (481)]. Echoing the salesman’s reference to the book as “[el] libro dia-
bólico” (Obras 3:69) [“[the] diabolic book” (482)], Gerry O’Sullivan considers
the Book of Sand to be “the Bible’s sinister Other” (116). In his idealized
vision, the Bible “remains the West’s exemplar of and for textual unity” (116);
the Book of Sand, on the contrary, is “un objeto de pesadilla, una cosa obsce-
na que infamaba y corrompía la realidad” (Obras 3:71) [“a nightmare thing, an
obscene thing, and that it defiled and corrupted reality.” (483)]. The Bible is
an inexhaustible story about the creation of the world and the early stages of
its diachronic development. The Book of Sand, however, is a metaphoric rep-
resentation of the universe in its syncronic totality which is impossible to cap-
ture and interpret completely, and which Borges himself considered to be “a
variant of ‘The Aleph’” (Borges qtd. in Cortínez 58). Indeed, the narrator asso-
ciates the scope of the book with that of the world, when he affirms that
the destruction of the former would lead to the apocalypse: “Pensé en el fuego,
pero temí que la combustión de un libro infinito fuera parejamente infinita y
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 27
sofocara de humo al planeta” (Obras 3:71) [“I considered fire, but I feared that the
burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet
in smoke.” (483)].
From ancient times, books, written scrolls, or sentences inscribed on strips
of paper have been used as amulets. The Book of Sand has primarily a similar
protective function. Its owner accepted the existence of the book as a given
magical object: “Su poseedor no sabía leer. Sospecho que en el Libro de los
Libros vio un amuleto. Era de la casta más baja; la gente no podía pisar su som-
bra, sin contaminación.” (Obras 3:69) [“ ‘The man who owned it didn’t know
how to read. I suspect he saw the Book of Books as an amulet. He was of the
lowest caste; people could not so much as step on his shadow without being
defiled’ ” (481)]. On the contrary, the salesman and the narrator try to defend
themselves from the absorbing “the Book of Sand” which will not be closed.
The possession of the “libro imposible” (Obras 3:70) [“the impossible book”
(483)] evokes the fear in both of them that their lives would be dissolved as
grains of sand when faced with the engrossing enigma of the world. Obtaining
this magic book, the narrator loses his peaceful existence and radically changes
his style of life; he becomes completely dedicated to the study of the book: “Me
quedaban unos amigos; dejé de verlos. Prisionero del Libro, casi no me asoma-
ba a la calle” (Obras 3:70) [“I had but few friends left, and those, I stopped see-
ing. A prisoner of the Book, I hardly left my house” (483)]. The fact that the
book is written in the language of Indostan, which the narrator does not know
but which he still tries to read, moves Gerardo Mario Goloboff to suggest that
this story celebrates “la palabra [que] significa por su sola/improbable presen-
cia” (262) [“the word [which] signifies by its only/ improbable presence”].
Moreover, the presence of the book awakens in the narrator two persistent
preoccupations: “el temor de que lo robaron, y después el recelo de que no fuera
verdaderamente infinito” (Obras 3:70) [“. . . the fear that it would be stolen
from me, and to that, the suspicion that it might not be truly infinite.” (483)].
The doubting of the infinite evokes claustrophobia: a fear of being bounded
by the limits of the universe. This fear of finitude may be also considered one
of the expressions of “a theme of the preparation for death” (Brant 73) which
in Herbert J. Brant’s opinion is characteristic of Borges’s stories in El libro de
arena.
To overcome their epistemological and ontological worries, both the salesman
and the narrator try to get rid of the monstrous book. To the narrator’s surprise,
the salesman does not haggle over the price the narrator offers him: “Me asom-
bró que no regateara . . . No contó los billetes, y los guardó” (Obras 3:70) [“I was
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 28
astonished that he did not haggle . . . . He did not count the money, but
merely put the bills into his pocket” (482)]. As the narrator points out, “Sólo
después comprendería que había entrado en mi casa con la decisión de vender
el libro” (Obras 3:70) [“Only later was I to realize that he had entered my house
already determined to sell the book” (482)]. Following Chesterton’s observa-
tion that “ el mejor lugar para ocultar una hoja es un bosque” (Obras 3:71) [“the
best place to hide a leaf is in the forest” (483)], the narrator himself leaves the
book in the National Library and tries to forget its location: “Aproveché un des-
cuido de los empleados para perder el Libro de Arena en uno de los húmedos
anaqueles. Traté de no fijarme a qué altura ni a qué distancia de la puerta. Siento
un poco de alivio, pero no quiero ni pasar por la calle México” (Obras 3:71)
[“I took advantage of the librarians’ distraction to hide the Book of Sand on one
of the library’s damp shelves; I tried not to notice how high up, or how far from
the door. I now feel a little better, but I refuse even to walk down the street the
library’s on” (483)]. The character’s approach to the book reflects the ambiguity
of the human aspirations to embrace the infinite, to examine it in terms of
logic, and at the same time to resist the idea of the limits, uniformity and
exhaustibility of the world.
The use of the pseudorealistic setting stands in contrast to the magical
nature of the book and to other distant locations mentioned in the text. The
narrator lives “en un cuarto piso de la calle Belgrano” (Obras 3:68) [“in a fifth-
floor apartment on Calle Belgrano” (480)]. This, together with the facts that
he worked in “la Biblioteca Nacional,” possessed Wyclif’s Bible, and expressed
his affection for Robert Stevenson and David Hume, allows the reader to rec-
ognize the presence of a ‘slightly fictionalized’ Borges-author in this story. At
the same time, the enigmatic stranger of Norwegian origin, as the narrator first
supposes, turns out to be from the remote “Orcadas” [“Orkneys”], a place men-
tioned in Scandinavian Eddas.31
The narrator’s account of his meeting with the stranger also echoes the one
between the woodcutter and the king in “El disco”: “Hará unos meses, al
atardecer, oí un golpe en la puerta. Abrí y entró un desconocido. Era un hom-
bre alto, de rasgos desdibujados” (Obras 3:68) [“One evening a few months ago,
I heard a knock at my door. I opened it, and a stranger stepped in. He was a tall
man, with blurred, vague features” (480)]. Likewise, the woodcutter recalls his
memories: “Una tarde oí pasos trabajosos y luego un golpe. Abrí y entró un
desconocido. Era un hombre alto y viejo” (Obras 3:66) [“One evening I heard
heavy, dragging footsteps and then a knock. I opened the door and a stranger
came in. He was a tall, elderly man” (475)]. Considering the use of repetition
01.qxd 29/8/07 6:16 PM Page 29
·2·
PLACE AS DISPLACEMENT IN
CORTÁZAR ’ S HOPSCOTCH
[T]he path almost always seems to lead nowhere in particular, and . . . the important
point is not where it leads but that it should lead somewhere
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Side”]) in Buenos Aires, the third section (“De otros lados” [“From Diverse
Sides”]) retroactively makes one question an apparent division established by and
between the previous two, and thus emphasizes Oliveira’s homelessness as a per-
manent condition in the novel. Indeed, by ludically combining the two distinct
urban spaces profiled in earlier chapters, and thus creating a hopscotch-like
movement whereby the previous chapters alternate in an unpredictable pattern,
“De otros lados” [“From Diverse Sides”] leads the reader, in the end, to question
the ‘real’ place of action in the text. Following this structure, the reader is
invited to “jump” from chapter to chapter, to read the novel in a particular order
indicated by the author in “Tablero de direcciones” [“Table of instructions”]
rather then by following a linear sequence of numbers. This last section, where
Paris and Buenos Aires become almost interchangeable, undermines any
idea of stability traditionally associated with the mention of a given place.2
The first two parts internalize and thematize Oliveira’s displacement by
combining references to specific urban topography and the overt metafiction-
al dimension of both Paris and Buenos Aires. I have noticed that Cortázar’s
cities have been created in a ludic dialogue with the long literary tradition of
nineteenth century European novelists such as Honoré de Balzac and Fyodor
Dostoevsky as well as with the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, who appear to
be Cortázar’s implicit interlocutors. Indeed, Paris in Rayuela serves a double
function: like its nineteenth century precursors, traditional in the creation
of the novelistic space and unlike its literary antecedents, overtly metafic-
tional. Motifs such as the cramped room in the city, the search with no par-
ticular purpose, the path, the capital as a center of intellectuals and a challenge
of their aspirations, and the woman-city equation are familiar to the readers
of Balzac’s and Dostoevsky’s classical works, where the city fulfills “the
representational” function of the chronotope as described by Bakhtin: “[it]
makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood
to flow in their veins” (250). Abundant in parallels with its nineteenth cen-
tury precursors and being explicitly metaphorical, Paris also is a metafic-
tional construct in Rayuela, another version of reality created by the human
imagination.
Likewise, Buenos Aires is both a recognizable city and a deliberately
invented world. It is both a carnivalesque and metaphysical urban space.
Cortázar’s Buenos Aires is also imbued with ludic references to motifs and
symbols recurrent in Borges’s works, such as human life as determined by lit-
erary scenarios, Pascal’s notion of the sphere, and the labyrinth. Indeed, the
02.qxd 30/8/07 10:46 AM Page 33
alguien había tirado un líquido azul que dibujaba como un par de alas. La pieza
tenía dos ventanas con cortinas rojas, zurcidas y llenas de retazos; una luz húme-
da se filtraba como un ángel hasta la cama de alcolchado amarillo” (31) [“There
was a smell of toilet soap, of soup, on the rug in the hallway someone had spilled
a blue liquid which had taken the shape of a pair of wings. The room had two
windows with red curtains, full of patches. A damp light spread out like an angel
over to the bed with a yellow spread.” (27)]. Oliveira’s living space is also
cramped and airless, particularly when he, la Maga and her sick son Rocamadur
live together: “Con la cama y Rocamadur y la cólera de los vecinos ya no qued-
aba casi espacio para vivir” (73–74) [“With the cot and Rocamadour and the
complaints of the tenants there was barely any living-space left” (77)]. Life in a
cramped room contributes to the development of dissatisfaction which leads
to the protagonist’s metaphysical search analogous to that of Rastignac and
Raskolnikov. Throughout the novel, Oliveira recognizes that “me costaba
mucho menos pensar que ser” (26) [“it was always easier to think than to be”
(13)]. He constantly asks himself, “¿ Por qué no aceptar lo que estaba ocurriendo
sin pretender explicarlo?” (27) [“Why couldn’t I accept what was happening
without trying to explain it” (14)].
Like his literary predecessors, Oliveira is lacking a home. According to
Bachelard’s phenomenological study of the influence of place on the formation
of human psychology and imagination, at home an individual naturally devel-
ops a “primary metaphysics,” a sense of well-being and integration with life
(Bachelard 9).9 Oliveira’s room, on the contrary, does not bring harmony into
the protagonist’s life. For a religious understanding, for example, his airless and
cramped place is rather associated with hell than with paradise. Whereas for
Dostoevsky and Balzac this religious perspective can be inspirational for the cre-
ation of their characters and their lodgings, Cortázar is not profoundly inter-
ested in the theological counterpoise between the places of the Devil and the
Good Lord. Nevertheless, a theological vision of the influence of the place of
dwelling on the formation of the individual’s outlook can be equally illumi-
nating for the understanding of Oliveira’s perception of the surrounding world.
As Janet A. Walker points out, in the Christian West “the quality of infinity
is ascribed to God and limitation in space is reserved for the devil” (290), as it
is seen in the remark of the ancient Greek alchemist Olympiodorus that God
“is everywhere” and “not in the smallest place like the daemon.” (qtd. in Jung
285). Carl Jung further notes that “the individual ego, separated and split off
from God is likely to become daemonic as soon as it accentuates its indepen-
dence of God by its egocentricity” (qtd. in Walker 292). Given this context,
02.qxd 30/8/07 10:46 AM Page 36
Paris . . . then declared, grandly, “Now it’s just the two of us!—I’m ready”
(217). In the same vein, Oliveira is looking for “derecho de ciudad” (154)
[“[r]ule of the city” (180)], which, in the opinion of his antithesis and fellow
immigrant Gregorovius, is “una ambición mal curada” (154) [“a half-cured
ambition” (180)]. Probably jealous of Oliveira’s ability to dream, Gregorovius
expresses irony with respect to the idyllic-bookish image of Horacio’s Paris,
which he identifies with the magic-oriental city he strived to conquer as a child;
“la ciudad de Ofir, según ha llegado al occidente por vías de la fábula” (117) [“the
city of Ophir, according to the legends that have reached the West through
storybooks” (134)]. Indeed, the romantic image of the ideal city is also con-
nected with Paris.11 As the narrator points out, “En fin, había que irse, subir a
la ciudad, tan cerca ahí a seis metros de altura, empezando exactamente al otro
lado del pretil del Sena, detrás de las cajas RIP de latón, donde las palomas
dialogaban esponjándose a la espera del primer sol blando y sin fuerza, la páli-
da sémola de las ocho y media que baja de un cielo aplastado, que no baja porque
seguramente iba a lloviznar como siempre” (174) [“Finally he had to go, go up
into the city, so close by there, twenty feet above, where it began exactly on
the other side of the Seine embankment, in back of the lead RIP boxes where
the pigeons were talking among themselves and fluffing up as they waited
for the first rays of the bland, unforceful sun, the pale eight o’clock pablum that
floats down from a mushy sky because it certainly was going to drizzle the way
it always did” (208–209)]. Gregorovius gives the following interpretation to
Horacio’s aspirations to conquer a Paris created by his imagination: “tenés
una idea imperial en el fondo de la cabeza. ¿Tu derecho de ciudad?” (154)
[“You . . . have an imperial notion in the back of your head. Freedom of the
city?” (180)].12 In his opinion, Horacio “adivina que en alguna parte de París,
en algún día o alguna muerte o algún encuentro hay una llave, la busca como
un loco” (160) [“He guesses that in some part of Paris, some day or some death
or some meeting will show him a key; he’s searching for it like a madman”
(133)]. The key would confer “derecho de ciudad” (117, 215) [“[r]ule of the city”
(180)]: understanding, presence and power.
The terrestrial and idyllic dimensions of the capital, its simultaneous func-
tions as a challenge and a refuge, are reconciled in the metaphoric image of Paris
as a woman, a device that has a long literary tradition. Symbolic representations
of abstract entities (Justice, Faith, Hope, Charity, Liberty) as women have been
common from the time of the classical Greeks, and the standard emblem of
France, from the Revolution, is the figure of Marianne. In Balzac’s Pére Goriot
Paris is also personified; the capital city is identified with a courtesan.13 As one
02.qxd 30/8/07 10:46 AM Page 38
“in this city women are cheaper than stone” (Rabelais qtd. Bakhtin 191), is also
associated with Paris, with the city as a mud-pit, the underworld and the road.
Like la Maga, Pola, Paris and the game of hopscotch, she is also one of Oliveira’s
guides to harmony, to “el kibbuz del deseo” [“a kibbutz of desire”].
Moreover, being identified with the mandala by Oliveira, Paris becomes an
overtly metafictional construct. Indeed, Paris is a metaphor where the notions
of self, geometry (urban space) and art converge.16 This city is also “el Gran
Tornillo” (315) [“the Great Screw” (385)], “el mundo . . . petrificado y estable-
cido” (19) [“[t]he world petrified and established”] (13), and “una barricada”
(59) [“a barricade”] (59). These all are variations of the same metaphorical
image built on the intersection of the physical, the spiritual and the meta-
physical. Gregorovius explicitly refers to Paris as a metaphor. He explains to la
Maga that Oliveira’s Paris, associated with freedom and self-realization, is an
utopic world of illusions: “Horacio es tan sensible, se mueve con tanta dificul-
tad en París. El cree que hace lo que quiere, que es muy libre aquí, pero se anda
golpeando contra las paredes” (111–112, italics added) [“Horacio is so sensitive,
it’s difficult for him to get around in Paris. He thinks that he’s doing what
he wants to do, that he has a lot of liberty here, but he goes around running into
barriers” (127)].
Gregorovius’s thoughts, and the motif of the stone wall in his arguments,
evokes a discourse of the “people with strong nerves,” the philistines described
by the protagonist, the Underground Man, in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the
Underground. As the Underground Man observes, “[the] impossible to them (the
people with strong nerves) equivalent to a stone wall. What stone
wall? . . . ‘Good Lord,’ they’ll scream at you . . . A stone wall, that is, is a stone
wall . . . etc., etc.” (126–127). Later in Rayuela, Horacio explicitly identifies
Gregorovious with Dostoevsky’s ambivalent characters: “Sos dostoievskiana-
mente asqueroso y simpático a la vez, una especie de lameculos metafísico”
(148) [“You’re so damned Dostoevskian, repulsive and pleasant at the same
time”].17 Gregorovius can be contrasted with both The Underground Man and
Oliveira, both of whom deliberately choose to live in rooms-holes and are proud
of their lack of action, but would not surrender before any obstacles. The
Underground Man rejects “the Crystal Palace” (151) as an embodiment of
philistine satisfaction. For the same reason, Oliveira cannot accept life in “[la]
caja de vidrio” (92) [“the glass cage” (101)]. The “glass cage,” Cortázar’s mod-
ification of Dostoevsky’s image, emphasizes invisibility and protection, a
vacuum-tight seal against the outside world, while preserving the original
connotations of lifelessness and emptiness implied by the discourse of the
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Underground Man. Like his Russian precursor, Oliveira refuses to accept “el
reino de material plástico” [“The kingdom” “made out of plastic material”
(380)], “un mundo delicioso” (311) [“a tasty world”] with the water of different
colors and bathrooms with telecommunication, which he associates with an
Orwellian nightmare. Both Dostoevsky’s and Cortázar’s characters find them-
selves in a “callejón sin salida” (Ezquerro 627) [“a ravine with no exit”]. They
refuse, however, to step out from the obstacles. As the Underground Man
contends, “[n]o doubt I shall never be able to break through such a stone wall
with my forehead, if I really do not possess the strength to do it, but I shall not
reconcile myself to it just because I have to deal with a stone wall and I haven’t
the strength to knock it down” (127).18 Oliveira, the non-conformist created
by Morelli, a fictional writer whose function in the novel is to serve as Cortázar’s
super ego (as convincingly argued by numerous critics), follows a similar line
of thought. The writer describes his creation in a following way:
Este hombre [El inconformista] se mueve en las frecuencias más bajas y las más altas,
desdeñando deliberadamente las intermedias, es decir la zona corriente de la aglom-
eración espiritual humana. Incapaz de liquidar la circunstancia, trata de darle la espalda;
inepto para sumarse a quienes luchan por liquidarla, pues cree que esa liquidación será
una mera sustitución por otra igualmente parcial e intolerable, se aleja encogiéndose de
hombros. (316)
This man [The nonconformist] moves within the lowest and the highest of frequen-
cies, deliberately disdaining those in between, that is to say, the current band of the
human spiritual mass. Incapable of liquidating circumstances, he tries to turn his back
on them; too inept to join those who struggle for their liquidation, he thinks there-
fore that this liquidation is probably a mere substitute for something else equally par-
tial and intolerable, he moves off shrugging his shoulders. (386)
la somnolencia tan bien descrita y hasta provocada en los relatos eslavos, y su cuerpo quedara
sepultado en la blancura homicida de las lívidas flores del espacio. Estaba bien eso: las livi-
das flores de espacio. (194–195; italics added)
‘God, it’s cold,” Oliveira said to himself, because he was a great believer in autosug-
gestion. Sweat was pouring over his eyes out of his hair and it was impossible to hold
a nail with the hump up because the lightest blow of the hammer would make it slip
out of his fingers which were all wet (from the cold) and the nail would pinch him again
and he would mash his fingers (from the cold). To make things worse, the sun had begun
to shine with full force into the room (it was the moon on snowing-covered steppes,
and he whistled to goad the horses pulling against their harnesses), by three o’clock
the whole place was covered with snow, he would let himself freeze until he got to that sleepy
state described so well and maybe even brought about in Slavic stories, and his body would
be entombed in the man-killing whiteness of the livid flowers of space. (234; italics added)
the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright and
solitude” (192)]30.
Similarly, in Rayuela, the narrator’s reference to “un círculo que está en
todas partes y su circunferencia en ninguna” (409) [“a circle whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (496)] appears in the con-
text of the protagonist’s existential preoccupations as expressed in rhetorical
questions:
Terrible tarea la de chapotear en un círculo cuyo centro está en todas partes y su circunfer-
encia en ninguna, por decirlo escolásticamente. ¿Qué se busca? ¿Qué se busca? Repetirlo
quince mil veces, como martillazos en la pared. ¿Qué se busca? ¿Qué es esa conciliación
sin la cual la vida no pasa de una oscura tomada de pelo? (408, italics added)
It’s a terrible joke, splashing around in a circle whose center is everywhere and whose cir-
cumference is nowhere, to use the language of scholasticism. What is being searched for?
What is being searched for? Repeat it fifteen thousand times, like hammer-blows on the wall.
What is being searched for? What is that conciliation without which life doesn’t go
beyond being an obscure joke? (496, italics added)
An encyclopedia that can virtually take one to any country at any time period
would give Oliveira an illusion of freedom and of belonging to the world in
its totality, as a desirable alternative to claustrophobia which he experiences
in Buenos Aires. Dreams of imaginary trips also visit Oliveira’s friend Traveler,
who has never “traveled”: “Dormido se le escapaban algunas veces vocablos
de destierro, de desarraigo, de tránsitos ultramarinos” (183) [“When he was
asleep he would sometimes come out with words that had to do with uproot-
ing, trips abroad, troubles in customes, and inaccurate alidades” (219)]. As
his wife Talita affirms, “Yo soy el mejor de sus viajes” (183) [“I have been his
best trip” (219)]. According to Boldy, Traveler, whose name and actions
contradict each other, exemplifies that “Buenos Aires . . . [is] the capital of
words” (49). Thus, Cortázar’s Buenos Aires displays a multidimensional ludic
presence of Borges’s texts which emphasizes the city’s both metaphysical and
metafictional aspects.
“El inmortal” [“The Immortal”] (El Aleph) is inspired by Piranesi’s Carceri.33 The
narrator-protagonist of this story describes his way to the terrifying city of
immortals as an exhaustive and dangerous pass through the infinite labyrinth:
“La fuerza del día hizo que yo me refugiara en una caverna; en el fondo había
un pozo, en el pozo una escalera que abismaba hacia la tiniebla inferior. Bajé;
por un caos de sordidos galerías llegué a una vasta cámara circular, apenas vis-
ible. Había nueve puertas en aquel sótano . . . . Fui divisando capiteles y astrála-
gos, frontones triangulares y bóvedas, confusas pompas del granito y del marmol.
Así me fue deparado ascender de la ciega región de negros laberintos entrete-
jidos a la resplandeciente ciudad” (Obras 1:536–537) [“The force of the sun
obliged me to seek refuge in a cave; in the rear was a pit, in the pit a stairway
which sank down abysmally into the darkness below. I went down; through a
chaos of sordid galleries I reached a vast circular chamber, scarcely visible. There
were nine doors in the cellar . . . I began to glimpse capitals and astragals, tri-
angular pediments and vaults, confused pageants of granite and marble. Thus
I was afforded this ascension from the blind region of dark interwoven labyrinths
into the resplendent City” (110)]. Likewise, in Talita’s dream, her route is a per-
ilous voyage through a labyrinth to terrifying pictures, “había que trepar por
arcos donde apenas las entalladuras permitían apoyar los dedos de los pies, avan-
zar por galerías que se interrumpían al borde de un mar embravecido, con olas
como de plomo, subir por escaleras de caracol para finalmente ver siempre mal,
siempre desde abajo o de costado, los cuadros” (226) [“one had to climb up some
archways where one could get footing only on the carvings, go through galleries
that went to the edge of a stormy sea with leadlike waves, climb up spiral stair-
cases to see finally, always poorly, always from below or from one side, the paint-
ings” (274)]. Both Talita and the protagonist of “El inmortal” [“The Immortal”]
experience disillusion when they reach their respective targets, the museum
with pictures and the city of immortals, both of which display the uniformity
of emptiness. As the protagonist in “El inmortal” [“The Immortal”] points out,
the architecture of the palace lacks any purpose and manifests a repetition of
meaningless parts, “la [impresión] de lo interminable, la de lo atroz, la de lo com-
plejamente insensato” (Obras 1:537) [“the [impression] of the interminable, that
of the atrocious, that of the complexly senseless” (110)]. Similar characteris-
tics are possessed by the pictures in Talita’s dream, which have “la misma man-
cha blanquecina, el mismo coágulo de tapioca o de leche se repetía al
infinito” (226) [“the same coagulation of tapioca or milk was repeated to infin-
ity” (226)]. Both the protagonist of “El inmortal” [“The Immortal”] and Talita
refer to their visions as terrifying ones. The horrifying image of the city is
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hierarchical structures, as well as all the forms of etiquette, is typical for car-
nival. As Bakhtin observes, “[t]he laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that
determine the structure and the order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are
suspended during carnival” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 123). Indeed, “la
señora Gutusso,” in her conversation with Gekrepten, points out that Talita’s
exercise is a violation of the decent routine: “Con las piernas al aire en ese tablón,
mire qué ejemplo para las criaturas. Usted no se habrá dado cuenta, pero desde
aquí se le veía propiamente todo, le juro.” (215) [“ ‘With her legs in the air on
that board, what an example for the children. You probably couldn’t see, but
from down here it was quite a sight, I can assure you.’ ” (261)].
In addition to the street of Buenos Aires, there are other carnivalesque
spaces par excellence in the novel, such as the circus and the insane asylum.
These institutions can easily replace one another, and display the relationship
of complementarity and overlap that manifests the “relativity and ambivalence
of reason and madness” (Bakhtin 125) typical of the carnival. In “Del lado de
acá,” [“From this side”] the idea of the center (which earlier in the novel was asso-
ciated with Paris) is associated with the unattainable point in the circus and
a symmetrically located one in the madhouse. As the narrator describes,
“[d]eteniéndose al lado del agujero del montacargas miró el fondo negro y pensó en
los Campos Flegreos, otra vez en el acceso. En el circo había sido al revés, un agu-
jero en lo alto, la apertura comunicando con el espacio abierto, figura de con-
sumación; ahora estaba al borde del pozo, agujero de Eleusis, la clínica envuelta
en vapores de calor acentuaba el pasaje negativo, los vapores de solfatara, el
descenso” (260; italics added) [“[s]topping by the shaft of the freight elevator, he
looked into the black depths and thought again about the Phlegrean Fields, the
way in. In the circus it had been just the opposite, a hole up above, the opening in
communication with free space, an image of consummation; now he was at the
edge of the pit, the hole of Eleusis, the clinic wrapped in sulphurous vapors, the
descent” (316; italics added)]. Moreover, Talita and Traveler prefer to think
about the madhouse in terms appropriate for referring to circus/theatrical per-
formances. As the narrator observes, “[l]os dos le buscaban el lado humorístico,
prometiéndose espectáculos dignos de Samuel Beckett, despreciando de labios para
afuera al pobre circo” (221; italics added) [“[t]he two of them tried to find the
humorous side, promising themselves spectacles worthy of Samuel Beckett, sneering
at the poor circus” (268)]. The circus is a ludic world of deception whose
actors (e.g. clowns) exercise the capacity of being simultaneously both self and
other, and which, like carnival, “proclaims the joyful relativity of everything”
(Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 125). As the narrator observes, the circus
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[“ ‘Is that the way lunatics do their killing?’ ‘No, my dear, but once in a while
they give it a try. Just like sane people, if you will allow me the poor compari-
son’ ” (270)]. Thus, both the circus and the mental asylum illustrate the carni-
valesque to be essentially ambivalent, which “absolutizes nothing” (Bakhtin 125)
and challenge the self/other dichotomy. Striking similarities between these two
places, as well as difficulties in the differentiation between “locos” [mad people,
“lunatics”] and “cuerdos” [“sane people”], also appear to be powerful expressions
of the common despair the characters experience in the world in which they live.
The distance between people is also challenged through the abundance of
doubles, “paired images, chosen for their contrast . . . or for their similarities”
(Bakhtin 126), typical of carnival thinking. For instance, Traveler, “un hombre
de territorio” (283) [“the man of the territory” (347)], and homeless Oliveira
explicitly identify themselves as “doppelgänger” (281, 282, 283). As Traveler
points out, “—No estás solo, Horacio. Quisieras estar solo por pura vanidad, por
hacerte el Maldoror porteño. ¿Hablás de un doppelgänger, no? Ya ves que alguien
te sigue, que alguien es como vos aunque esté del otro lado de tus condenados
piolines” (281) [“You’re not alone, Horacio. Maybe you wanted to be alone out
of pure vanity, play the Buenos Aires Maldoror. You spoke about a Doppelgänger,
didn’t you? Now you can see that someone is following you, that someone is like
you even though he’s on the other side of your damnable threads” (344)].
Oliveira also observes to Talita that “La diferencia entre Manú y yo es que somos
casi iguales” (210) [“The difference between Manú and me is that we’re almost
exactly the same” (254)]. Talita, who ranks herself among “las mujeres eman-
cipadas e intelectuales” (191) [“the emancipated and intellectual women”
(229)], and la Maga, who has an intuitive touch with the world which allows
her to penetrate eternity, “a esas grandes terrazas sin tiempo que todos ellos bus-
caban dialécticamente” (29) [“those great timeless plateaus that they were all
seeking through dialectics” (25)], form a similar symmetrical relationship in
Oliveira’s mind. As he explains to Traveler, “—Yo sé que es Talita, pero hace
un rato era la Maga. Es las dos, como nosotros” (282) [“ ‘I know she’s Talita, but
a while ago she was La Maga. She’s two people, just like us’ ” (346)]. He often
confuses them, playing with their images rather than with the characters them-
selves: “un beso a Talita, un beso de él a la Maga a Pola, ese otro juego de espe-
jos como el juego de volver hacia la ventana y mirar a la Maga parada ahí al
borde de la rayuela mientras la Cuca y Remorino y Ferraguto amontonados cerca
de la puerta estaban como esperando que Traveler saliera a la ventana” (279;
italics added) [“a kiss on Talita, a kiss he gave La Maga or Pola, that other game
of mirrors like the game of turning his head towards the window and looking
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at Las Maga standing there next to the hopscotch while cuca and Remorino
and Ferraguto, crowding around the door, seemed to be waiting for Traveler to
come to the window” (340)]. In “Del lado de allá” [“From other side”], Oliveira’s
love for La Maga is both a bridge to and an embodiment of his distance from
Paris. In Buenos Aires, Talita performs a similar function. There is an inre-
coverable lack of internal connection, however, as there is no bridge between
Oliveira and Buenos Aires: “Había que seguir, o recomenzar o terminar: todavía
no habiá puente” (189; italics added) [He had to keep going, either start over
again or end it: there was still no bridge as yet” (226; italics added)].
The topos of the double as literary device questions the boundaries of the
fictional universe. Oliveira, for instance, explicitly refers to Dostoevsky’s char-
acters when he recommends Traveler: “Consultá a Dostoievski para eso de las
sustituciones” (282) [“Look up that business of substitutions in Dostoyevsky”
(345)].37 The presence of both tragic and the comic elements, characteristic of
Dostoevsky’s doubles, is also relevant to Cortázar’s characters.38 In contrast to
Dostoevsky’s works, however, in Cortázar’s novel, doubles as a literary device
obtain an overt metafictional significance.
The context of Oliveira’s mentioning of the Russian writer evokes laughter,
for it follows the protagonist’s meditations about himself in light of the motif
of “pity,” one of the most important in Dostoevsky’s works.39 Oliveira consid-
ers himself a victim of “piedad” [“pity”] which prevents his union with the sky
associated with “rayuela”: “Un día meto un dedo en la costumbre y es increíble
cómo el dedo se hunde en la costumbre y asoma por el otro lado, parece que
voy a llegar por fin a la última casilla y de golpe una mujer se ahoga, ponele, o me
da un ataque, un ataque de piedad al divino botón, porque eso de la piedad . . .” (282,
italics added) [“One day I stick my finger into habit and it’s incredible how one’s
finger sinks into habit and comes out the other side, it looks as if I’m finally
going to get to the last square and suddenly a woman drowns, let’s say, or I get
an attack, an attack of useless pity, because that business of pity . . .” (345)].
These meditations, which in a satiric way combine sarcastic self-critique and
the unlimited influence of stereotypical thinking, provoke laughter, which in
a sense both indicates and disguises the protagonist’s existential anxiety caused
by an awareness of his continuously ‘displaced’ condition.
In this way, exemplifying the influence of Dostoevsky’s literary universe on
that created by Cortázar in Hopscotch, the presence of the double and the
notion of the shift thematized in the text’s discourse offer a further challenge
on the place/displacement opposition. The polysemic use of the word “territory”
appears to be connected with that of the double, and indicates the presence of
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the shift, a core of carnival thinking on the lexical level. The concept
of territory conventionally associated with the link between land, identity
and culture (see Lavie et al. 1), and with the ideological notions of sovereign-
ty and property, is both present, personified and ironized in Cortázar’s text.
Undermining traditionally hierarchical dualities between ‘home’ and ‘abroad,’
the center and the margin, and self and other, the novel invites readers to recon-
sider their confidence in the permanent junction between a particular culture
and a stable terrain, determinant for modern concepts of nations and cultures.
A consistent identification of Traveler with the territory in Oliveira’s
discourse emphasizes a parallel between personal (self/other) and spatial
(domestic/foreign) relationships, and challenges their perception in terms of
strict dichotomies.
As Oliveira explains to Traveler, “sos mi doppelganger, porque todo el tiempo
estoy yendo y viniendo de tu territorio al mío, y en esos pasajes lastimosos me parece
que vos sos mi forma que se queda ahí mirándome con lástima, sos los cinco mil
años de hombre amontados en un metro setenta, mirando a ese payaso que
quiere salirse de su casilla.” (282; italics added) [“you’re my Doppelganger,
because all the time I’m coming and going from your territory to mine, if I real-
ly ever do get to mine, and in those weary passages it seems to me that you’re
my form staying there looking at me with pity, you’re the five thousand years
of man piled up into six feet, looking at the clown who wants to get out of his
square” (345)]. In addition, territory is a physical space of the game “rayuela,”
as Horacio explains to Traveler: “Si te salieras del territorio, digamos de la casil-
la una a las dos, o de la dos a la tres . . .” (281–282) [“If you were to leave the
territory, let’s say from square one to square two, or from two to three . . .”
(344)]. In this way, in the word “territory,” the geographical, the human
and the ludic appear to converge. Oliveira’s references to Argentina, its per-
sonification and demistification carry similarities to carnivalesque “bringing
down to earth” (Bakhtin 123). In Oliveira’s attempt to undermine the official
vision of the country is contrasted with the emphatically fleshly grotesque
identification of the country with “matambre arrollado” (194) [“a tight-rolled
omelet” (233)].
As the narrator points out, “aunque estuviera convencido de que a la
Argentina había que agarrarla por el lado de la verguenza, buscarle el rubor
escondido por un siglo de usurpaciónes de todo género como tan bien explican
sus ensayistas, y para eso lo mejor era demostrarle de alguna manera que no se
la podía tomar en serio como pretendía” (194) [“even though he was convinced
that the only way to get a hold on Argentina was to come up on it from the
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shameful side, find the blush hidden under a century of usurpations of all kinds,
as writers had pointed out so well, and therefore the best way was to show it in
some way in which it didn’t have to take itself so seriously” (233–234)].
Identifying houses with bodies, Traveler also points to the distorting vision of
reality which populates the country and the city: “—Las ventanas son los ojos
de la ciudad . . . y naturalmente deforman todo lo que miran” (203) [“Windows
are the eyes of the city . . . and naturally they give the wrong shape to everything
they see” (245)].
Buenos Aires is also a place that generates a carnivalesque discourse
(particularly chapters 37 and 41). The incorporation of “Diálogo típico de
españoles” [“A Typical Dialogue between Two Spaniards”] a pseudo-poetic text on
the indecipherable language characterized by the narrator as “la jitanjáfora” (198)
[“nonsense” (238)] and an improvisation with the music from “Caballería ligera”
(215) [“Light Cavalry Overture”] in chapter 41, for instance, displays the hetero-
geniety of the menippean discourse, which is characterized by “a wide use of the
inserted genres,” “a mixing of prose and poetic speech” which usually produces a
comic effect. “Verse portions are almost always given with a certain degree of par-
odying” (118). Laughing at Talita in the episode with the plank, “Los chicos se
pusieron en fila y empezaron a cantar, con música de “Caballeria ligera” [“The boys
formed a line and began to sing to the tune of the Light Cavalry Overture”]:
The vulgarity of this song is typical for carnivalesque discourse, which is directed
towards a shift of authority and world order. Thus, the shift becomes internal-
ized in the very structure of the discourse narrated in Buenos Aires.
Carnivalesque and metaphysical elements coexist in Cortázar’s Buenos
Aires. On the one hand there are markers that refer to a particular city. The
mentioning of the names of the streets as well as the references to the archi-
tectural characteristics of buildings make it difficult for a reader to confuse
Buenos Aires with any other place. On the other hand, it is, in at least two
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senses, an invented reality. The city is imbued with a metaphysical air akin to
Borges’s Buenos Aires in Fervor de Buenos Aires; and it is a ludic carnivalesque
space. Cortázar’s Buenos Aires manifests an inevitable gap between fictional and
empirical realities; it is an emphatic way to express the character’s anxiety of
alienation.
Oliveira’s Homelessness:
Displacement as “No Placement”
“De otros lados,” [“From Diverse sides”] a deliberate re-combination of the
previous chapters of the story in alternating format, emphasizes Oliveira’s alien-
ation and condition of exile through its very structure. This device makes the
reader reconsider the apparently strict division established by the first two sections
and intentionally creates confusion with regard to identifying the location of the
action. Paris and Buenos Aires, “el lado de acá” [“from this side”] and “el lado de
allá,” [“from other side”] are no longer complementary because Oliveira appears
to be in exile in both cities. Indeed, in Paris, Horacio is like a witness: he is pre-
sent and absent at the same time. As la Maga points out, “Vos sos como un tes-
tigo, sos el que va al museo y mira los cuadros. Quiero decir que los cuadros están
ahí y vos en el museo, cerca y lejos al mismo tiempo.” (24) [“You’re like a witness.
You’re the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the
paintings are there and you’re in the museum too, near and far away at the same
time.” (20)]. According to Emmett Joseph Sharkley, Oliveira’s simultaneous
longing to be immersed in the world and remain distanced from it appears to be
a quintessential problem of the modern hero; it is “an expression of the modern
struggle between alienation and understanding” (33). Striving to break any
attachment to his own native place, Oliveira does not display any interest in
La Maga’s city: “Oliveira escuchaba sin ganas, lamentando un poco no poder
interesarse; Montevideo era lo mismo que Buenos Aires” (26) [“Oliveira listened
without interest, a little sorry that he was not interested; Montevideo was just like
Buenos Aires” (21)]. He tries to overcome the feeling of nostalgia awakened by
his sudden memories about Buenos Aires and his friends: “él necesitaba consolidar
una ruptura precaria (¿qué estaría haciendo Traveler, ese gran vago, en que líos
majestuosos se habría metido desde su partida? Y la pobre boba de Gekrepten, y
los cafés del centro)” (26; italics added) [“he had to finish breaking away (what
was Traveler up to, that old drifter? What kind of majestic hassles had he got into
since he had left? And poor, silly Gekrepten, and the bars downtown)” (21)].
Likewise, when in Buenos Aires, he prefers not to think or to talk about Paris. As
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cultural, por salir de la mezcla” (in Bermejo 62) [“the lack of certainty and of
the foundations of the cultural type in order to get out of mixture”].45 Though
Traveler “espiaba en Oliveira los signos del pacto ciudadano” (190) [“could spot
that Oliveira was making his peace with the city” (228)], Oliveira hopelessly
remains alienated in his native city. “Oliveira no podía reconciliarse hipócrita-
mente con Buenos Aires, y . . . ahora estaba mucho más lejos del país que
cuando andaba por Europa” (190) [“Oliveira could not make any hypocritical
compromise with Buenos Aires, and . . . at that moment he was much father
away from his own country than when he had been wandering about Europe.”
(228)].46 Oliveira’s feeling of marginality experienced both within and without
his native land, as well as the relationship of interchangeability between Paris
and Buenos Aires gradually established by the text, display displacement as
“no placement” (Kierkegaard qtd. in Houe 359).47
An attempt to define a place typical of exile, characterized by “open-
endedness and incompleteness” (Kierkegaard qtd. in Palmer 39), appears to be
also a determinant of Rayuela’s structure of the “Open” (Eco 633) work and its
use of imagery. The title of the novel points to the game, which in itself is an
attempt to build the bridge between the celestial and terrestrial, as the narra-
tor explains: “En lo alto está el Cielo, abajo está la Tierra, es muy difícil llegar
con la piedrita al Cielo, casi siempre se calcula mal y la piedra sale del dibujo.
Poco a poco, sin embargo, se va adquiriendo la habilidad necesaria para salvar
las diferentes casillas (rayuela caracol, rayuela rectangular, rayuela de fantasía
poco usada) y un día se aprende a salir de la Tierra y remontar la piedrita hasta
el Cielo, hasta entrar en el Cielo” (178) [“On top is Heaven, on the bottom is
Earth, it’s very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always
miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to
get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rec-
tangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often) and then one day
you learn how to leave Earth and make pebble climb up into Heaven” (214)].48
The ambiguity of the novel’s ending, where Horacio either does or does not
commit suicide also points to displacement as no-placement to be the text’s
narrative strategy that makes every reader come up with his/her own ‘bridge’-
interpretation.49 As Cortázar points out in his conversation with Garfield,
“el hecho de dejar el libro abierto . . . es exactamente lo que yo busco con mis
lectores” (30) [“the idea of leaving the book open-ended . . . is exactly what
I intend for my readers”].50 The task of the “lector-cómplice” would be to become
“copartícipe y copadeciente de la experiencia por la que pasa el novelista, en
el mismo momento y en la misma forma” (326) [“a co-participant and co-sufferer
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of the experience through which the novelist is passing, at the same moment and
in the same form” (397)], which implies the disappearance of the borders
between the reader and the writer. Thus, Oliveira’s exile, his non-placement
accompanied by the endless search attains both thematic and metafictional
importance in Rayuela. It allows the reader to recognize a modern intellectual
and Cortázar to express his metapoetical ideas.
In conclusion, Oliveira’s existential displacement multiplies into textual
displacement, which is a displacement of other texts, associated with incom-
pleteness and open-endedness. A strategy of textual displacement, whose most
efficient mechanisms are irony and parody, is particularly prominent in repre-
sentations of Paris and Buenos Aires, where the protagonist moves. The use of
the motifs recurrent in the nineteenth century representations of the modern
city and the lives of the individualists in it, and at the same time an explicit
recognition of the imaginary nature of Paris as a metaphor, illustrates a
dissipation of boundaries between empirical and fictional realms and underlines
the impossibility of reconciliation between the protagonist and the city.
Metaphysical Buenos Aires is both a literary construction, which evokes the
city created in Borges’s early poetry, and a carnivalesque space that underlines
Oliveira’s anxiety of alienation. Created at the crossroads of separate literary
worlds, Paris and Buenos Aires are given new lives in the polyphonic space of
Cortázar’s novel: they are Oliveira’s indispensable companions in his life-long
voyage without destination.
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·3·
FICTIONAL AND ‘ REAL’ PLACES :
CONVERGENCES AND
DIVERGENCES
Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.
Vladimir Nabokov
The controversial places of utopia, dystopia and heterotopia have attracted the
attention of philosophers, artists and critics throughout the ages. This chapter
contends that attempting to delineate these places in Borges’s and Cortázar’s
narratives allows the reader to move deeper into the fictional worlds created by
these authors, and offers further insights regarding the location of Borges’s voice
within the distinct literary universe created by Cortázar.
My reading of Borges’s stories “Utopia del hombre que está cansado” [“A
Weary Man’s Utopia”] and “La casa de Asterión” [“The House of Asterion”],
and Cortázar’s novels 62: Modelo para armar [62: A Model Kit] and Los Premios
[The Winners], is informed by ideas developed by such scholars as Judith
Schklar and Tobin Seibers. They have observed that, in the postmodern world,
any distinction between utopia, dystopia and heterotopia is questionable. This
chapter suggests that Borges’s and Cortázar’s narratives, where overtly imagi-
nary and recognizable locations consistently coexist, exemplify this vision. The
blurring of the frontier between utopias and other locales in these writers’ texts
turns out to be a common expression of the skepticism about the contemporary
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Utopia, the volume printed in Basel in 1518” (462)].4 “Someone’s land” has all
the dreariness and uniformity of More’s Utopia. The main city of More’s “happy
place,” for instance, is called Amaurot, “[f]rom the Greek, implying ‘dark city’ ”
(More 35). This place which stands on the river Anyder, which means “waterless”
(More 37). As the narrator of Utopia points out, “[i]f you know one of their
cities, you know them all, for they’re exactly alike, except where geography itself
makes a difference” (More 36). Likewise, on the land where passions, emotions
and the concept of difference no longer exist, Someone “vestido en gris” (Obras
3:52) [“dressed in grey” (460)] and with “rostro severo y pálido” (Obras 3:53)
[“stern, pale face” (461)] observes that his house cannot be distinguished from
the others: “He construido esta casa, que es igual a todas las otras” (Obras 3:55;
italics added) [“ ‘I have built this house, which is like all other houses’ ” (464)].
Uniformity and sameness are characteristic of the architecture both on More’s
isle, which is Nowhere, and Someone’s land; they display a common lack
of imagination in their inhabitants. In contrast to More’s text, where the idea
of sameness might be connected with that of equality, which the imaginary
traveler worships and hopes for, Borges’s story is sceptical about the benefits of
equality and uniformity.
Moreover, the moral, ideological and social principles that govern the life
of the utopians in More’s text are maintained in “Someone’s land.” The con-
cept of “el olvido” (Obras 3:54) [“forgetfulness”], practiced in the place where
people are indifferent to the flow of time, “viv[en] sub specie aeternitatis” (Obras
3:53) [“live sub specie aeternitatis” (461)], is inspired by More’s book on
which Borges explicitly comments in his essay “La postulación de la realidad”
[“The Postulation of Reality”]: “Nuestro vivir es una serie de adaptaciones, vale
decir, una educación del olvido. Es admirable que la primer noticia de Utopía
que nos dé Thomas More, sea su perpleja ignorancia de la “verdadera” longi-
tud de uno de sus puentes” (Obras 1:218) [“For us, living is a series of adap-
tatations, which is to say, an education in oblivion. It is admirable that the first
news of Utopia Thomas More gives us in his puzzled ignorance of the ‘true’
length of one of its bridges” (61)].5 Echoing More’s proto-anarchistic slogan that
“The love of money is a root of all evil” (96) and such ideas as the lack of pri-
vate property and the devaluation of money, familiar to the Borges-reader,
Someone points out to the narrator: “Ya no hay quien adolezca de pobreza, que
habrá sido insufrible, ni de riqueza, que habrá sido la forma más incómoda de
la vulgaridad. . . . Ya que no hay posesiones no hay herencias” (Obras 3:54) [“No
one any longer suffers poverty, which must have been unbearable—nor suffers
wealth, for that matter, which must have been the most uncomfortable form
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have really taken place, and the Summa Theologica” (461)].7 Swift’s dystopian
world, where digressions form the norm, appears to be broadly present in
Borges’s story. The first meeting of the narrator with Someone evokes a fear
which reminds the reader of Gulliver’s first encounter with his new master in
the Brobdingnag. As Gulliver recalls, he had found himself “[s]cared and con-
founded” while looking at the man “as Tall as an ordinary Spire-steeple” (Swift
65). Likewise, the narrator experiences fear when Someone “severo y pálido”
opens the door: “Me abrió la puerta un hombre tan alto que casi me dio miedo”
(Obras 3:52) [“The door was opened by a man so tall it almost frightened me”
(460)]. The asceticism of Someone’s life reminds one of Swift’s Houyhnmns,
found among the last of Gulliver’s travels characterized by Borges in his pro-
logue to Swift’ book as “terribles” (Obras 4: 512) [“terrible”]. Displaying a
common lack of morality and inability to feel any kind of passions, the
Houyhnmns exemplify a devitalised and impoverished society. Swift’s fatalism
reaches its climax when Gulliver gradually starts to admire the Houyhnmns and
accept their judgement about himself and humanity. At first sceptical about the
Houyhnmns’ comparison of him and the Yahoos, Gulliver rejects any parallel
between himself and “their [the horses’] degenerate and brutal nature.” (182).8
Later, realizing that a female Yahoo is attracted to him, he concludes: “[f]or now
I could no longer deny, that I was a real Yahoo, in every Limb and Feature”
(233). Gradually he starts observing physical resemblances between himself and
Yahoos, and later a moral one: “my horror and astonishment are not to be
described, when I observed, in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure”
(183). In her perceptive essay “Swift: the Metamorphosis of Irony,” Ann Dyson
observes that Gulliver’s acceptance of the Houynhnms’ view of similarities
between people and Yahoos can be interpreted as a metaphor for a human con-
dition that is incurably unhealthy, but nevertheless has to be shown and
accepted as inevitable.
In Borges’s story, by contrast, Someone, tired and dispirited by his lifeless
existence, chooses suicide as an act of liberation from his own nature and a
surrounding world of indifference. His reflections are in tune with Swift’s fatal-
ism, expressed in a way typical of the utopian satire. According to Frye, the
latter is characterized by a “growing sense that the whole world is destined to
the same social fate with no place to hide” (327). In his Prologue to Gulliver’s
Travels, Borges quotes William Thackerey’s words: “pensar en Swift . . . es como
pensar en la declinación de un gran imperio” (Obras 4: 512) [“to think about
Swift . . . is like thinking about the decline of a great empire”]. The description
of Someone’s suicide in the crematory by means of the efficient mass death
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into species who hate each other . . . . He returns with his hair grown gray and
brings with him a wilted flower from the future . . . a celestial flower or the flower
of a dream is a flower of the future, the unlikely flower whose atoms now occupy
other spaces and have not yet been assembled” (164)].11 A similar device, a paint-
ing canvas looking to the past as Wells’s flowers do to the future, was used by Wells’s
friend Henry James in The Sense of the Past, as Borges further notes in “La flor de
Coleridge”: “En The Sense of the Past, el nexo entre lo real y lo imaginativo (entre
la actualidad y el pasado) no es una flor . . . es un retrato que data del siglo XVIII”
(Obras 2:18) [“In The Sense of the Past the nexus between the real and the imag-
inative (between present and past) is not a flower . . . , but a picture from the eigh-
teenth century that mysteriously represents the protagonist” (165).
Commenting on James’s work, Borges observes, “un incomparable regressus
in infinitum. . . . La causa es posterior al efecto, el motivo del viaje es una de las
consecuencias del viaje” (Obras 2:18) [“an incomparable regressus in infini-
tum. . . . The cause follows the effect, the reason for the journey is one of the
consequences of the journey” (165)]. From these comments, it can be suggested
that Borges sees the future determining the present and the past and in Wells’s
and James’s novels, as well as being determined by it. Borges combines both
images, Wells’s flower of the future and James’s canvas (which inspired a voy-
age to the past) in his final lines of “Utopia de un hombre que está cansado,”
where the protagonist-narrator observes: “En mi escritorio de la calle México
guardo la tela que alguien pintará, dentro de miles de años, con materiales hoy
dispersos en el planeta” (Obras 3:56) [“In my study on Calle México still hangs
the canvas that someone will paint, thousands of years from now, with sub-
stances that are now scattered across the planet” (72)]. This image suggests that,
in line with his creative interpretation of Wells’s flowers (offered in “La flor de
Coleridge”), Borges re-elaborates his own speculation that, whereas space may
vary, time is a single constant where present, past and future coexist.
Indeed, in contrast to both Wells’s and James’s narratives, in Borges’s para-
doxical metaphysics, as it appears in “Utopía del hombre que está cansado,”
different time periods overlap rather then form a succession. Someone, a
400-year-old man from the future, for example, shows the narrator books that
remind him of antique writings/manuscripts: “En una de las paredes vi un
anaquel. Abrí un volumen al azar; las letras eran claras e indiscifrables y trazadas
a mano. Sus líneas angulares me recordaron el alfabeto rúnico, que sin embargo,
sólo se empleó para le escritura epigráfica. Pensé que los hombres del porvenir no sólo
eran más altos sino más diestros” (Obras 3:53; italics added) [“On one of the walls
I noticed a bookshelf. I opened a volume at random; the letters were clear and inde-
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cipherable and written by hand. Their angular lines reminded me of the runic
alphabet, though it had been used only for inscriptions. It occurred to me that the
people of the future were not only taller, they were more skilled as well” (67; italics
added)].12 He offers Acevedo a painting “como recuerdo de un amigo futuro”
(Obras 3:56; italics added) [“as a souvenir of a future friend” (71; italics added)].
The visitor picks up one that “encerraba algo infinito” (Obras 3:56) [“sug-
gested . . . something of the infinite about it” (71)]. The eclectic setting inside
his house where one room has wooden doors “las paredes de madera” and in the
kitchen “todo era de metal” (Obras 3:52) [“everything was made of metal”] may
be considered a synecdochal representation of the Utopian land where differ-
ent epochs simultaneously coexist.13
Borges’s metaphysical concept of a future that embraces the past and the
present, as well as the description of Eudoro’s journey, makes the notions of
utopia, dystopia and heterotopia converge. The word “utopia,” which appears
in the title, refers to “Someone’s land,” which is visited in the story by the pro-
tagonist Eudoro. Someone’s indifference and cruelty, which the people from his
land willingly accept (and even strive for), allow one to identify this place with
dystopia. Finally, the uncertainty about the distance between Someone’s land
and the world the narrator comes from, and striking similarities (as described
by the narrator) between “real” geographic and overtly fictional places, as well
as such characteristics as a break from the traditional notice of time, the lack
of free access and a possible change of functions according to society’s needs
marks the locale as heterotopic in nature. Indeed, the narrator’s references to
his way to the land of Utopia (before his meeting with Someone) emphasize
uniformity between ‘real’ geographical and fictional places which mirror each
other: “No hay dos cerros iguales, pero en cualquier lugar de la tierra la llanu-
ra es una y la misma . . . . Me pregunté sin mucha curiosidad si estaba en
Oklahoma o en Texas o en la región que los literatos llaman la pampa” (Obras
3:52) [“No two mountain peaks are alike, but anywhere on earth the plains are
one and the same. . . . I asked myself without much curiosity whether I was in
Oklahoma o Texas or the region that literary men call ‘las pampas’ ” (65)].
Further, Eudoro’s perception of ‘real’/geographical places is configured by the
books he has read. He prefers to think about the surrounding world in terms of
familiar poetry, which introduces the Argentine literary motif:
—En mi curioso ayer— contesté—, prevalecía la superstición de que entre cada tarde
y cada mañana ocurren hechos que es una verguenza ignorar. El planeta estaba pobla-
do de espectros colectivos, el Canadá, el Brasil, el Congo Suizo y el Mercado Común. Casi
nadie sabía la historia previa de esos entes platonicos, pero sí los más íntimos pormenores
del último congreso de pedagogos, la inminente ruptura de relaciones y los mensajes
que los presidentes mandaban, elaborados por el secretario del secretario con la pru-
dente imprecisión que era propia del género” (Obras 3:54; italics added).
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“In that strange yesterday from which I have come,” I replied, “there prevailed the
superstition that between one evening and the next morning, events occur that it
would be shameful to have no knowledge of. The planet was peopled by spectral
collectives—Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, the Common Market. Almost no one
knew the prior history to those Platonic Entities, yet everyone was informed of the most
trivial Details of the latest conference of pedagogues or the imminent breaking off of
relations between one of these entities and another and the messages that their
presidents sent back and forth—composed by a secretary to the secretary, and in the
prudent vagueness that the form requires.” (68)
Thematizing the journey to the future is in line with classical utopic texts, where
this voyage is “an unconscious desire to escape the culture whose product [the
traveler] is” (Leddy 85). This motif reappears in Borges’s text in a modified form
because as the present and future form a single metaphysical moment, and space
is a function of time, there is no need to abandon familiar places to enter
nowhere, or Utopia. The notion of utopia as a “placeless place” (Foucault 24)
turns out to be undermined in Borges’s story, which suggests its presence with-
in the limits of familiar topography.
In this way, “Utopia del hombre que está cansado” enters in an implicit
dialogue with the literary tradition of utopic/dystopic writing, and offers its
own contribution to the genre. Whereas in More’s Utopia such values as
equality, asceticism, and a rejection of private property are introduced as pos-
itive but remain intrinsically ambiguous, in Borges’s text there is no place for
ambiguity; they are negative. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels links the physical place-
ment of the characters (e.g. Houyhnmns) with a moral one (decadence);
while for Borges’s story the grotesque effect is obtained by the linkage of the
apparently human appearance of the inhabitants of Someone’s land with
their total lack of emotion of any kind, which makes them capable of unlim-
ited monstrosity. In a ludic dialogue with Wells’s influential text, Borges’s story
both thematizes and inverts a time- space relationship, and develops a meta-
physical notion of time where future, present and past coexist. In contrast to
Wells’s text, in Borges’s story space is but a function of time, where the past,
present and future overlap. Consequently, the distance between the overtly
imaginary land of the future and recognizable present-day locations is ques-
tioned. As opposed to the works of his precursors, Borges’s text reduces the
distance between ‘fictional’ and ‘real’ places, both of which emphatically
share a dystopian dominant, terrifying in its simultaneous impossibility and
familiarity.
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estaba segura de haber visto de lejos a Nicole y quizá a Marrast que vagaban por
el barrio de los mercados, y era como si Nicole anduviera buscando (y no los
encontraba, y era tristísimo) esos collares de grandes piedras azules que se
vendían en las calles de Teherán” (59) [“Tell was sure of having seen Nicole and
maybe Marrast from a distance as they wandered through the market district,
and it was as if Nicole were searching (and she was unsuccessful and terribly
sad) for those necklaces with large blue stones that were sold on the streets of
Teheran” (59)]. Also, in contrast to other cities, the characters aspire to but fail
to meet each other in the City: “Es una región que te encoge el alma, que te
da tristeza sin razones, nada más que por estar ahí” (65) [“It’s a place that curls
up in your soul, makes you sad for no reason, just being there . . .” (66)].
The City is a lifeless place and it has connotations with the fatal and the
dead. Looking at the dying boy, Hélèna thinks about the City as lacking in vital-
ity typical of other places: “en la ciudad donde caminar tenía siempre algo de
pasivo, por inevitable y decidido, por fatal . . . . Lo que pudiera ocurrirle en la
ciudad nunca la había preocupado tanto como el sentimiento de cumplir itin-
erarios en los que su voluntad poco tenía que ver, como si la topografía de la
ciudad, el dédalo de calles cubiertas, de hoteles y tranvías, se resolvieran siem-
pre en un solo derrotero pasivo” (102) [“the city, where walking always had
something passive about it, because it was inevitable and all decided, fated . . . .
What could have happened in the city had never worried her as much as the
feeling of following an itinerary where her will had little bearing, as if the topog-
raphy of the city, the maze of covered streets, hotels and streetcars would
always be resolved into one single, inevitable, passive course” (104)].
Emphasizing the reflexive relationship between “París subterraneo” [“that
underground Paris”] and “la ciudad,” she concludes that to be in the hospital
“[e]s casi como estar en la ciudad” (102) [“[i]t’s almost like being in the city”
(104). In the hotel where Hélèna is killed, there are the same “verandas [trop-
icales] protegidas por cañas” (115) [“[tropical] verandas protected by bamboo”
(118)] described in Juan’s poem. Thus, the City, both apocalyptic and wish-
fulfilling, undermines the utopia/dystopia dichotomy. On the one hand, the
characters associate their hopes and dreams with this place. On the other, the
actions which happen there consistently bring violence and destruction and
corrupt communications between the parties.
Further, in addition to functioning as both utopia and dystopia (forms
conventionally associated with the fictional places), the City both reflects
and incorporates ‘real’ urban spaces, which also allows one to regard it as
heterotopic in nature.31 The blurring of the boundaries between recognizable
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(83) [“the seas and temples are also fourteen (infinite) in number” (139)], which
allows Asterión to identify his house with the world: “la casa es del tamaño del
mundo; mejor dicho, es el mundo” (83) [“[t]he house is the same size as the
world; or rather, it is the world” (139)]. Consequently, Asterion’s house extends
infinitely; the inside and outside are one and the same claustrophobic space for
Asterion.38 As Gold points out, “the labyrinth seems to have a limit, but actu-
ally is infinite or cyclical” (50). The multifunctional heterotopia described in
Borges’s story can be seen as a challenge to any opposition between the public
and the private, considered by Foucault as “simply given” (23).
Moreover, the ludic structure of the palimpsest and the hybrid nature of the
protagonist may be considered metapoetical/artistic analogues to the concept of
heterotopia, an eclectic locus. There are two hypotexts distinguished by the
author himself and explicitly indicated in the story. The first one is the ancient
Greek myth described in Apollodorus’s The Library from which the epigraph for
the story is taken: “Y la reina dio a luz un hijo que se llamó Asterión” (Obras
1:569) [“And the queen gave birth to a child who was called Asterion” (138)].
The second hypotext is Watt’s painting “The Minotaur” (1896) to which, as
Borges confesses in the epilogue of El Aleph, he owes “el carácter de mi pobre
protagonista” (Obras 1:629) [“the character of my poor protagonist”].39 According
to the Greek writer, the Minotaur was the unfortunate product of the mating
of the sacred bull with the king’s wife Pasiphae, a sign of shame as well as of mon-
strosity that has been confined in the labyrinth built by Daedalus: “And Pasiphae
gave birth to Asterius, who was called the Minotaur. He had the face of a bull,
but the rest of him was human; and Minos shut him up and guarded him in the
labyrinth” (Appolodorus 1:305). Evoking Foucault’s definition of “heterotopia
of deviation” (Foucault 25), the labyrinth is build in order to isolate the terri-
fying Minotaur. As described in Apolodorus’s text, it reminds one of a prison, a
place contrasted from those where people live. In Borges’s text, on the contrary,
the relationship of equivalence between Asterion’s house (prison, labyrinth) and
the world displays the former as a tragic norm from which there is no escape and
liberation except death. Asterion’s house functions as heterotopia of illusion,
which reveals the apparent freedom outside of it as a deception.
Further, by introducing the first person narrator and mentioning only the
name of Asterión (which is not common knowledge), Borges offers a rewriting
of the well-known myth. Though there are some hints at the hybrid nature of
Asterión, who lives in an unfurnished house and whose activities allude to his
animal nature, the presence of Minotaur and the labyrinth is disguised until the
last paragraph narrated in the third person and where the name of Theseus is
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both synthesis and fragment that challenges the idea of the absolute determi-
nation of being/object as defined by certain physical characteristics.
This mode of representation of the ship as an intrinsically paradoxical site
is recurrent in sea-narratives familiar to Cortázar and to his characters. Persio,
who beforehand knows about the coming events, “que tiene todas las cartas en
la mano” (Cortázar in Prego 122) [“who has all cards in his hands”] and func-
tions as Cortázar’s super-ego in the novel, tell his young friend Jorge that he has
never traveled on a ship but has read “las novelas de Conrad y de Pío Baroja”
(43). Indeed, like “Malcolm,” the ship in Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the
Narcissus is associated both with the total unity and with permanent incom-
pleteness: “The passage had begun, and the ship, a fragment detached from the
earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet” (Conrad 21). In addition, the
same paradox of representation haunts the “Neversink” in Herman Melville’s
White-Jacket; or The World in a Man-of-War: “For a ship is a bit of terra firma cut
off from the main; it is a state in itself” (24; italics added).
The ambivalence of “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that
exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to
the infinity of the sea” makes the ship “the greatest reserve of imagination”
(Foucault 27). Indeed, mystery dominates the “Malcolm,” which is a constant
object of curiosity for its passengers. For the non-convincing reason that an
unusual strain of typhus has broken out among the sailors, the passengers find
themselves quarantined in claustrophobic isolation, cut off from the crew and
from the radio room that is their only connection with Buenos Aires. Annoyed
by being denied access to the stern, some of the men, Gabriel Medrano, a den-
tist, Carlos López, a school teacher, and a representative of a lower class, Atilio
Presutti, nicknamed Pelusa, unsuccessfully try to penetrate the mysteriously for-
bidden area. Meanwhile the gay man Raúl Costa attempts to seduce the young
Felipe Trejo, and friendship/attraction grows between Medrano and Claudia
Freire; and between Carlos López and Paula Lavalle.43 Bringing disillusion to
the characters who expected an engaging voyage all over the world, the ship
does not go anywhere and finally anchors off shore at Quilmes, a very short dis-
tance away from Buenos Aires.
As Foucault in his article “Of Other Spaces” points out, the ship does not
allow “dreams [to] dry up” (27). Similarly, in Cortázar’s novel, inspiring Persio’s
metaphysical meditations, the “Malcolm” itself obtains a life of poetic image.44
The ship becomes a trope metaphorically identified with Picasso’s guitar, a
picture owned by Guillaume Appolinaire: “Extrañamente la gran guitarra ha
callado en la altura, el Malcolm se mueve sobre un mar de goma, bajo un aire de tiza”
03.qxd 30/8/07 10:48 AM Page 85
(357) [“Strangely, the enormous guitar has fallen silent up above, and the
Malcolm sails over a sea of rubber, under an atmosphere of chalk” (313)]. Like
a cubist painting, it is associated with the multiplicity of fragmented perspec-
tives in a spatial arrangement similar to the labyrinthine interactions of the pas-
sengers or the compartments of the ship: “Las jaulas de los monos, los leones
rondando los puntes, la pampa tirada boca arriba, el crecer vertiginoso de los cohi-
hues, irrumpe y cuaja ahora en los muñecos que ya han ajustado sus caretas y sus pelu-
cas, las figuras de la danza que repiten en un barco cualquiera las líneas y los círculos
del hombre de la guitarra de Picasso (que fue de Apollinaire)” (357) [“The monkey
cages, the lions haunting the decks, the pampas stretched out face up, the ver-
tiginous growth of South American pines, all explode and come back together
again now in the dolls which have already adjusted their masks and wigs, the
figures of the dance which repeat on any ship the lines and circles of Picasso’s
man with the guitar (which belonged to Apollinaire)” (313–314)].
At the same time the ship is identified with the pampas, a wide and absorb-
ing land whose limits are left beyond the human perception and where a per-
son is doomed to solitude. Persio’s perception of the ship is similar: “Los sentidos
dejan poco a poco de ser parte de él para extraerlo y volcarlo en la llanura negra; ahora
ya no ve ni oye ni huele ni toca, está salido, partido, desatado, enderezándose como
un árbol abarca la pluridad que es el caos resolviéndose, el cristal que cuaja y se ordena,
la noche primordial en el tiempo americano” (112) [“Little by little, his senses grow
disembodied, and he is hoisted and turned over on the black plains; he no
longer sees nor hears nor smells nor touches, he is gone, departed, let loose
standing straight as a tree encompassing plurality in one single enormous pain,
which is chaos resolving itself, the shattered crystal fusing in an orderly pattern,
the primeval night in American time” (280)]. This vision evokes the character’s
pessimistic thoughts about the American identity formed on this mythical and
chaotic land: “Qué debía quedar de todo eso, solamente una tapera en la pampa,
un pulpero socarrón, un gaucho perseguido y pobre diablo, un generalito en el
poder? . . . ¿es esto lo sudamericano? . . . Menos que maniqueos, menos que hedóni-
cos vividores, ¿representamos en la tierra el lado espectral del devenir, su larva sardónica
agazapada al borde de la ruta, el antitiempo del alma y el cuerpo, la facilidad barata,
el no te metás si no es para avivarte?” (115) [“And what remains of all these? Only
an abandoned hut in the pampas, a cunning tapster, a poor devil of a pursued
gaucho, a pipsqueak of a general in power? . . . is this South America? . . . Less
than Manicheans, less than rotten hedonists, are we the earthly represen-
tatives of the spectral side of becoming, its sarcastic larva crouching at the
side of the road, the anti-time of both body and soul, the cheap facility, the
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·4·
DISPLACEMENT, DREAMS AND
ARCHIVE IN BORGES ’ S ESSAYS
Our disputes are purely verbal. I ask what is ‘nature,’ ‘pleasure,’ ‘circle,’ ‘substitution’.
The question is one of words, and is answered in the same way.
Michel Montaigne
Borges’s essays together with his short stories, brought the author interna-
tional fame. In the writer’s own words, his style does not change when he
composes essays: “Me pregunto si hay alguna diferencia entre el estilo de la
narrativa y el estilo del ensayo. En mi caso, no lo hay” (176) [“I ask myself
whether there is any difference between the narrative style and that of the
essay. In my case, there is none”].1 My interpretation of the functioning of archi-
tectural structures and the notion of place as physical locality in “El sueño de
Coleridge” [“Coleridge’s Dream”] and “La muralla y los libros” [“The Wall and
the Books”] from Otras Inquisiciones aims to show that these texts are both
indispensable for an understanding of the author’s metapoetical ideas, and illu-
minating for an investigation of the complexities of some apparently familiar
concepts such as dream-work, history, and artistic expression.2
Borges’s exploration of the cross-cultural and cross-temporal dreams of the
palace “Xanadu” in “El sueño de Coleridge” [“Coleridge’s Dream”] allows one
to place this essay in an implicit dialogue with Freud’s original concept of
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Coleridge writes that . . . sleep overcame him a few moments after reading a passage in
Purchas that describes the construction of a palace by Kublai Khan, the emperor whose
fame in the West was the work of Marco Polo. In Coleridge’s dream, the text he had coin-
cidentally read sprouted and grew; the sleeping man intuited a series of visual images, and,
simply, the words that expressed them. After a few hours he awoke, certain that he had com-
posed, or received, a poem of some three hundred lines. (369, italics added)
pronouns, adverbs and verbs, expose only several of the numerous ways to
approach a work of human imagination, which, like dream itself, is a “rebus”
(Lacan 156).
Moreover, the narrator interprets Kubla Khan’s and Coleridge’s creations
as elements of “la serie de los sueños” [“the series of dreams”], repetitive and
enigmatic. Whereas for Freud dreams bring clarity, and their interpretation is
“the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (The
Interpretation 608), for Borges dreams increase doubts. According to Borges,
dreams are another manifestation of the work of enigmatic human imagination,
as the narrator expresses in an apparently contradictory sentence: “Quizá la serie
de los sueños no tenga fin, quizá la clave esté en el último” (Obras 2:22)
[“Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one will be the
key” (372)]. The first part of the sentence points to infinity, the second indica-
ted a possibility of closure.
In this way, “El sueño de Coleridge” allows one to compare and contrast
Freud’s and Borges’s approaches to dream-work, its result and its interpretation.
In line with Freud’s approach to interpretation of dreams, Borges suggests that
the human imagination is guided by displacement and operates with recurrent
dream symbols/archetypes. Both Borges and Freud see the discourse of the
dream and its interpretation as using similar narrative strategies that involve dis-
placement. As in The Interpretation of Dreams, in “El sueño de Coleridge,” any
creative attempt to interpret Kubla Khan’s and Coleridge’s creations is an act
of displacement that leads to the creation of a day-dream-space similar to the
one interpretation aims to decipher. Borges diverges from Freud’s conceptions,
however, by questioning any logical explanation to dreams and dream-making
as too simple, and favors magical ones. Whereas Freud was essentially interested
in the semantics of dreams, which in his opinion, can be reduced to a few clear
patterns, including the psycho-sexual development, the Argentine writer
approaches dream as a syntactic phenomenon that can acquire infinite and
unpredictable forms and makes a plurality of interpretative versions possible.
era deleznable y destruyó los libros por entender que eran libros sagrados, o sea
libros que enseñan lo que enseña el universo o la conciencia de cada hombre”
(Obras 2:11–12) [“Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, wanted to obliterate the canonical
books because they accused him; Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, tried to abolish the
entire past in order to abolish one single memory: his mother’s infamy. (Not in
an unlike manner did a king of Judea have all male children killed in order to kill
one.) . . . Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in his empire because he knew that it
was perishable and destroyed the books because he understood that they were
sacred books, in other words, books that teach what the entire universe or the
mind of every man teaches” (188–189)]. Thus, the repression exercised by the
emperor turns out to be an act of archivization, evoking the past as much as it
attempts to destroy it. As Derrida observes, “[o]ne recalls and archives the very
thing one represses” (Archive 80).
Moreover, the Emperor’s actions can be seen as traces of those performed
by his ancestors, the difference is only in scale: “Históricamente, no hay mis-
terio en las dos medidas. . . . Quemar libros y erigir fortificaciones es tarea
común de los príncipes; lo único singular en Shih Huang Ti fue la escala en que
obró” (Obras 2:11) [“Historically speaking, there is no mystery in the two
measures. . . . Burning books and erecting fortifications is a common task of
princes; the only thing singular in Shih Huang Ti was the scale on which he
operated” (186)]. Thus, the Emperor’s actions evoke the history he wants to
destroy, suggesting a relationship between repression, repetition and the archive,
and can be described along the lines of Derrida’s speculation about Freud’s vision
of the future: “As Freud might say (this would be his thesis), there is no future
without the specter of the oedipal violence that inscribes the suppression into
the archontic institution of the archive, in the position, the autoposition or the
hetero-position of the one and of the Unique” (81).
Further, there is a parallelism between Derrida’s ambivalent concept of
history, where chronology is both recognized and displaced, and Borges’s
perception of history, where the notion of continuity and a questioning of
chronology coexist. The narrator in “Deutsches Requiem,” for instance, asserts
that “La historia de los pueblos registra una continuidad secreta” (Obras 1:577)
[“the history of nations records a secret continuity” (233)].25 In “El pudor de la
historia” [“The Modesty of History”] on the other hand, any idea of chronol-
ogy appears to be deconstructed: “Tácito no percibió la Crucifixión, aunque la
registra su libro” (Obras 2:132) [“Tacitus did not perceive the crucifixion,
although his book recorded it” (246)].26 In a likewise paradoxical fashion,
whereas the Emperor tries to abolish the past, destroying the books and
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The very process of building is guided by the text written by one scholar
who “drew a comparison in the most exhaustive way” (155) between the Great
Wall of China and the Tower of Babel, which emphasizes that no work is cre-
ated in isolation from already existent texts. Whereas, as told in Genesis 11,
the building project failed, the city was abandoned and the people scattered
when their language became subverted; the Great Wall alone would provide
for the first time in the history of mankind “a secure foundation of a new
Tower of Babel” (156). Ironically, the edifice may be completed, as a scholar
predicts, only when it becomes a new Tower of Babel, the biblical myth where
displacement is embodied in a symbol traditionally associated with a wild
enterprise that brings disaster and disorder. Along the same lines, Bakhtin
uses an image of the Tower of Babel in his reference to the multiple linguistic
and extra-linguistic influences that inevitably contribute to the creation of any
literary work/utterance: “Along with the internal contradictions inside the
objects itself, the prose writer witnesses the unfolding of social heteroglossia
surrounding the object; the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes on around
any object; the dialectics of the object are interwoven with the social dialogue
surrounding it” (278). Evoking Bakhtin’s observation, the wall in Kafka’s text
manifests the “vast work” of fiction to be both continuity and a fragment, where
the notions of displacement and dialogue converge.
Whereas for Kafka, displacement as a narrative strategy is a way to build
an intrinsic connection between intellectual quest, existential experience and
an illustration of the dynamic presence of language in human consciousness and
acts, in Borges’s essay displacement and dialogue interrelate in the expression
of the author’s aesthetic and philosophical concerns. Indeed, the narrator’s
meditations in “La muralla y los libros” appear in response to the existent text:
“Leí, días pasados, que el hombre que ordenó la edificación de la casi infinita
muralla china fue aquel Primer Emperador, Shin Huang Ti, que asimismo dis-
puso que se quemaron todos los libros anteriores a él. Que las dos vastas opera-
ciones—las quinientas a seiscientas leguas de piedra opuestas a los bárbaros, la
rigurosa abolición de la historia, es decir del pasado—procedieran de una per-
sona y fueran de algún modo sus atributos, inexplicablemente me satisfizo y, a
la vez, me inquietó. Indagar las razones de esa emoción es el fin de esta nota” (Obras
2:11; italics added) [“I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erec-
tion of the almost infinite wall of China was the first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti,
who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned. That these two vast
operations-the five to six hundred leagues of stone opposing the barbarians, the
rigorous abolition of history, that is of the past—should originate in one person
04.qxd 29/8/07 6:21 PM Page 104
and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time,
disturbed me. To investigate the reasons for that emotion is the purpose of this
note.” (186)].
Furthermore, his ludic analysis of the myth, he explicitly refers to the wall
as “la segunda cara del mito” (Obras 2:11) [“the second part of the myth”
(187)], he has read about manifests displacement as a movement born from the
dialogue that includes both the dissemination, and the transformation of other
texts. His thoughts also can be seen as an artistic illustration of the concept of
“understanding,” which, according to Bakhtin, is a dialogical activity. As this
critic observes, “Understanding and response are dialectically merged and
mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other” (282). In
this way, Borges’s essay inspired by Kafka’s parable, allows us to suggest a pos-
sible compatibility between a modified deconstructionist concept of displace-
ment, associated with dissemination and transformation and the concept of a
dialogical discourse, where meaning is not exhaustive, but infinitely incomplete.
In Borges’s “El sueño de Coleridge” and “La muralla y los libros,” both the
architectural structures and the notion of place as a physical locality serve as
points of departure for an artistic exploration of the aesthetic work, history and
dreams as interrelated realms. These three phenomena operate by the common
mechanism of displacement through disseminating and transforming move-
ments, which are also required for their interpretation.
In “El sueño de Coleridge,” displacement as a mechanism of dream-work
both evokes and deviates from Freud’s original concept. In Borges’s essay, as in
Freud’s psychoanalysis, displacement has both distorting and creative functions,
and it is used as the narrative strategy in the attempted exploration of dream-
work. In contrast to Freud, who viewed the interpretation of the displacement
as a means of clarifying and furthering the understanding of dream-work and
the operation of the human psyche, Borges’s essay implicitly suggests that
dreams exemplify complexity, rather then offer clarifications, and can acquire
infinite and unpredictable forms. Dreams transcend the limits of the rational,
and therefore their mechanisms can be explained only in terms of magic.
Whereas “El sueño de Coleridge” allows one to compare and contrast
Borges’s and Freud’s vision of dreams, “La muralla y los libros” makes it possi-
ble to relate the views expressed in the essay with Derrida’s notions of “repres-
sion,” “archive,” and “textual displacement,” which are informed by his creative
reading of Freud.
The building of the Great Wall of China as an apparent alternative to burnt
books reflects the notion of displacement as dissemination and transformation
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·5·
DISPLACEMENT AND THE DIVIDED
SELF IN CORTÁZAR ’ S STORIES
Hungarian beggar with whom she dreams of reconciling on a bridge over the
Danube river in Budapest. This place symbolizes the common duality of both
the city and the protagonist.8 The bridge connects the two parts of the
Hungarian capital, Buda “aristocrática y rica” [“aristocratic and rich”] and Pest
“industrial y obrera” [“industrial and working”] (Lavaud 75). A similar appar-
ently antithetical relationship is maintained within a divided self: Alina Reyes/
Budapest beggar.9 The symbolic nature of both the city’s name and that of the
protagonist (Alina “la reina” [“a queen”] (429)/beggar), both of which harbor
oppositions, makes geographical and subjective dimensions converge. In
addition, Alina’s references to her self in spatial terms as “la lejana” (the one
who is far away) point to the affinity between the notions of self and territory
(e.g. urban space). An essential overlap between real, imaginary and symbolic
spatialities obtains meaning through the operation of the map of human mind.
Thus, the bridge as an architectural construction, inseparable from its
metaphorical functioning as the protagonist’s divided self in Cortázar’s text,
disrupts any fixed or static notions of subjectivity and spatiality.10
As “a place-of-conflict” (Heidegger 79) which “gathers to itself in its own
way earth and sky” (Heidegger 153), the bridge evokes Freud’s definition of
displacement, first in the protagonist’s dream and than in the day-dream of
Cortázar’s fiction.11 It is a place of transition Alina strives to reach in her dream-
thoughts, which make prominent the process of self-division.12 Experiencing
alienation and distress from her fashionable life in Buenos Aires, she obsessively
thinks about a meeting with the poor and physically abused Budapest woman
on the bridge: “Idea que vuelve como vuelve Budapest, creer en la mendiga de
Budapest donde habrá tanto puente y nieve que rezuma” (431) [“An idea that
recurs just as Budapest always recurs, to believe in the beggar in Budapest
where they’ll have lots of bridges and percolating snow” (21)]. In an act of psy-
chic displacement, accompanied by de-centeredness and shifting associations,
Alina insistently identifies herself with “la lejana” in her day-dream which
primarily brings her to the bridge: “Me digo: ‘Ahora estoy cruzando un puente
helado, ahora la nieve me entra por los zapatos rotos’” (430) [“I say to myself,
‘Now I’m crossing a bridge, it’s all frozen, now the snow’s coming in through
my shoes’ (19)”].
Further, she subordinates her life to the realization of her dream: “lo sigo por
gusto, por saber adónde va, para enterarme si Luis Mariá me lleva a Budapest,
si nos casamos y le pido que me lleve a Budapest. Más fácil salir a buscar ese
puente, salir en busca mía y encontrarme como ahora, porque ya he andado la
mitad del puente entre gritos y aplausos . . . como si esto tuviera sentido entre
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and Budapest), turns out to be reduced.23 Though the fantastic twist, the desired
exchange of identities takes place, Buenos Aires and Budapest, as well as Alina-
“la reina” (429) and Alina-beggar, remain foreign lands for the protagonist.
Alina’s diary exemplifies the poetics of displacement, as an ‘unshakable’
bridge between Alina and her ‘true’ divided self. Her way to obtain fulfillment
lies through literary self-expression. The protagonist’s discourse turns out to be
determining, rather than reflecting or portraying, the character’s psychic reality:
her inner split. Indeed, functioning as a “self-narrative” (Steedman 28), Alina’s
writings address what is impossible to represent—the marginal and/or repressed.
Writing a diary becomes a way to get possession of her ‘self,’ the missing part of
her life. This diary could be considered an instance of an attempt “to discover . . .
a sense of unified selfhood,” (Waugh 6) which, as feminists would argue, women
as well as oppressed and marginalized groups have lost (see Stanley,
pp. 41–60). Indeed, both the Alina who lives in spiritual exile in Buenos Aires
and the beggar who consistently suffers from humiliation can be included in
these categories. Alina, for instance, confesses: “Estoy sola entre esas gentes sin
sentido” (431) [“I am alone among all these people without sensitivity” (19)].
Likewise, in her imagination, the Budapest beggar is alone and unprotected:
“A veces sé que tiene frío, que sufre, que le pegan.” (429) [“At times I know
that she’s cold, that she suffers, that they beat her” (18)].24 While early references
to the ill-treated woman allow one to distinguish between her and Alina Reyes,
in Alina’s further meditations their identities become inerchangeable: “Puedo
solamente odiarla tanto, aborrecer las manos que la tiran al suelo y también a
ella, a ella todavía más porque le pegan, porque soy yo y le pegan” (429) [“I can
only hate her so much, detest the hands that throw her to the ground and her
as well, her even more because they beat her, because I am I and they beat her”
(19)]. As Eliane Lavaud observes, in these writings “la frontera entre lo vivido
y lo imaginario se hace cada vez más frágil, más sutil” (69) [“the boundary
between the lived and the imagined every time becomes more fragile, more
subtle”]. Finally, the ambiguous use of pronouns makes it impossible to distin-
guish between the two sides of Alina’s self: “La pasaba a aquella, a mí tan
lejos . . . Porque a mí, a la lejana, no la quieren” (430) [“It was happening to that
one, to me far off . . . Because in the distances they do not love me-her”] (19).
This mixture of first and third person pronouns both reveals the notion of self
to be subversive and makes one associate presence with displacement.
Involving dissemination and transformation and producing a turbulence of
signifiers, writing appears to be the only home for Alina’s displaced self. Her
diary, which both thematizes displacement and adopts it as a narrative strategy
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“Cervantes,” from the room next door, where, he is informed, lives a single
woman.26 In spite of this information, Petrone is annoyed for two consecutive
nights by the crying of a baby: “No se engañaba, el llanto venía de la pieza
de al lado. El sonido se oía a través de la puerta condenada, se localizaba en ese
sector de la habitación al que correspondía los pies de la cama” (112) [“There
was no deception; the cry came from there, from the room next to his. A sound
came through the sealed door to the sector of his room that corresponded to
his bed’s legs”]. The presence of the locked door in his claustrophobic room,
which in the author’s own words “parecía una celda, la celda de una cárcel”
(108) [“looked like a cell, a cell in a prison”], awakens Petrone’s imagination
and allows him to hear this cry, the origin of which remains mysterious till the
end of the narrative: “De no estar allí la puerta condenada, el llanto no hubiera
vencido las fuertes espaldas de la pared, nadie hubiera sabido que en la pieza de
al lado estaba llorando un niño” (277) [“If the shut off door were not there,
nobody would know about the child—this cry would not overcome thick
walls”].27 Cortázar comments on the influence of the sealed door on the
creation of the strange atmosphere in the other room: “De golpe, la noción de
por qué estaba condenada la puerta . . . le creaba a la otra habitación un ambi-
ente extraño” (107) [“Suddenly, the idea of why the door was sealed . . .; it was
creating a weird aura behind it in another room”].28
The presence of the closed door and the childhood motif generated by the
mechanism of displacement in Cortázar’s story reminds one of H. G. Wells’s
“The Door in the Wall” and suggests new dimensions of the classic metaphor
that both situate the Argentine author within a continuum of the world liter-
ature and underline his individual talent. In both texts the door marks an alter-
native, “the world of difference,” between “the busy life of a schoolboy and the
infinite leisure of a child” (Wells 149) in Wells’s text or between the life of the
salesman and the child-self in Cortázar’s story. Petrone’s longing for the baby’s
cry the last day he stays in the hotel illustrates José Ortega’s observation that
in “La puerta condenada,” the door-metaphor is “el vehículo que sirve para
apuntar hacia . . . otra realidad, es la puerta (metaforizada ya en el título)
que abre el anodino mundo de Petrone a una desconocida y enriquecedora
dimensión de la realidad” (187) [“the guide towards . . . another reality, it is a
door (already metaphorized in the title) which opens Petrone’s innocuous
world to an unfamiliar and enriching dimension of reality”].29 Indeed, after hav-
ing been disturbed by the baby’s cry for two nights, Petrone misses it and can
be relieved only by imagining that he hears it the night after the woman’s depar-
ture: “Extrañaba el llanto del niño, y cuando mucho más tarde lo oyó, débil pero
05.qxd 29/8/07 6:24 PM Page 116
before he goes to sleep. Functioning as “a trap and a site of alienation” (Pile 160),
which according to Lacan implies “a moment of misrecognition” (Lacan 160),
the presence of the mirror in the room indicates a possibility of the self-division,
“an irrecoverable split” (Freud qtd. in Pile 161) or “gap” (Lacan qtd. in Pile 161)
that the protagonist both witnesses and displays himself. Thus, evoking both the
psychoanalytical and phenomenological approaches to the poetics of space,
according to which houses and rooms “are in us as much as we are in them”
(Bachelard XXXIII), the setting of Petrone’s room implicitly introduces a topos
of divided identity, one of the thematic focuses of the story.31
The presence of the locked door and its location evokes the protagonist’s
imagination, which exercises displacement, illustrates the lack of self-integrity
and points to an epistemological gap in knowledge about the human self. The
discovery of the door, for example, leads Petrone, for the first time, to draw an
imaginary parallel between himself and his neighbor: “Petrone imaginó que del
otro lado habría tambien un ropero y que la señora de la habitación pensaría
lo mismo de la puerta” (276) [“Petrone imagined that on the other side, there
was also a wardrobe, and that the woman in the contiguous room would have
similar thoughts about the door”].
The imaginary symmetry between two rooms and their inhabitants
culminates when Petrone mimics the crying he hears (or imagines that he
hears) from the next door at night: “se pegó a ella (la puerta) . . . y acercando
la boca a las tablas de pino empezó a imitar en falsete, imperceptiblemente, un
quejido como el que venía de otro lado . . .” (280) [“he leaned against the
door . . ., and bringing his mouth close to the pine slots, he started imitating
imperceptibly, in falsetto, the moan, which was coming from the other room”].
The facts that the crying from the other room stops when the protagonist imi-
tates it, the woman’s departure from the hotel the next morning, and the rep-
etition of the same sound coming from the empty room next night all allow
critics to consider this text as the variation of the traditional fantastic fear-ghost
for stories.32 According to Ana Hernández del Castillo, the atmosphere of the
hotel suggests in itself the idea of “suppression” and anticipates the presence of
the mother and child whom the protagonist hears behind the blocked door”
(51–52).33 Petrone’s own interpretation of the nature of the crying he hears the
first night points to the split of his neighbour’s self and suggests that she loses
a part of her self in his act of transcendence-imitation, and that this could be
a reason for a woman’s sudden departure. Indeed, the protagonist blames the
noise on the woman, who in hysterics, in his opinion, imitates the weeping of
a baby and then tries to calm the nonexistent baby down: “La mujer estaba
05.qxd 29/8/07 6:24 PM Page 118
the agency, was drawing posters, was coming back to eat, was drinking a cup of
coffee which Laura served him with smile. They were going often to the cinema,
to the forests, were becoming more and more familiar with Paris.”]. Likewise,
Laura is not free from thoughts about Nico, who frequently visits her in a form
of a nightmare. As the narrator observes, “Soñaba mucho, pero la pesadilla era
distinta, Luis la reconocía entre muchos otros movimientos de su cuerpo, palabras
confusas o breves gritos de animal que se ahoga” (228) [“She dreamt often, but
nightmares could be recognized immediately. Luis recognized them among many
other movements of her body, confused words and the short screams of a suffo-
cated animal”]. Thus, the characters’ well-being in France is an artifact that inter-
nalizes the syntax of displacement.
The life of Luis and Laura in Paris is explicitly compared to that of the
displaced word, a word in brackets both separated and connected with the main
phrase: “No quedaba más que una parva libertad condicional, la irrisión de vivir
a la manera de una palabra entre paréntesis, divorciada de la frase principal de
la que sin embargo es casi siempre sostén y explicación” (214) [“No more was
left than an appearance of freedom, a mirage of life, like a word in brackets,
divorced from the main clause, for which, nevertheless, it almost always pro-
vides support and explanation.”]. This reference is a metaphorical way of estab-
lishing a hierarchy between Paris and Buenos Aires, with Buenos Aires as a
dominant. Indeed, the abundance of toponymic references to Buenos Aires
indicates its presence in the protagonists’ life in Paris, a description of which,
on the contrary, is reduced to the mentioning of “la rue de Richelieu” (214) and
the train station where the dead Nico is supposed to arrive. Thus, in spite of
the fact that the action takes place there, Paris remains a vague, distanced con-
struct which functions as a chronotope, where the present appears to be reduced
to the blank, to displacement. This representation of Paris stresses the protag-
onist’s alienation in this city and illustrates the futility of attempts to repress
memories and to obtain life free from the constraints of the past.
Buenos Aires enters a fictional world of Cortázar’s text through the
epistolary bridge of a mother’s letters, and the characters’ reaction to them and
to their own memories. As if illustrating Bachelard’s observation about the supe-
riority of the house of childhood, “most firmly fixed in our memories” (30), this
urban space has been always vividly present in the protagonists’ life although
they avoid mentioning it: “No es que a Luis no le gustara acordarse de Buenos
Aires. Más bien se trataba de evadir nombres (las personas, evadidas hacía ya
tanto tiempo, pero los nombres, los verdaderos fantasmas que son los nombres, esa
duración pertinaz)” (214; italics added) [“It was not that Luis did not like to recall
05.qxd 29/8/07 6:24 PM Page 121
Buenos Aires. It was more an intent to avoid names (people, avoided already
for such a long time, but names, the true ghosts of enduring persistence)”]. The
mentioning of the recognizable places of Buenos Aires functions as a metonymy,
a rhetorical mechanism of displacement that brings the familiar urban space
into the protagonists’ lives and indicates the hidden nostalgia they experience:
“Rivadavia al seis mil quinientos, el caserón de Flores, mamá, el café de San
Martín y Corrientes donde lo esperaban a veces los amigos, donde el mazagrán
tenía un leve gusto a aceite de ricino” (213) [“Rivadavia, number sixty five hun-
dred, a mansion in Flores, mamá, a café on San Martín and Corrientes where
sometimes his friends waited for him, where sweet coffee had a slight taste of
castor oil”]. Escape from this city of the protagonists’ childhood turns out to be
impossible: “San Martín, Rivadavia, pero esos nombres eran también imá-
genes de calles y de cosas” (213) [“San Martín, Rivadavia, but these names were
also images of streets and things”]. The constant presence of Buenos Aires in
Luis’s and Laura’s Parisian life exemplifies incompleteness and dislocation,
subverts the measure of distance in time and space in the representation of
chronotopes, and emphasizes the protagonists’ condition of exile.
Likewise, the ambiguous reaction evoked in Luis and Laura by his mother’s
letters from Buenos Aires illustrates the characters’ split identities and nostal-
gia from which they suffer.36 Being “siempre una alteración del tiempo, un
pequeño escándolo inofensivo dentro del orden de cosas” (213) [“always an inter-
ruption in time, a little inoffensive scandal in the order of things”], these writ-
ings both point to and undermine the distance between Paris and Buenos Aires:
“Cada vez que la portera le entregaba un sobre, a Luis le bastaba reconocer la
minúscula cara familiar de José San Martín para comprender que otra vez más
habría de franquear el puente” (213–214; italics added) [“Each time when the
superintendent handed him an envelope, it was sufficient for Luis to have just
a look at the stamp with the familiar portrait of José de San Martín to realize that
once again he would have to cross the bridge”]. The mentioning of the bridge,
associated with the passageway from one dimension to another (Paris/Buenos
Aires, present/past) will later reappear in Cortázar’s Rayuela, as if exemplifying
Morelli’s metapoetical observation that one book is “puente vivo” for the other.
Whereas in this story it evokes the burden of memory, the feeling of guilt that
connects the present and the past, Paris and Buenos Aires; in the novel, the
bridge no longer has any emphatically ethical connotation, but rather obtains
a prominent metaphysical dimension in Oliveira’s discourse.
In both narratives, Rayuela and “La carta de mamá,” the image of the bridge
is associated with communication and alienation. La Maga refers to bridges when
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she talks about Oliveira’s inability to love: the bridge between the present and
the past which the mothers’ letters construct transforms Laura into an
“ajena”/“foreigner” to Luis, who is tormented by his feelings of guilt for his
dead brother. Believing that they make his present life to loose its ground, Luis
prefers immediately to respond to and displace these writings, as if to close the
door to the world of his childhood, which he wants to forget. This does not, how-
ever, succeed, and his intention, as well as his life in Paris (and Paris itself for
him) functions as a mask he deliberately puts on himself in order to conceal
(from himself and others) his attachment to the city of his memories and the
anxieties that they cause. Indeed, in the narrator’s discourse, the distinction
between Luis’s letters, his life and the streets of Paris turns out to be subverted
in the common action of “scratching out” that emphasizes their common arti-
ficiality: “Cada nueva carta insinuaba por un rato (porque después él las borraba
en el acto mismo de contestarlas cariñosamente) que su libertad duramente con-
quistada, esa nueva vida . . . cesaba de justificarse, perdía pie, se borraba como el
fondo de las calles mientras el autobus corría por la rue de Richelieu.” (213–214;
italics added) [“Every new letter reminded him for a moment (precisely for a
moment, because afterwards he scratched them out by the very act of a gentle
response) that his freedom, conquered in such a tough way, that this new life,
cut off by pitiless scissors from the tangled ball which others called his life, was
no longer justified. It was losing sense, its grounds were erasing as asphalt under
the wheels of a bus which was moving along la rue de Richelieu.”]. Though the
letters return Luis to the painful past as “un duro rebote de pelota” (213) [“a hard
bounce of a ball”], his life without them is unbearable: “No las detestaba; si le
hubieran faltado habría sentido caer sobre él la libertad como un peso inso-
portable. Las cartas de mamá le traían un tácito perdón . . . tendían el puente por
donde era posible seguir pasando” (219; italics added) [“He did not hate them;
if he had not received them, he would feel his freedom falling on him like an
unbearable weight. Mamá’s letters were bringing him a salient forgiveness . . .
they were throwing a bridge across which it was possible to continue walking”].37
Likewise, Laura is always waiting for the letters and rereads them many times:
“Las cartas de mamá interesaban siempre a Laura, . . . las releía” (216) [“She was
always interested in letters from mama . . . reread them”]. In this way, the char-
acters’ emotional response to the letters they receive emphasize their existen-
tial displacement in both Paris and Buenos Aires; the latter, which they
deliberately left, dominates their life abroad.
A representation of Paris and Buenos Aires, which questions the presence/
absence dichotomy (and subverts both geographical and temporal distances),
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forms a parallel to the relationship between the protagonists and the dead Nico.38
Both the displacement of the past/Buenos Aires as well as the scratching out
of Nico’s name, whose arrival the mother’s last letter announces, turn out to
be illusions. The nervousness that Luis and Laura experience when his
mother suddenly starts mentioning Nico in her letters, as if he were alive,
emphasizes the characters’ inner split and manifests their life in Paris as a
more apparent then real liberation. Indeed, though tempted to consider the
mother’s mentioning of their late brother Nico’s arrival as a mistake, a mis-
spelling to their cousin’s name “Víctor,” neither Luis nor Laura, from whom at
first he decided to conceal the letter, cannot get rid of their thoughts about his
brother and the pain they evoke. As if displaying that his life is dependent on
the twists and turns of language rather than on logic and rationality, his mother’s
mentioning of Nico makes Luis feel that there is not enough room in the
apartment for two, and converts Laura into an “ajena”/foreign person: “Laura
estaba en París, pero cada carta de mamá la defínía como ajena” (219) [“Laura
was in Paris, but each letter from mamá, defined her as a stranger”].39 The idea
of a linguistic displacement as an escape from the emotional torture of Nico’s
presence is explicitly thematized: “En la agencia . . . releyó la carta, . . . sin
nada extraordinario fuera del párrafo donde se había equivocado de nombre.
Pensó si no podría borrar la palabra, reemplazar Nico por Víctor, sencillamente
reemplazar el error por la verdad, y volver con la carta a Laura para que Laura la
leyera” (216) [“At the advertising bureau . . . he reread the letter, . . . without
noticing anything extraordinary except for the paragraph where she had mixed
up a name. He even thought that it could be possible to erase the word, to change
Nico to Víctor, simply substitute the truth for a mistake, and to come back home
with the letter for Laura to read”].
All attempts to scratch out Nico, however, both from the letter and from
the characters’ memories, turn out to be doomed to failure, for as Luis asserts
with pain: “ ‘Si se pudiera romper y tirar el pasado como el borrador de una carta
o de un libro. Pero ahí queda siempre, manchando la copia en limpio, y yo creo
que eso es el verdadero futuro’ ” (214) [“ ‘If it would be possible to break and
throw away the past like a draft of a letter or a book. But it stays forever, con-
taminates the clean copy, and I believe, it is a true future’ ”.]. Indeed, in spite
of avoiding any mentioning of Nico, whose name has become “[u]n lento ter-
ritorio prohibido” (217) [ “a forbidden territory”], his presence is a constant in
Luis’ mind. This exemplifies Freud’s observation about silence being an efficient
way of preserving active memory. As Bachelard also observes, more telling in
many ways than the dialogue itself, silence allows “an entire past come to dwell
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in a new house” (5).40 The silence that surrounds his name in Paris has an
oxymoronic effect of bringing Nico into presence: “Lo raro era que Laura no
lo nombrara nunca, y que por eso también él lo nombrara, que Nico no fuera
ni siquiera el difunto, ni siquiera el cuñado muerto, el hijo de mamá . . . Laura
seguía sin nombrarlo, y él se plegaba a su silencio por cobardía, sabiendo que
en el fondo ese silencio lo agraviaba por lo que tenía de reproche, de arrepen-
timiento, de algo que empezaba a parecerse a la traición” (221). [“The strange
thing was that Laura never mentioned him, and therefore he also never did.
Nico was not even a deceased, not even a dead brother-in-law, a mamá’s
son. . . . Laura continued not to mention him, and he, Luis, from cowardice,
joined her in this silence, knowing that in the depth of his soul this silence
offended him because it had to do with a reproach, with repentance, with some-
thing that was starting to appear similar to a betrayal”]. As Susana Jakfalvi
observes, “[e]s tan inútil vivir negando la presencia fantasmal de Nico, el Otro,
que la vida de Luis y Laura se desarrolla en función de esa ausencia, que está
presente en todos sus actos, en todas sus intenciones” (38) [“It is so useless to
live negating the ghostly presence of Nico, of the Other, that Luis’s and Laura’s
lives evolve around his absence, an absence that is present in all their acts and
intentions”]. Thus, although Luis tries to apply his rules of symmetry and chess-
playing in order to dismiss Nico, his attempt can only be a pretended success:
“Nico iba a desembarcar en Francia, en París, en una casa donde se
fingía exquisitamente haberlo olvidado, pobrecito” (225) [“he [Nico] would arrive
in France, in Paris, at the house where everybody skillfully pretended to forget
about him, poor thing”].
The futility of their attempts to displace the dead Nico’s presence culmi-
nates in his arrival, at least as perceived by the protagonists. It is often inter-
preted by the critics as a fantastic element in the story.41 As Rodríguez-Luis
observes, “[a]t that moment the hesitation that is the fantastic’s most charac-
teristic feature appears and takes hold of the narrative” (80). I suggest that
Laura’s and Luis’s preparations for Nico’s arrival is a culminating expression of
the inner division that the protagonists experience, caused by the impossibil-
ity of exile from the feelings of guilt which cannot be displaced, in spite of the
attempt to change the territory.42 Moreover, the protagonists’ expectations of
the meeting with Nico, and their discussion of the impressions from it without
mentioning Nico’s name, subverts any distinction between Nico, Luis and
Laura: their aspirations to escape their memories leave the protagonists doomed
to a ‘ghost’ life that of “a memory trace[s]” which carry “sign of something miss-
ing” (Garber 129). Indeed, their presence in Paris is pointing toward the
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absence, their lives turn out to be empty sets, brackets containing an absence.
Ironically, it is Nico’s arrival that breathes life into the couple’s ghost-like
existence: “Quizá no todo estaba perdido, quizá la nueva vida llegara a ser real-
mente otra cosa que ese simulacro de sonrisas y de cine francés” (229) [“Perhaps
not everything was lost, perhaps the new life would indeed become something
else other then this mirage of phantom smiles and French cinema”].
The expressions of the feelings of guilt reach their climax when both Luis and
Laura, independently, come to meet Nico at the train station and try to identify
him among the people who just have arrived in Paris.43 As Luis observes, “Uno
sobre todo se parecía a Nico. . . . Y Laura debía haber pensado lo mismo” (223)
[“One . . . indeed looked like Nico. . . . And Laura was probably thinking the same
thing”]. The conversation between the protagonists after they have come back
from the train station, makes explicit their conscious incorporation of Nico’s pres-
ence in their lives: “—¿ A vos no te parece que está mucho más flaco?—dijo.
Laura hizo un gesto. Un brillo paralelo le bajaba por las mejillas.—Un poco—
dijo—. Uno va cambiando” (237) [“—Do you think that he has become much
thinner?—he asked. Laura made a gesture. Two shiny streams of tears were
running down her cheeks.—A little bit,—she said.—One is changing . . .”].
This act is the culminating expression of the protagonists’ anxiety, a man-
ifestation that their lives are exercises in self-deception, no less illusory then
Nico. The borders between the worlds of the dead and the living turn out to
be subverted in this dialogue, where subjectivity edits and rules experience.
Moreover, after the meeting with ‘dead’ Nico, Luis seems to copy his
brother’s possible actions: “Subió despacio (en realidad siempre subía despacio
para no fatigarse los pulmones y no toser)” (235) [“He slowly climbed up the
stairs (the truth is that he always was going up slowly, not to exhaust his lungs,
and not to cough)”]. A mention of Luis’ possible ill-health establishes an
uncanny parallel with his brother that allows the story to remain enigmatically
open-ended.44 Typically for Cortázar’s short stories, as Osvaldo López Chuhurra
observes, “[l]a dualidad difícilmente se resuelve en la unidad; se cerraría en un
vértice . . . Julio Cortázar no acostumbrado casi nunca colocar punto final”
(215) [“the duality is hardly ever resolved in unity; it closes in a vertex . . . Julio
Cortázar almost never places the final point”]. In this way, a representation of
the geographical Paris/Buenos Aires opposition and the parallels it evokes and
challenges, such as presence/absence and dead/alive dichotomies, turn out to
be illuminating manifestations of the protagonists’ divided identities, which
exercise an imaginary spatial displacement as both an expression and a conse-
quence of the ethical problem.
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CONCLUSION
With false hope of a firm foundation gone, with the world displaced by worlds
that are but versions, we face the questions how worlds are made, tested, and
known.
Nelson Goodman
Narrative worlds created by Borges and Cortázar, challenge from different, yet
ultimately related, perspectives, all attempts to define place and identity, by
means of dichotomies such as here and there, self and other, and home and
exile. While the works of both authors address a multiplicity of cultures,
languages and territories, their approaches to ‘place’ are not identical. Borges’s
elaboration of “place” suggests imagined settings for mystical experiences and
impossible objects. In his texts, place can be read as a trope that stands for the
human aspiration to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite. In
contrast, for Cortázar, place is a locality for dwelling and thinking, a starting
point for existential experiences with ethical connotations.
In Borges’s narratives, place is an infinite source of searching, dissemination
and transformation which evokes continuous displacement. A mysterious Aleph
(“El Aleph”), which can be interpreted as a manifestation of the infinite capac-
ity of revelation to acquire new forms, in fact exposes everything and nothing.1
Similarly, the circular ruins (“Las ruinas circulares”), a sacred place chosen by
the magician, leaves unresolved the mystery about the nature of the human self.
Impossible objects such as a book of sand (“El libro de arena”) that supposedly
incorporates the universe in its entirety, and a disk (“El disco”) which stands for
06.qxd 29/8/07 6:25 PM Page 130
a totality of the pagan world, are lost at the end of their respective stories.
Moreover, displacement, as both a mechanism of dream and a characteristic of
their manifestation such as the ruined palace “Xanadu” or its poetic equivalent,
the lyric fragment “Kubla Khan” (“El sueño de Coleridge”), indicates a mirror
relationship between inside (mental) and outside (empirical) worlds as well as
between factually existing locations and openly imaginary. The equivalence
between the palace and the poetic image (“El sueño de Coleridge”), the wall and
the books points to their common onthology: fiction. Thus, for Borges, place
turns out to be displaced into a “meta” concept. Beyond the physical and tan-
gible, it is an object of dream, thought and interpretation rather than a mater-
ial locality. By bringing to bear on various philosophical, anthropological and
literary discourses, I have mapped out the dynamic of place and displacement
in these two authors’ narratives, and I have been able to locate several “sities”
of Borges’s writings within Cortázar’s fictional universe.
Borges’s approach to place as a metaphysical and metafictional construct
was influential for Cortázar, particularly as evidenced in the image of Buenos
Aires created in Rayuela. I have demonstrated the significance of Borges’s
Fervor de Buenos Aires in the gestation of “metaphysical-artistic” Buenos Aires
in Rayuela, as well as Cortázar’s swerving from Borges’s conceptions. In his early
poetry, Borges fashions an overtly “metaphysical” Buenos Aires whose repre-
sentation is informed by a fusion of local color and his commitment to philo-
sophical idealism. In Rayuela Cortázar takes metaphysical conceptions akin to
those of Borges as an ingredient of his own literary world imbued with carni-
valesque elements. In Cortázar’s novel both carnivalesque and metaphysical
aspects of the city exemplify the author’s despair in the world he cannot accept
and function as a mask of anxiety. Cortázar’s ludic references to motifs and sym-
bols recurrent in Borges’s works (such as human life determined by literary sce-
narios, Pascal’s notion of the sphere, word-games, the labyrinth, and so on) also
emphasize dialogic relationships between these writers works that both display
Borges’s influence on Cortázar’s narratives, and allow a reader to appreciate
these writers’ unique contributions to literature.
Further, both Borges’s and Cortázar’s texts blur boundaries between overtly
imaginary and recognizable locations. Inspired by such canonical texts as
Appolodorus’s Library, More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Wells’ The Time
Machine, Borges chooses exotic locations as in “Utopia del hombre que está
cansado” or in “La casa de Asterión” which are gradually transformed to the ter-
rifyingly familiar ones. Cortázar’s narratives incorporate apparently recognizable
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conclusion 131
objects, such as the City in 62: Modelo para armar or the ship in Los Premios. The
capacities and limitations of the characters, however, gradually mutate these sur-
roundings into extraordinary locations that share dystopian dominant. This
vision of utopia/dystopia as no longer “nowhere” and of familiar places as increas-
ingly displaced can be seen as an artistic manifestation of the authors’ common
experience of displacement and emotional exile.2
In Borges’s narratives physical displacement is a point of departure for his
elaboration of his vision of space as a function of time where present, past, and
future coexist; in Cortázar’s texts physical displacement can be read as trope for
psychological self-division; it undermines the inside/outside opposition and intro-
duces an ethical dimension. Both Paris and Buenos Aires, in Rayuela and “Cartas
de mamá,” are associated with the territorial and emotional exile of the protag-
onists. The Budapest bridge is the place for the manifestation of Alina Reyes’s
inner self-division which is never overcome (“Lejana”). And the door in “La puer-
ta condenada” makes it possible for Petrone to witness the splitting of the inner
world of his neighbor, and to manifest his own self-division. Moreover, being
aware of their displacement, Cortázar’s characters search for their own ‘place,’
which is an unreachable, idealized location associated with inner harmony and
the recovery of their lost integrity. Oliveira, for example, is desperately looking
for a center, a mysterious place/object he can hardly define (Rayuela); Alina
dreams about the bridge where she will be able to meet her double (“Lejana”);
Juan idealizes “la ciudad,” which in his imagination is a happy alternative to real
cities such as London, Paris and Vienna (62: Modelo para armar); the passengers
consider the ship Malcolm (Los premios) a place for rest from the everyday prob-
lems they face in Buenos Aires; and Luis and Laura from “Cartas de mamá” des-
perately strive to escape a feeling of guilt. Place and displacement are consistently
connected with the existential/moral search for integrity, truth, “lo abierto”
(Cortázar 61) that makes the ethical quests prominent in his works.
Both Borges’s and Cortázar’s narratives can be productively read in an
implicit dialogue with philosophical and anthropological approaches to place.
A suggested study of Borges’s “El Aleph,” “Las ruinas circulares,” “El disco” and
“El libro de arena,” for example, allows one to discover a new dimension in the
influence of the kabbalistic thought on Borges’s writing, as well as in his insight-
ful interpretation of the Kabbalah, one of the sources of inspiration for his
literary themes. Evoking a vision of place offered by Jewish mystics, these sto-
ries allow the reader to distinguish one of the patterns prominent in Borges’s
narratives: his depiction of place as an artistic elaboration of revelation that
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lacks in single unequivocal meaning and displays infinite capacity for taking
new forms.
An analysis of Borges’s “La casa de Asterion” in light of Foucault’s notion
of heterotopia made it possible to suggest a structure lacking in a center to be
characteristic for such a place, a feature that does not appear in Foucault’s own
analysis. The use of Freud’s original concept of displacement as a heuristic tool
for literary analysis of “El sueño de Coleridge” makes it possible to compare and
contrast the expressed vision of dreams with that offered by the father of psy-
choanalysis. Whereas for Freud, the interpretation of displacement as a mech-
anism of dreams is a tool for understanding the work of the human psychic
apparatus, Borges’s essay presents dreams and their mechanisms as enigmatic,
and resistant to any definitive analysis.
Informed by his readings of Freud, Derrida’s notion of repression as archive
turns out to be compatible with a mirror-relationship between the actions of
displacement as a mental mechanism and as an instrument of political control
in “La muralla y los libros.” In his notion of archive, the French philosopher
maintains the parallel between mental and historical realms, originally intro-
duced by Freud. Borges’s essay can be seen as an extension of this connection,
for it implicitly suggests that the mechanism of dream work has its analogy in
a circular nature of history, whose processes are re-inscription/repetition and
trace, as well as in the perception of the aesthetic phenomenon whose inter-
pretations can never be complete and exhaustive.
In Cortázar’s texts, the notion of place as displacement responds to exis-
tentialist ideas that Borges, who “understands that personality that we praise
so much to be nothing” (Borges qtd. in Monegal 1925, 90), strongly disliked.3
The existentialist notion of exile/displacement as an experience of the return
to a person’s true self is both present in and challenged by Cortázar’s narratives.
Exile, defined by Kierkegaard and Said as an experience of “incompleteness”
and “open-endedness,” for instance, is thematized in Rayuela and “Cartas de
mama.” Said’s concept of the intellectual as traveler, a provisional guest, con-
sistently appears in Cortázar’s narratives, and it is most evidently embodied
in such characters as Persio (Los premios), Oliveira (Rayuela) and Juan (62:
Modelo para armar). According to existentialists, exile brings about reconcili-
ation between a person and his/her ‘true’ self. Cortázar’s narratives, however,
leave the very notion of ‘true’ self open-ended, most prominently in such sto-
ries as “Lejana,” “La puerta condenada,” and “Cartas de mama.” In these texts,
the notion of place as displacement is also introduced by means of subject/object
parallelism, in which both elements display divisions and a desire for integrity
which is never attained. Identity obtains a spatial focus in Cortázar’s narratives,
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conclusion 133
TRANSLATIONS
the key, which she was holding in her hand, as if it were a huge gold coin. The
concierge took their keys to hang on the stand, and started talking with the
woman about some letters. Petrone had time to notice that she was still young,
insignificant, and badly dressed, as all local women.
According to his calculations, the contract with the mosaic manufacturers
would take approximately a week. In the afternoon, Petrone hung up his cloth-
ing in the wardrobe, arranged his papers on the table, and after having taken
a bath, went out for a walk in the town-center, until it was time to go to the
office. Negotiations lasted till the end of the day, softened by coffee in “Pocitos”
and dinner in the house of the main partner. It was after 1 a.m. when they
dropped him at the hotel. He was very tired and fell asleep immediately. When
he got up, it was almost 9 a.m., and during those first minutes, when the night
dreams had not left him yet, he thought that in the middle of the night he had
been disturbed by a baby’s cry.
Before going out, he chatted with the concierge, who was speaking with a
German accent. While he was getting information about bus routes and names
of streets, his distracted glance was wondering through the hall, at the end of
which was his room and that of the lady. Between the doors, there was a
pedestal with a pitiful copy of the Venus de Milo. Another door, in the lateral
wall, led to an alcove littered with arm-chairs and newspapers, as everywhere.
When the concierge and Petrone stopped talking, the silence of the hotel
seemed to coagulate, falling like dust over the furniture and onto the floor tiles.
The elevator was rumbling unbearably, with a noise like that of rustling pages
of newspaper or the scratch of matches.
Meetings finished that evening, and Petrone took a walk through the street
18 de Julio before having dinner in one of the cafés on la plaza Independencia.
Everything was going well, and probably he could return to Buenos Aires ear-
lier then he had thought. He bought an Argentine newspaper, a pack of black
cigarettes, and slowly walked towards the hotel. He already had seen the two
films that were playing in the movie theatre next door, and he really did not
want to go any place else. The manager greeted him as he passed, and asked
whether he needed another set of linen. They chatted and smoked for a little
while, and then said good-night to each other.
Before lying down, Petrone arranged his papers that he had used during the
day, and scanned the newspaper without much interest. The silence of the hotel
was almost overwhelming, broken only for a moment by an occasionally passing
tram on Soriano street, to be followed by even more silent intervals. Calmly,
but not without impatience, he threw the newspaper into a trashcan, and
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undressed, while looking distracted in the mirror of the wardrobe. It was an old
one that blocked the door to another room. Petrone was surprised that he had
not noticed the door during his first inspection. At first, he had thought that
the building was designed to be a hotel, but then he realized that it was one of
those modest places that had been installed in old apartments or former
family offices. Indeed, in almost all the hotels where he stayed (and he had trave-
led a lot), the rooms had a sealed door, sometimes openly visible, but almost
always screened with a wardrobe, table or coat stand that, as in this case, gave
it a certain ambiguity, a bashful desire to mask its existence, as a woman who
hopes to hide her belly and her breasts with her hands. In any event, the door
was there, jutting out from behind the wardrobe. Once people had entered in
and went out from it, slammed it, closed it, gave it life which still was present
in its wood, so different from that of the walls. Petrone imagined that on the
other side, there was also a wardrobe, and that the woman in the contiguous
room would have similar thoughts about the door.
He was not very tired, but fell asleep with pleasure. He was sleeping for
three or four hours when suddenly a feeling of discomfort woke him up, as if
something had happened, something disturbing and annoying. He turned the
lamp on, saw that it was half past two in the morning, and turned it off again.
At that moment he heard a baby’s cry from the room next to his.
At first, he did not realize what it was. He then almost felt satisfied for a
moment, for it meant that there had been indeed, a baby’s cry which had not
let him rest, the night before. With everything explained, it was easier to go to
sleep again. But then he thought about something else and slowly sat up on the
bed, listening, without turning on the light. There was no deception; the cry
came from there, from the room next to his. A sound came through the sealed
door to the sector of his room that corresponded to his bed’s legs. But it was not
possible that there was a baby in the room next to his; the manager had clear-
ly told him that the lady was staying alone, and that she was spending almost
all day at work. That night she was probably taking care of a relative’s or friend’s
child—Petrone thought for a moment. But what about yesterday night? Now he
was sure that he already had heard a cry, because it was a sound, which was hard
to take for something else. It was rather a series of irregular, very weak moans,
of plaintive sobs followed by whimpering, all this was inconsistent and minimal,
as if a child were very sick. He had to be a creature of several months—newborns
scream louder, with sudden clucks and shortness of breath. For some reason,
Pertrone imagined that it was a boy, weak and sick, with a shriveled face and
quiet movements. This was moaning at night, crying timidly, without calling too
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much attention. If the shut off door were not there, nobody would know about
the child—this cry would not overcome thick walls.
In the morning Petrone thought about it for a little bit, while having
breakfast and smoking. To sleep badly was not convenient for his daily job.
He had woken up twice in the middle of the night; both times because of the
cry. The second time was worse because in addition to the cry, he had heard
a voice of a woman who was trying to calm the child down. The voice was
very low, but its anxious tone gave it a theatrical quality, a whisper which
crossed the door with such a force, as if she were shouting. The child stopped
for a moment, and then an inconsolable anguish replaced the short moan.
And again the woman was whispering incomprehensible words, maternal
magic to pacify her child, tortured by his body and his soul, by his life or by
the fear of death.
“Everything is sweet, but the manager fooled me,” thought Petrone, stepping
out of his room. He was annoyed by lies and did not conceal it. The manager,
nevertheless, was surprised.
—A boy? You probably confused him with something. There are no little
boys on this floor. In the room next to yours, a single lady stays, as I already have
told you.
Petrone hesitated before responding. Either the manager was stupidly lying,
or the hotel’s acoustics were playing an idiotic joke. The manager was looking
a bit askance at him, as if he were also annoyed by the situation. “He probably
thinks that I am too shy and that I am looking for a pretext to demand a trans-
fer to another room”—thought Petrone. It was difficult, and even senseless,
to insist, when everything was denied. He shook his shoulders and asked for a
periodical.
—I was probably dreaming—he said, annoyed by having to say this, or any
other thing.
The cabaret was boring him to death, and his two hosts were not particu-
larly enthusiastic about refreshments, so he easily pleaded fatigue, and left for
his hotel. They decided to sign the contracts the next afternoon; in essence,
he finished the business part of his trip.
It was so quiet in the reception that Petrone found himself going on tiptoe.
There was an afternoon newspaper for him near the bed, and also a letter from
Buenos Aires. He immediately recognized his wife’s handwriting.
Before going to bed, he looked for a while at the wardrobe and the jutted
out part of the door. Probably if he had put his two suitcases on the top of the
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wardrobe, thus blocking the door, there would be less noise from the contigu-
ous room. As always, at this time, there was silence. The hotel fell asleep, both
people and things were sleeping. But to ill-humored Petrone, everything seemed
to be the opposite. It appeared to him that everything was awake, eagerly
awake in the middle of the silence. His unexpressed anxiety possibly was trans-
ferring to the house, its people, lying awake, hidden in their rooms. What a pile
of nonsense, indeed.
Petrone was almost not surprised, when a baby’s cry woke him at 3 o’clock
in the morning. Sitting up in his bed, he was asking himself whether it would be
better to call for a night watchman to have a witness that it was impossible to sleep
in this room. A child was crying very softly. His cry was imperceptible, but Petrone
knew that it was there, that it would not stop, and that it would increase again.
Ten or twenty of the slowest seconds passed, then something grunted briefly, and
a hardly perceivable squeak lasted sweetly till it broke into a shrilling cry.
Having lit a cigarette, he asked himself whether he should knock on the
wall politely, so that the woman would calm down her child. And suddenly he
realized that he didn’t believe either in her or in her child—he didn’t believe,
no matter how strange it might seem, that the manager had lied to him. Then
he heard woman’s voice, exhorting a child softly and persistently, drowning his
crying. She was lulling a child to sleep, calming him down, and Petrone imag-
ined her sitting on a bed, or rocking a cradle, or holding a baby in her arms. But
no matter how much he tried, he could not imagine the child, as if the affir-
mation of the manager was stronger than the reality to which he was listening.
Little by little, while time passed and weak moans grew quieter or louder
between woman’s whispers of consolation, Petrone started suspecting that this
was a farce, a stupid and monstrous game without explanation. He remembered
old tales about childless women who secretly played with dolls, an invented
maternity much worse than petting dogs, cats or nephews. The woman was imi-
tating the crying of her frustrated child, trying to calm down the air between
her empty arms, maybe with her face wet from tears, because the crying which
she imitated was probably her real expression, her grotesque pain in the solitude
of a hotel room, protected by indifference and by the dawn.
Having turned on the light, unable to fall asleep again, Petrone asked
himself what to do. His mood had completely deteriorated; it was congested by
this atmosphere, where suddenly everything became tricky, empty, false: a
silence, a crying, a lullaby, the only reality of this hour between night and day
that was deceiving him with an unbearable lie. To knock on the wall seemed
too little for him. He did not wake up completely, though it was impossible to sleep.
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Without realizing it, he found himself slowly moving wardrobe until he uncovered
the dusty and dirty door. Barefoot, in pajamas, he leaned against the door like
a centipede, and bringing his mouth close to the pine slots, he started imitating
imperceptibly, in falsetto, the moan, which was coming from the other room. He
raised his voice, groaned, sobbed. On the other side, everything became a silence
which would last the whole night; but the moment before that Petrone had heard
the shuffling of woman’s slippers, her running across the room, the launch of a short
and dry scream, the beginning of a storm, instantly broken, like a tight rope.
When he passed by the front desk, it was after 10 a.m. Between dreams,
before eight in the morning, he had heard the voices of an employee and the
woman. Somebody was walking in the next room, moving things. He saw a trunk
and two big suitcases near the elevator. The manager was looking perplexed.
—How did you sleep last night?—he asked in a professional tone, barely
concealing his indifference.
Petrone shook his shoulders. He did not want to insist on anything, when there
was only one night left.
—Anyway, now it will be quieter,—said the manager, looking at the suit-
cases. The lady is leaving us at noon.
He waited for a comment, and Petrone cheered him up with a responding
look.
—She was staying here for a while, and now suddenly is leaving. With
women, you never know.
—No,—said Petrone,—You never know with them.
In the street he felt nauseous, but it was not physical. Swallowing a bitter
coffee, he was thinking and thinking about the same thing, forgetting about his
errands, indifferent to the splendid sun. It was his fault that the woman had to
leave, mad from terror, from shame or from anger. She was staying here for a
while . . . She was probably sick, but inoffensive. It was not her, but him, who
had to go from “Cervantes.” He had to talk to her, to apologize, to ask her to
stay, and promise to keep the secret. But having taken a couple of steps in the
direction of the hotel, he stopped in the middle of the road. He was afraid of
erring, of the woman’s unsuspected reactions. It was already time for a meet-
ing with his two business partners, and he did not want them to wait for him.
Well, let her be annoyed. It was nothing more than hysteria, she would find
another hotel to take care of her imaginary son.
But that night, he again did not feel well, and the silence of the room
seemed to him even more dense. When he entered the hotel, he could not resist
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looking at the key-stand, and realized that the key for his neighbor’s room was
already taken. He exchanged some words with the employee, who was yawn-
ing, while waiting for a moment to go home, and entered his room with little
hope of sleep. He had the afternoon newspapers, and a new detective novel.
He entertained himself with packing his suitcases and arranging his papers. It
was warm, and he opened wide the little window. The made-up bed seemed to
be uncomfortable and too firm. Finally, he had all the silence necessary for sleep,
and he could not. Tossing in the bed, he felt defeated by this silence regained
in a tricky way, which was returning to him completely and vindictively.
Ironically, he thought that he was missing the child’s cry, that this perfect quiet-
ness would not be sufficient for him to fall asleep and even less for getting up.
He was missing the cry, and when much later, he heard a weak unmistakable
sound behind the sealed door, he realized—through fear, through desire to run
away at night—that he was fine and that the woman did not lie, that she was
right in lulling a child to calm down, so that they would be able to sleep.
It could very well be called a conditional freedom. Each time when the super-
intendent handed him an envelope, it was sufficient for Luis to have just a look
at the stamp with the familiar portrait of José de San Martín to realize that once
again he would have to cross the bridge. San Martín, Rivadavia, but these
names were also images of streets and things; Rivadavia, number sixty five hun-
dred, a mansion in Flores, mamá, a café on San Martín and Corrientes where
sometimes his friends waited for him, where sweet coffee had a slight taste of
castor oil. With the envelope in his hands, having thanked her, Merci bien,
madame Durand, he went out to the street, but he was already not the same as
he had been on the previous day, or on any other day. Each letter from his mamá
(even before that recent, that ridiculous, absurd error) was immediately chang-
ing Luis’s life, by bringing him back to the past like a hard bounce of a ball. Even
before that, about what he had just read, and what now he would reread in the
bus, half-mad, half-perplexed, without being persuaded . . . mamá’s letters were
always an interruption in time, a little inoffensive scandal in the order of things
which Luis had managed to plan, obtain and cherish, when he had gotten Laura
and Paris. Every new letter reminded him for a moment (precisely for a moment,
because afterwards he scratched them out by the very act of a gentle response)
that his freedom, conquered in such a tough way, that this new life, cut off by
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pitiless scissors from the tangled ball which others called his life, was no longer
justified. It was losing sense, its grounds were erasing as asphalt under the
wheels of a bus which was moving along la rue de Richelieu. No more was left
than an appearance of freedom, a mirage of life, like a word in brackets,
divorced from the main clause, for which, nevertheless, it almost always
provides support and explanation. And an annoyance, and a desire to respond
immediately, as if to close the door again.
That morning was one of those many mornings when a letter from mamá
had arrived. He talked very little about the past with Laura, and almost never
about the mansion in Flores. It was not that Luis did not like to recall Buenos
Aires. It was more an intent to avoid names (people, avoided already for such
a long time, but names, the true ghosts of enduring persistence). Once he
ventured to say to Laura: “If it would be possible to break and throw away the
past like a draft of a letter or a book. But it stays forever, contaminates the clean
copy, and I believe, it is a true future.” Indeed, why would they not talk about
Buenos Aires, where their family was living, and from where, from time to time,
friends sent them postcards decorated with loving words. And the newspaper
La Nación, with sonnets by ecstatic ladies and already obsolete sensations! From
time to time, there was a crisis in government, an angry colonel, or a magnificent
boxer. Why wouldn’t they talk about Buenos Aires with Laura? But she also did
not touch the past, only by chance in a dialogue, and especially when mamá’s
letters arrived, she would remember something, she would drop a name or an
image, which would fall like coins that are out of circulation, like old things,
worn out in a remote world on the far side of a river.
—Eh oui, fait lourd—said the worker, who was sitting opposite him in the bus.
“If he only knew what is real heat—Luis thought—. If only he could walk on
February afternoon on la avenida de Mayo, on one of the little streets of Liniers.”
Once more he took the letter from the envelope, without illusions. The
paragraph was there, clear enough. It was absurd, but it was there. His first reac-
tion, after surprise, like a blow to the forehead, was, as always, defensive. Laura
should not read this letter from mamá. No matter how ridiculous was the
error; it was a confusion of names (mamá probably wanted to write “Víctor” and
wrote “Nico,” instead). In any event Laura would be sad, and it would be
stupid. From time to time letters get lost; God willing, this would had gone to
the bottom of the sea. Now he had to throw it to the water in the office, and
of course, several days later, Laura would definitely ask: “How strange, there was
no letter from your mother?” She never said tu mamá, probably because she lost
hers when she had been a little girl. Then, he would answer. “It is strange,
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indeed. I am going to drop a couple of lines to her today,” and he would send
them, surprised by mamá’s silence. Life would proceed normally: the office, the
cinema at night, Laura, always calm, kind, attentive to his needs. Getting out
of the bus at la Rue de Rennes, he asked himself sincerely (it was not a question,
but how to put it another way) why didn’t he want to show the letter from
mamá to Laura? Not because of her, nor because of what she would feel. It was
not important to him what she would feel, not while she was disguising her feel-
ings. (Was it important to him what she was feeling, while she was disguising
them?). No, it did not matter to him much (Did it matter to him?). The first
truth was important to him, supposing there was a second one behind it; the
most immediate truth, if one may say so, was the face that Laura would make
and her conduct. He was worrying about himself, naturally, about the effect that
Laura’s perception of mamá’s letter would produce on him. Her eyes would come
across the name of Nico, and he knew that her chin would start trembling
lightly, and afterwards she would say: “But how weird . . . What has happened
to your mother?” And all the time he would feel that Laura was restraining her-
self from screaming, or hiding in her hands her face already disfigured by crying,
disfigured by the outline of Nico’s name ready to escape from her lips.
and daughter-in-law could cause, nor to the pain—“so many screams and tears
at the beginning—of Nico’s death. Never, in the two years which they had spent
already in Paris, had mother mentioned Nico in her letters. She was like Laura,
who also never talked about him. They never mentioned his name, although
two years had passed since Nico’s death. A sudden reference of his name, in the
middle of the letter, was almost a scandal: the very fact of Nico’s name unex-
pected appeared in one line, with the capital and trembling ‘N,’ and a bended
‘o.’ But it was worse, because the name was placed in an absurd and incom-
prehensible phrase, in something which could not be anything else but an
announcement of senility. All at once, mamá had lost the notion of time, she
was imagining that . . . This paragraph appeared after a brief acknowledge-
ment of Laura’s letter. A period marked by the weak blue ink bought in the local
store, and a point-blank statement: “This morning Nico has asked about you.”
The rest followed as usual: her health, a cousin Matilde had fallen and dislo-
cated her collar-bone, the dogs were well. But Nico has been asking about them.
Of course, it was easy to change Nico to Víctor, who was, no doubt, the one
who had asked about them. Cousin Víctor, who is always very attentive. Víctor
has two more letters then Nico, but with an eraser and skill, one may change
these names. This morning, Víctor has asked about them. It was very natural
that Víctor came over to visit mamá, and asked about relatives in Paris.
When he came home for lunch, the letter was intact in his pocket. He was
still inclined not to tell anything to Laura, who was waiting for him with a
friendly smile on her face, a bit blurred since leaving Buenos Aires; as if the grey
air of Paris had taken its color and clarity. They had been living in Paris already
for two years, having left Buenos Aires as soon as two months after Nico’s
death, but in reality Luis had been considered absent from the day of his mar-
riage to Laura. One afternoon, after talking with Nico, who was already sick, Luis
had sworn to escape from Argentina, from the Flores mansion, from mamá and
dogs, and from his brother (who was already sick). In those months, everything
was rotating around him like figures in a dance: Nico, Laura, mamá, dogs, the
garden. His oath was a brutal gesture similar to breaking a bottle into smithereens
in the middle of a dance floor. Everything had been brutal in those days: his mar-
riage, their departure with neither explanations nor concern for mamá, a forget-
fulness of all social duties and of friends who were half surprised, half disenchanted.
Nothing was important to him, not even Laura’s attempts to protest. Mamá was
left alone in the mansion with the dogs, bottles of medicine, and Nico’s clothes,
which were still hanging in the closet. Let her stay, let everybody go to hell. Mamá
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had seemed to understand, she was already not crying for Nico any longer, and
was walking as before in the house, with the cold and resolved resignation of the
old for death. But Luis did not want to remember what had happened during the
night of departure: suitcases, a cab at the door, the house where he spent his
childhood, the garden where he and Nico had played at war, two dogs, lazy and
stupid. Now he was almost ready to forget about all this. He was going to the
agency, was drawing posters, was coming back to eat, was drinking a cup of cof-
fee which Laura served him with smile. They were going often to the cinema,
to the forests, were becoming more and more familiar with Paris. They were for-
tunate, life was surprisingly easy, a manageable job, a nice apartment, excellent
movies. Then letters from mamá started arriving.
He did not hate them; if he had not received them, he would feel his free-
dom falling on him like an unbearable weight. Mamá’s letters were bringing him
a salient forgiveness (although there was nothing for which to ask forgiveness),
they were throwing a bridge across which it was possible to continue walking.
Each one was calming him down or was making him worry about his mamá’s
health, reminding him about family concerns, about the permanence of a
familiar order. Sometimes he hated this order, and he hated it because of Laura,
because Laura was in Paris, but each letter from mamá, defined her as a stranger,
as an accomplice of that order which he had rejected one night in the garden,
after having heard once again Nico’s damped, almost humble cough.
No, he would not show her the letter. It was not noble to substitute one name
for another, but it was unbearable to let Laura read this phrase. Mamá’s grotesque
mistake, her silly accidental awkwardness—he was seeing her struggling with the
old pen, with a sliding paper and insufficient sight—, it would grow in Laura like
a responsive seed. It was better to throw the letter away (he threw it away that very
afternoon), and at night to go to the cinema with Laura, and to forget as soon as
possible that Víctor had asked about them. Even though it had been Víctor, a well-
brought up cousin, he would forget that he had asked about them.
Diabolic, cunning, licking his lips, Tom was waiting for Jerry to fall into his
trap. Jerry escaped and innumerable catastrophes fell on Tom. During inter-
mission Luis bought ice-cream, and they ate it while watching distractedly color-
ful announcements. When the film started, Laura sank further into her chair
and took away her hand from Luis’s arm. He again felt that she was far away;
who knows whether what they were watching together was the same thing for
both, though afterwards they commented on films on the street or in bed. Luis
asked himself (it was not a question, but how to put it another way), whether
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Nico and Laura had been as distant in the movie theatre, when Nico had courted
her, and they had been going out together. Probably they had known all of the
movie theatres of Flores, the whole stupid embankment of Lavalle street, a lion,
an athlete who struck the gong, subtitles in Spanish by Carmen de Pinillos, the
characters of that film had been as fictitious as the relationship itself . . . Thus,
when Jerry had escaped from Tom and an hour of Barbara Stanwyck or Tyrone
Power had started, Nico’s hand would slowly touch Laura’s hip (poor Nico, so
timid, so chaste), and both would feel ashamed of God only knew what. It was
clear to Luis that they were not guilty of anything definitive; although he did
not have the most delicious proof, but such a rapid disappearance of Laura’s
attachment to Nico had been sufficient for him to see that this engagement was
a simple simulacrum of a union, determined by vicinity and the same cultural
and social circles which formed the salt of Flores. It was sufficient to come one
evening to the same ballroom which Nico had frequented, and he had intro-
duced Laura to Luis. Perhaps for that reason, for the easiness of the beginning,
the rest had been unexpectedly difficult and bitter. But he did not want to recall
it now; the comedy was finished with the bland ruin of Nico, his melancholic
refuge in death from tuberculosis. The strange thing was that Laura never
mentioned him, and therefore he also never did. Nico was not even a deceased,
not even a dead brother-in-law, a mamá’s son. At first, this had brought him
relief after a confused exchange of reproaches, mamá’s crying and screams, the
stupid intervention of uncle Emilio and of cousin Víctor (Víctor has asked about
you this morning), a hastened marriage without any ceremony—a call for a taxi
and three minutes in front of a functionary with dandruff on his lapels. Having
found a refuge in a hotel in Adrogué, far from mamá and from all infuriated
kinsfolk, Luis had been grateful to Laura who never had make a reference to
the poor puppet who so vaguely had been transformed from a boyfriend to a
brother-in-law. But now, divided by ocean, two years after his death, Laura con-
tinued not to mention him, and he, Luis, from cowardice, joined her in this
silence, knowing that in the depth of his soul this silence offended him because
it had to do with a reproach, with repentance, with something that was start-
ing to appear similar to a betrayal. More than once he had explicitly mentioned
Nico, but he understood that this was not counted, because Laura’s response
was only to change the topic of conversation. Slowly a forbidden territory had
been forming step by step in their language, isolating them from Nico, wrap-
ping his name and his memory in stained and sticky cotton. And from the other
side mother was doing the same, as if in an inexplicable plot with them, she was
keeping silent. In each letter she was talking about dogs, Matilde, Víctor,
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aspirin, the payment of her pension. Luis had been hoping that mamá would hint
to her son at least once that it was time to ally with her in front of Laura, to oblige
Laura gently to accept Nico’s posthumous existence. Not because it was nec-
essary: to whom was Nico that important either alive or dead? But the toler-
ance of memory about him in the pantheon of the past would be a dark,
irrefutable proof that Laura had forgotten about him completely and forever.
The nightmare caused by the mention of his name would dissipate into a feel-
ing as weak and inane as when he was alive. But Laura continued to silence his
name, precisely when it would be natural to pronounce it, and Luis was again
feeling Nico’s presence in the garden at Flores, was hearing his discreet cough,
which prepared the best possible imaginable present for their wedding, his death
during the honeymoon of the one who had been his bride and the one who had
been his brother.
A week later, Laura was surprised that mother’s letter had not arrived. They
went over all the possible hypotheses, and Luis wrote her that same afternoon.
A response did not worry him too much, but he would like (he thought about it
while he was getting down the stairs in the mornings) for the superintendent to
give him the letter personally instead of bringing it to the third floor. After
approximately two weeks (15 days), he recognized a familiar envelope, the face
of Admiral Brown and a view of the Iguazú waterfall. He held on to the enve-
lope until he went out to the street and responded to Laura’s farewell from
the window. It seemed ridiculous to him to have to turn around the corner
before he could open the envelope. Bobby had escaped to the street, and in sev-
eral days he had started itching, infected by the mange from another dog. Mamá
was going to see a veterinarian, Uncle Emilio’s friend, because it was not accept-
able for Bobby to spread the pestilence to Blackie. Uncle Emilio was thinking that
she should bath them in acaroina, but she was already too old for this, and for her
it would be better if a veterinarian would prescribe some powder against insects
or something to mix in the dogs’ food. A lady in the neighboring house had a
mangy cat, and who knows, may be cats can infect dogs, though it would be across
a chicken wire fence that divided the houses. But why would they be interested
in this old lady’s talk, though Luis always had been very gentle with dogs, and as
a child had even slept with one at the foot of his bed, in contrast with Nico, who
had never liked them much. A lady in the house next to theirs advised to dust
them with DDT, because even if there was no itching, dogs get infected with all
kinds of mange while they are walking on the streets; in the corner of Bacacay
stopped a circus with rare animals, and there are plenty of microbes in the air, and
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so on. Mamá was overwhelmed by fear, and she was writing either about a dress-
maker’s son who scalded his arm with boiling milk, or about itchy Bobby.
Afterwards, there was something similar to a little blue star (the tip of the
pen had probably caught on the paper and mother began an annoyed grumble)
and then some melancholic thoughts about how lonely she would feel when
Nico also would go to Europe, as it seemed to her, but this was the destiny of
the old; children are swallows who leave the nest one day, and one should resign
oneself to this, while strengths last. The lady next door. . . .
Somebody pushed Luis, and with a Marseilles accent reminded him rapidly
about the rules of behavior on the streets. He vaguely realized that he was hin-
dering the movement of people who were entering the narrow subway corri-
dor. The rest of the day was equally foggy, he called Laura to say that he would
not come back for lunch, spent two hours on a bench at the square rereading
mamá’s letter, asking himself what should he do with this insanity. To talk to
Laura, before anything else. Why (it was not a question, but how to put it
another way) to continue hiding what was happening from Laura? He could not
pretend already that this letter was lost as the other one. Already he could not
believe indeed that mamá had mistakenly written Nico instead of Víctor, and
that she was suffering so much that she had gone insane. No doubt, the cause
of these letters is Laura, that was what was happened to Laura. Not even this:
that what had happened from the day of their wedding, the honeymoon in
Adrogué, the nights when they had desperately loved each other in the ship
which was bringing them to France. That was all Laura, everything would be
Laura now, when Nico wanted to come to Europe in mamá’s delirium.
Accomplices as never before, mamá started talking to Laura about Nico,
informing her that Nico was going to come to Europe, and she wrote it in that
way, knowing well that Laura would understand that he would arrive in France,
in Paris, at the house where everybody skillfully pretended to forget about him,
poor thing.
Luis did two things: he wrote to Uncle Emilio, indicating the symptoms
which worried him and asking him to visit mamá immediately to personally
ascertain her condition and to take any necessary measures. He then drank two
glasses of cognac one after another, and walked home in order to think about
what he should say to Laura, because he finally needed to talk to her, to keep
her posted. Moving from one street to another, he felt how difficult it was for
him to think about the present, about what should happen in half an hour.
Mamá’s letter placed him, drowned him, in the reality of these two years of his
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life in Paris, in a lie of a traded peace, in the happiness in the eyes of outsiders,
maintained by entertainment and performances, by a forced pact of silence,
where both of them became more and more distant, as usually happens in a neg-
ative pact. Yes, mamá, yes, poor itchy Bobby, mamá. Poor Bobby, poor Luis,
what a strong itch, mamá. A dance in the club at Flores, mamá, I went because
he insisted, I imagine that he wanted to boast of his conquest. Poor Nico, mamá,
with that dry cough, in which nobody believed yet, in that suit with stripes, his
hair shined with briolin, his silk ties, so crisp and neat. A short talk, you feel
liked, . . . How not to invite your brother’s fiancé for a dance. Oh, to say fiancé
is too much. Luis, I suppose I can call you Luis, can’t I? But yes, I am surprised
that Nico did not bring you home yet, mother is going to like you very much.
Our Nico is so awkward, he did not even talk to your father. Timid, yes, always
the same. As I am. Why do you laugh, you do not believe me, do you? But I am
not as I seem to be . . . It’s warm in here isn’t it? Indeed, you have to come,
mamá would be pleased. The three of us live together with our dogs. Hey
Nico, it is shame to hide all this from us, you rascal. We are like that between
us, Laura, we say everything to each other. With your permission, I would dance
this tango with mademoiselle.
Such a small thing, so easy, and he (Nico) is so shiny with his silk tie. She
had broken up with Nico by mistake, because of the blindness, because his slip-
pery brother had been able to win in a moment, to turn her head without any
real effort. Nico does not play tennis, when would he play, please, if you can-
not tear him away from chess or stamps. Quiet, such a poor thing, Nico was left
behind, lost in the corner of the patio, calming himself down with cough syrup
and a bitter mate. The moment when he fell ill, poor thing, and was prescribed
rest, coincided with dancing in the gym and in the fencing hall “Villa de
Parque.” One would not lose such things, especially when Edgardo Donato was
going to play . . . To mamá, it seemed very good that he would take Laura for
a walk; she liked her as her own daughter from the moment they had brought
her home. Listen, mamá, the boy is very weak, and he might get upset if some-
body told him about it. Sick people may imagine whatever; he might think that
I am flirting with Laura. It would be better if he didn’t not know that we were
going to gym. But I did not say this to mamá, nobody at home knew that we
were going out together. Naturally, till sick Nico would feel better, poor thing.
And thus, dances, two or three, Nico’s X-rays, afterwards short Ramos’s auto,
the evening party in Beba’s house, wine glasses, a ride in the car till the bridge
across the river, a moon, this moon as an upstairs window of the hotel, and
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Laura resisting, a bit drunk, skillful hands, kisses, suffocated screams, a blanket
of vicuna wool, return in silence and a smile of forgiveness.
The smile was almost the same when Laura opened the door. There was
baked meat, salad, flan. At ten o’clock their neighbors, who were their canasta
partners, came over. Very late, after having prepared to go to bed, Luis took out
the letter and put it on the lighted table.
—I did not talk earlier with you about this, because I did not want to upset
you. It seems to me that mamá . . .
He laid down on his back and waited. Laura put the letter back in the enve-
lope and turned off the light. He felt her near him, not exactly near, but he
could hear her breath near his ear.
—Do you understand?—said Luis, restraining his voice.
—Yes. Don’t you think that she confused the name?
It could be that. Pawn two, king four. Pawn two, king four. Excellent.
—Most probably she wanted to write Víctor.—he said, thrusting nails into
the palm of his hand.
Knight two, king four, bishop.
They pretended to sleep.
Laura agreed that Uncle Emilio should be the only person told about this;
and days passed without any further discussion. Each time when he came home,
Luis waited for an unusual phrase or gesture, a breach in this perfectly kept quiet-
ness and silence. They went to the cinema as always, were making love as
always. For Luis, there was no more mystery in Laura, except for her humble res-
ignation with this life, in which nothing had been realized from what they had
been dreaming about two years ago. Now he knew her very well, and when he
compared them, he had to admit that Laura was similar to Nico, to those who
stay behind and only act by inertia, though she sometimes used her almost ter-
rible will in not doing anything indeed, in not living for anything. She would
have found much more common understanding with Nico than with him. Both
Luis and Laura had understood that from the day of their wedding, from the first
steps which followed the bland acquiescence of their honeymoon and desire.
Now Laura again had nightmares. She dreamt often, but nightmares could be
recognized immediately. Luis recognized them among many other movements
of her body, confused words and the short screams of a suffocated animal.
Everything had already started on the ship, when they were still talking about
Nico, because he had just died and they had boarded just a few weeks afterwards.
One night, after thinking about Nico, when there was already insinuated a tacit
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silence that would be installed afterwards between them, Laura had a nightmare.
It repeated from time to time, and it was always the same: Laura was waking him
up with a hoarse moan, a sharp convulsion in her legs, and suddenly a scream
which was a complete negation, a rejection with the hand, with her whole body
and voice, of something terrible that was enveloping her in her dream like a huge
piece of sticky material. He was shaking her, calming her down, bringing her
water which she was drinking while sobbing, hounded by the other side of her
life. Then she was saying that she did not remember anything, it was something
horrible that could not be explained. She was falling asleep taking her secret with
her, because Luis knew that she knew that she had just faced somebody who had
entered her sleep, God knows under which horrifying mask; and whose knees
Laura would hug in an attack of fear, or probably of barren love. It was always
the same, he was bringing her a glass of water, waiting in silence until she would
again rest her head on the pillow. Perhaps once, fear would be stronger than pride,
if there was pride. Perhaps then he would be able to enter the battle from his side.
Perhaps not everything was lost, perhaps the new life would indeed become
something else other then this mirage of phantom smiles and French cinema.
In front of the drawing table, surrounded by strangers, Luis was recalling
a sense of symmetry and was trying to reestablish that order which he liked to
follow in life. Given that Laura did not touch the topic, waiting with an appar-
ent indifference for Uncle Emilio’s response, it was up to him to communicate
with mamá. He responded to the letter, limiting himself to short news of the
last weeks, and left for postscript a rectifying phrase: “So, Víctor talks about
coming to Europe. Everybody likes to travel; it should be tourist agency pro-
paganda. Tell him to write to us; we can send him all the necessary informa-
tion. Tell him also that he can count on our hospitality.”
Uncle Emilio’s response came with the return mail. It was dry, corre-
sponding to a close relative, resenting them for what, during the time of mourn-
ing for Nico, had qualified as unqualifiable. Without openly expressing his
indignation, Uncle Emilio had shown his feelings in a subtle manner, as in sim-
ilar cases, when he hadn’t come to say good-bye to his nephew, and had for-
gotten his birthday for two consecutive years. Now he limited himself to
fulfilling his duty of mamá’s brother-in-law, and was reporting bare results.
Mamá was doing well, but almost did not talk. That could be understood, tak-
ing into account her multiple afflictions of the last years. One could notice that
she was feeling very lonely in the house at Flores; it is logical because no
mother who had lived all her life with her two sons could feel happy alone in
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a huge mansion, filled with memories. As for the phrases in question, Uncle
Emilio had proceeded with the tact which this delicate issue required, he was
lamenting to tell them that he could not clarify the situation. Mamá had
not being inclined to talk and even had received him in the front hall-way,
something she had never done before to her brother-in-law. To his hint about
a therapeutic treatment, she had responded that, apart from rheumatism, she
was feeling very well, though these days it was very tiring for her to iron so many
shirts. Uncle Emilio was interested in asking about what shirts she was talking
about, but she just shook her head and offered him sherry and Bagley biscuits.
Mamá did not give them a lot of time to discuss Uncle Emilio’s letter and
its obvious inefficiency. Four days later, a certified letter came, though mamá
knew perfectly well that there was no need to certify letters which went by air
to Paris. Laura called Luis and asked him to come home as soon as possible. Half
an hour later, he found her breathing heavily, lost in contemplation of some
yellow flowers on the table. The letter was lying at the mantelpiece, and after
reading it, Luis put it back there. He sat near Laura and waited. She shook her
shoulders.
—Mother has lost her mind—she said.
Luis lit a cigarette. The smoke brought tears to his eyes. He understood that the
game was continuing and that it was his turn to make the next move. Three
or probably four players were participated in this match. Now he was sure that
mamá was also standing at the edge of the board. Luis was sinking deeper and
deeper into the armchair, and he covered his face with a useless mask of hands.
He heard Laura’s crying, and downstairs, the children of the superintendent
were rushing up and down.
The night brings solutions, et cetera. It brought them a heavy and mute sleep,
after their bodies had met in the monotonous battle which neither desired.
Once again a silent agreement gained power: in the morning they would talk
about the weather, the crime at Saint-Cloud, or about James Dean. The letter
continued to rest on the mantelpiece, and while drinking tea, they could not see
it. But Luis knew that when he would come back from work, he would not find
it there. Laura was brushing away all the traces with cold and persistent effort.
One day, another day, one more day. In the evening they laughed loudly at their
neighbors’ stories and Fernandel’s program. They decided to go to the theatre per-
formance, and to spend the end of the week in Fontainebleau.
Unnecessary facts were accumulating on his drawing table, everything
was coinciding with mamá’s letter. The ship, indeed, was coming to La Havre
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on Friday the 17th in the morning, and a special train was arriving at Saint
Lazare at 11:45 a.m. On Thursday they saw a theatre performance, and had a
great time. Two nights before Laura had had another nightmare, but he did not
move to bring her water, and was waiting, turning his back to her till she
would calm down by herself. Then Laura had fallen asleep, and during the
following day, she cut and sewed a summer dress. They talked about buying an
electric sewing machine, when they finished paying for the refrigerator. Luis
found the letter from mamá in the drawer of the night table and took it to the
office. He called the steamship line, though he was sure that mamá had given
him precise information. It was the only certain thing, because it was impos-
sible even to think about the rest. And this imbecile, Uncle Emilio. It would
be better to write to Matilde. In spite of them having been distant, Matilde
would understand the urgent necessity to intervene, to protect his mamá. But,
indeed (it was not a question, but how to put it another way), was it necessary
to protect mamá, specifically mamá?
For a moment he thought about calling her, but he remembered sherry and
Bagley biscuits, and shook his shoulders. There was also no time to write to
Matilde, though in reality there was time, but probably it was preferable to wait
until Friday, the 17th, before . . . The cognac already was no longer helping him
not to think, or at least to think without fear. Each time he was recalling with
more and more clarity, the last weeks in Buenos Aires, after Nico’s funeral.
What he had understood before as a pain turned out to be something else now,
something where there was a lack of confidence, malicious distrust as the bared
teeth of a predatory animal who feels that everybody wants to get rid of him,
and throw him somewhere far from home. Indeed, only now did he start see-
ing his mamá’s true face. Now he was seeing her as she had been during those
days when all the family had been visiting her, extending their sympathy in con-
nection with Nico’s death, spending evenings with her. He and Laura were also
coming from Adrogué to spend time with her. There stayed just for a bit,
because soon after they had arrived, uncle Emilio or Víctor or Matilde imme-
diately appeared, with the same cold rejection of the family, indignant with
what had happened, with Adrogué, because they were happy, while Nico, poor
thing, while Nico . . . They would never suspect how everybody had collabo-
rated to put them on the first available ship, how they joined together to buy
tickets, and how they had put them gently on the deck, showered with gifts and
the wavings of farewell handkerchiefs.
Clearly, his duty as a son obliged him to immediately write to Matilde. He
was still capable of thinking about things before his fourth cognac. By the fifth
07.qxd 29/8/07 6:26 PM Page 154
one he was thinking about them again, and was laughing (he was crossing Paris
by foot to be alone and to clear up his mind), he was laughing at his son’s debt,
as if children had obligations, as if these obligations could be as those of a fourth
grader, sacred obligations before a sacred mademoiselle from the filthy fourth
grade. Because his son’s debt was not to immediately write to Matilde. Why to
pretend (this was not a question but how to put it another way) that mamá had
lost her mind? The only thing which could be done is not to do anything, let
the days pass, except Friday. When he said good-bye to Laura, telling her that
he would not come back for lunch because he had urgent posters to deal with,
he was so sure of the rest that he could almost add: “If you want, let’s go
together.” He found a refuge in a café at the station, less for hiding rather than
in order to have a little advantage of seeing while remaining invisible. At 11:35
a.m., he recognized Laura by her blue skirt, followed her at a distance, saw her
looking at a time table, asking something of an employee, buying a ticket at the
platform, entering the platform where people, with the look of those who
were waiting, already were gathering. Standing behind a truck full of boxes of
fruit, he was watching Laura, who seemed to doubt whether to stay at the
entrance to the platform or move forward. He watched her without any surprise,
as if she were an insect whose behavior could be interesting. The train arrived
almost immediately, and Laura mixed with people who came close to the win-
dows of the coaches, looking for their friends and relatives among the screams
and hands which were sticking out as if they were drowning inside. He went
around the truck and entered the platform between boxes of fruit and spots of
grease. From where he was staying, he would see the passengers going out, he
could again see Laura, her face relieved, because why wouldn’t Laura’s face be
relieved? (It was not a question, but how to put it another way). And then, giv-
ing himself the luxury of staying on the platform, after the last passengers and
porters would pass, he would go down the square, full of sunshine, to drink
cognac at the corner café. And the same afternoon he would write to his
mamá without a minor reference to a funny episode (but it was not funny) and
then he would have courage and would talk to Laura (but he would not have
courage and would not talk to Laura). At any event, cognac, this without any
doubt, and let everything else go to hell. To see a bunch of people hugging each
other, with screams and tears, the unleashed kinsfolk, a cheap eroticism, as a
fair’s merry-go-round flooding the platform between piled up suitcases and
packages; and finally, finally, such a long time since we’ve seen each other, how
tanned you are, Ivette, but yes, the sun was wonderful, daughter. Inasmuch as
he was looking for similarities, for the fun of allying with stupidity, two of the
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man who passed should be Argentineans by their hair style, their jackets, their
expressions of satisfaction which hid their agitation at entering Paris. One of
them indeed looked like Nico, if, of course, you were looking for similarities.
The other did not, as in reality the first one did not either. His neck, for
instance, looked much fatter, and his waist looked much broader then Nico’s.
But with the intention to find similarities just for fun, that other, who had
passed and approached the exit with only one suitcase in his left hand, as well
as Nico, was left-handed, with a round-shouldered back and the same shoulder-
line. And Laura was probably thinking the same thing, because she was fol-
lowing him, watching him with the facial expression which Luis knew so well,
for that was Laura’s face when she was waking up with nightmares, and was lying
in bed with her eyes fixed in the air, watching, now he knew it, one who was
moving away, turning his back on her, consumed by revenge without name,
which made her scream and fight in her sleep.
But no matter how they would look for similarities, naturally, the man was
a stranger, they saw him from the front when he put his suitcase on the floor
in order to look for a ticket to pass it to the employee at the exit from the
platform. Laura was the first to leave the station; he allowed her to gain her dis-
tance and to get lost at the bus stop. He entered the coffee shop at the corner,
and threw himself on the chair. Later, he did not remember whether he was ask-
ing for something to drink, if that which had burned his mouth, was the
bitterness of cheap cognac. He worked the whole afternoon on posters, with-
out taking any rest. Sometimes he thought that he had to write to mamá, but
he left it alone till the end of the working day. He was walking home. When
he came, he found the superintendent in the front hall and talked to her for a
while. He would prefer to talk to the superintendent or his neighbors, but every-
body was entering their apartments; the dinner hour was approaching. He
slowly climbed up the stairs (the truth is that he always was going up slowly,
not to exhaust his lungs, and not to cough), and as he reached the third floor,
he leaned to the door, before ringing the bell, in order to rest, and as if listen-
ing to what was happening inside the apartment. Then he gave two short
rings, as always.
—Ah, it’s you—said Laura, offering him a cold cheek. I already started ask-
ing myself whether you’d need to stay longer. The meat, probably, is already
overcooked.
It was not overcooked, but it did not have any taste at all. If at this moment
he would be able to ask Laura why she had come to the station, the coffee would
recover its taste, or a cigarette. But Laura had not left the house during the whole
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day, she told him, as if she needed to lie or to wait till he would make a funny
comment about the date and of mamá’s lamentable manias. Stirring his coffee,
with his elbows on the table cloth, he once more allowed a moment to pass.
Laura’s lie was not important anymore, one more among so many kisses belong-
ing to someone else, so many silences where everything was Nico, where there
was nothing in her or in him that was not Nico. Why (it was not a question, but
how to put it another way) not to put a third knife, fork and spoon on the table?
Why not go away, not close a fist and smash with it this sad and suffering face
that a cigarette’s smoke was deforming, that was going and coming back between
waters, that seemed to be filling up step by step with hatred, as if it were mamá’s
own face? Perhaps he was waiting in another room, or perhaps he was, as Luis,
waiting while leaning at the door, or he had been already settled, where he always
was an owner, in the white territory of sheets, where he was coming so often in
Laura’s dreams. There he would wait, lying on his back, also smoking a cigarette,
coughing a bit, with a smile on the clown’s face, as was his face during his last
days, when there was not a drop of healthy blood in his vessels.
Luis passed to another room, went to his working table, turned on the lamp.
He did not need to reread mamá’s letter in order to respond to it, as he had to
do. He started writing, dear mamá. He wrote: dear mamá. He threw the paper
and wrote: mamá. He felt that his home was a fist that was squeezing him.
Everything was tighter, more and more suffocating. The apartment was good
for two; he was thinking exactly about two. When he lifted his eyes (after
finishing writing: mamá), Laura was standing at the door, watching him. Luis
put his pen aside.
—Do you think that he has become much thinner?—he asked
Laura made a gesture. Two shiny streams of tears were running down her
cheeks.
—A little bit,—she said.—One is changing . . .
translations 157
I had two pieces of news for him. First, that his manuscript was at the printer’s;
second, that my sister Norah, who liked it very much, would illustrate it. This
story, now justly famous, was entitled “House Taken Over.” Years later, in Paris,
Julio Cortázar reminded me of this old episode and confessed that it had been the
first time that he had seen his work in print. I was honored to learn this.
I know very little about contemporary literature. I believe that we can know
about the past in a symbolic mode, and that we can imagine the future, accord-
ing to our fears and hopes; but in the present, there are too many things for us
to decipher. Future generations will know what we do not know, and will
study pages which deserve re-reading. Schopenhauer advised that to avoid
being trapped in the hands of chance, one should read books which were writ-
ten a hundred years ago. I have not always been true to this cautious dictum;
I read Secret Weapons with a special pleasure and have selected this story.
A fantastic story, according to Wells, should admit of only one fantastic ele-
ment in order for the readers’ imagination to easily accept it. This prudence
belongs to the skeptical nineteenth century, not to the age that dreamed up the-
ories of the universe or Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. In “Letters from
Mother,” the trivial, the necessarily trivial, resides in the title, in the protago-
nists’ conduct, and in the continuous mentioning of cigarette brands and sub-
way stations. The miraculous requires such details.
Another virtue of this fine story is that supernatural is not stated, but
rather insinuated, making it all the more powerful, as in Lugones’s tale “Ysur.”2
The possibility is left open that everything is a guilt-inspired hallucination.
Someone who seemed innocent comes back with a vengeance.
Julio Cortázar has been condemned or approved for his political views.
Ethics aside, I believe most people’s opinions are superficial and ephemeral.
NOTES
Introduction
1. See, also, Borges’s prologue to Cortázar’s “Cartas de mamá.” All translations in this book,
unless otherwise indicated, are mine.
2. Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on numerous occasions expressed the admiration for
Borges’s works and considered them as inspirational for their own writings. See, for exam-
ple, Foucault’s The Order of Things, and Derrida’s Dissemination.
3. For other comparative studies of Borges’s and Cortázar’s works see Carter Wheelock’s
“Borges, Cortazar and the Aesthetic of the Vacant Mind,” Peter Ronai’s “Reading Jorge
Luis Borges in the Manner of Julio Cortázar,” Eduardo González’s “Hacia Cortázar, a Partir
de Borges,” Sonia Thon’s “El ritmo en la prosa de Borges and Cortázar,” Policarpo Varon’s
“Borges y Cortázar,” Regina Harrison’s “Mythopoesis: The Monster in the Labyrinth
According to Supervielle, Gide, Borges, and Cortázar,” Manuel Alcides Jofré’s “Teoría y
práctica de la superrealidad en la literatura latinoamericana: Borges, Cortázar y Neruda,”
and Daniel Mesa Gancedo’s “De la casa (tomada) al café (Tortoni): Historia de los dos que
se entendieron: Borges y Cortázar.”
4. In the West, the closest concept to contemporary ‘place’ among earlier terms is the bibli-
cal Hebrew makom, which has a connotation of “hiding place” or a “resting place” in the
Book of Job (16:18). In Genesis (22:3, 28:11, 28:15, 28:19) place is associated with revela-
tion and with the divine. Makom refers to a place where God might be worshipped. A rab-
binical commentary on Genesis exclaims, “Why is God called place? Because He is the place
of the world, while the world is not His place” (Sambursky, 15).
Aristotle’s conception of place is based on his ideas of relation, delimitation and regula-
tion: “Place is a space in which the body is placed” (Physics 53). Whereas for Aristotle, place
serves as the condition of all existing things, for Immanuel Kant, place is essential for the for-
mation of human knowledge about this world and for the description of epistemological systems.
Place is a category associated both with the scope of knowledge and the “positions” which the
parts occupy relatively to one another. Kant’s notion of “architectonic” which is a “system of
the places of knowing” (653) emphasizes the relationship between place, epistemology and order.
08.qxd 29/8/07 6:28 PM Page 160
In a similar fashion, Foucault discusses “the trajectory of meaning” (196) and the posi-
tion of the subject within the space of knowledge. In Archaeology of Knowledge, for exam-
ple, he points out that “knowledge . . . is also the space in which the subject may take up
a position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his discourse” (238). Martin
Heidegger considers place in its existential connection with “dwelling” and “thinking”
(148). From his ontological perspective the notion of building is close to that of thinking.
Place is unseparable from the authenticity of dwelling. “Being” must be placed and place’s
existence is due to being, for when ontology is able to take meaning into Being, space is then
filled with meaning, i.e., it becomes place (204). Place is “next to none” (84). The “primal
gathering principle” or event (Ereignis) is the original understanding of place, clearing,
abode, home, whole, or totality, worlded earth, ground—all of which mean fundamentally
the same. For Gaston Bachelard, human perception of place is influenced by imagination
and memory; a human being “experiences the house in its reality and its virtuality, by means
of thoughts and dream” (8). Though he discusses the symbolism of such locations as house,
its parts and physical objects which usually are places for others, for instance, chests, draw-
ers and wardrobes in connection with self-development; he fails to recognize the difference
between space and place. In his topoanalysis place is seen as an extension of human exis-
tence, and is treated as a homogeneous part of human life. Similarly, for Henri Lefebvre
places indicate “relationship of local to global” (288). He distinguishes between the trivi-
alized spaces of everyday life and special symbolic ones which can be “desirable” or “unde-
sirable,” benevolent or malevolent. Postmodern philosophers emphasize the contrast
between anthropological place of modernity based on place-identity-relations continuum
and “non-place” of contemporaneity, which is equivalent to “passage” (de Certeau 156). Non-
places undermine the concept of integration and fixation and create solitude and similitude;
they lead to the coexistence of worlds and their archetype appears to be a travel space (Augé
85). A similar distinction is maintained in contemporary architecture. As Mies van der Rohe
(1947) points out, place-identity-form unity is characteristic for modernist buildings. This
relationship, however, is challenged by postmodern structures. By becoming a “zone” of rad-
ical indeterminacy (McHale 44), postmodern place questions the inside/outside opposition
and loses the senses of “stability” and “limit” (de Certeau 117).
5. Juri M. Lotman’s and Boris A. Uspenskij’s The Semiotics of Russian Culture emphasizes the
distinction between fixed and mobile spaces, between passable places and closed boundaries.
It shows how the fixed elements in a literary text form the cosmogonic, geographic and social
structure, the so-called “field” of the hero.
6. Displacement, whose history as a concept is more recent then that of place, implies the act
of displacing and the state of being displaced. Being a physical action and its result, dis-
placement is associated with “the loss of particular places” (35), “dislocation,” “replacing” or
“removal” (Casey 161). Moreover, displacement, an essential element of any system of knowl-
edge, is inevitable in any attempt to describe and understand the physics of place. According
to Joseph Fell, for example, metaphysics is “dis-placement” for it regards the ground or place
as to be “supplied” or “made present by ontotheological inquiry,” and it does so because “it
has forgotten that the ground/place already is the place in which the beings about whose ground
metaphysics inquires have already been identified as the beings they are” (204).
Displacement becomes an essential concept for existentialism and psychoanalysis, as
Soren Kierkegaard’s and Sigmund Freud’s treatments of this phenomenon demonstrate.
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other. As Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg point out, the modern concepts of nations and
cultures appear to be undermined by the displacement which involves “the undoing of one
particular old certainty—the notion that there is an immutable link between cultures, peo-
ples, or identities and specific places” (1).
7. In his conversation with André Camp, Borges explicitly separates his passion for philosophy
from his personal beliefs: “I am fond of circular form. That does not mean that I believe in
circular time, in the hypothesis of Pythagoras, Hume, Nietzsche, or many others. The
stoics also held that history repeats itself in exactly the same fashion. I do nothing but take
advantage, to the best of my ability, of the literary possibilities of this hypothesis Nietzsche
thought he had invented” (qtd. in Kristal 143).
8. As Goodman observes, “We cannot test a version by comparing it with a world undescribed,
undepicted, unperceived” (4).
9. In his book Crítica y Ficción, Ricardo Piglia characterizes Borges’s texts as “una micro-
scopía de las grandes tradiciones” (83). In a similar fashion, in his book Out of context,
Daniel Balderston perceptively observes that “Borges plays in his fictions with narrowly
constricted space and time yet suggests that even there (as in Aleph) there are infinite
possibilities” (138).
Chapter 1
1. For the most complete discussions of the kabbalistic elements in Borges’s fiction, see Jaime
Alazraki’s “Borges and the Kabbalah,” Saúl Sosnowsky’s Borges y la cabala and Edna
Aizenberg’s The Aleph Weaver. The importance of the Kabbalah in Borges’s fiction has been
also discussed by in such works as “Una vindicación de la cábala” by Marcos R. Barnatán,
“Borges, el Aleph y la Kábala” by Mario Satz, “Borges, Cabbala and ‘Creative Misreading’ ”
by Evelyn Fishburn, and most recently in “Two Borges Essay Manuscripts in the University
of Virginia Collection: ‘La cábala’ and ‘Flaubert’ ” by Donald L. Shaw.
2. In Genesis (see, particularly, 22:3, 28:11, 28:19), place, makom, is a locale where God
might be worshipped. In post biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, place became a theological
synonym for God, as expressed in the Talmudic sayings “He is a place of his world,” and
“His world is His place” (Jammer 26).
3. All references are to Andrew Hurley’s translation of “El Aleph” as it appears in Borges.
Collected Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 274–286.
4. Bakhtin defined the chronotope as follows: “We will give the name chronotope
(literally, “time-space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships
that are artistically expressed in literature” (84).
5. Drawing on striking similarities between the settings in Evaristo Carriego’s sonnet “Como en
los buenos tiempos” [“As in good times”] and “The Aleph,” which in the later one has iron-
ic connotations, Norman Thomas Di Giovanni’s suggests that Borges’s work as a biographer
influenced his own creation. He considers Carriego’s text to be “a prime source for ‘The
Aleph’ ” (108), and notices similarities between the settings and the narrator’s engagement
with paying homage to his diseased beloved in both works, albeit ironized in the last one.
6. Charles Mears, the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World,” a
story which Borges creatively translated into Spanish (see Kristal 34–35), can be seen as
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a possible source of inspiration for Borges’s Daneri. Both characters “suffered from aspira-
tions,” which have been “all literary” (294).
7. In my analysis, I will refer to another edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the quote used
by Borges appears on p. 643.
8. For a recent, illuminating discussion of Borges’s vision of quotations as an artistic encounter,
a literary theme, and an incessant source for literary creation, see Lisa Block de Behar’s
Borges. The Passion of an Endless Quotation. My detailed analysis of this insightful book has
been published in Semiotica 3(2006), pp. 345–355.
9. Admiring Schopenhauer’s book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Borges points out: “Creo
que es el que ha dado, de algún modo, digamos, la cifra, la clave para entender el mundo”
(qtd. in Balderstón et al. 294). [“I believe that it is he who gave, in a certain way, let’s say,
the key for understanding the world”].
10. According to Humberto Nunez-Faraco, this episode echoes a passage from Luke (4–5): “And
the devil taking him up into a high mountain, showed unto him all the kingdoms of the
world in a moment of time.”
11. Borges and Derrida similarly use the foreign words “el aleph” and “pharmakon,” respectively,
the ambivalent meanings of which become organizing principles of “El Aleph” and
Dissemination.
12. This episode can also be interpreted as a ludic allusion to Dante’s “Paradiso,” where the
pilgrim is exposed to a reality he cannot express: “In that heaven which partakes most of
His light/I have been, and have beheld such things as who/ Comes down thence has no wit
nor power to write” (4–6).
13. According to Sharon Lynn Sieber, “El Aleph” is one of the most “compelling examples”
(200) of the structure of simultaneity in modern fiction.
14. Following on Estela Canto’s observation that a kaleidoscope is a source of inspiration for
Borges’s story, Heather Dubnick persuasively argues that the story exemplifies a “new modern
consiousness” that Charles Baudelaire in his “The Painter of Modern Life” compares
“ ‘to a mirror as vast as a crowd’ that reflects upon everything within its sight’ ” (138).
15. I will quote from James E. Irby’s English translation of “Las ruinas circulares” as it appears
in Labyrinths (New York: A New Directions Book, 1964), pp. 45–51.
16. Daniel Mesa Gancedo perceptively notices that the topos of an attempt to create human being
in dream has been also of interest for Cortázar. It is a leitmotif of his story “Bruja” [“A Witch”].
17. The magician’s reaction on the insomnia echoes Caliban’s despair in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
when he says: “ . . . when I wak’d/I cry’d to dream again” (3.2.24–25). The dream-desert-
labyrinth pattern is consistent in Borges’s fiction. See, for example “El milagro secreto.”
18. “The Doctrine of Cycles,” trans. Esther Allen, in Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot
Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (New York:
Penguin, 1999), pp. 115–123.
19. “Circular Time,” trans. Esther Allen, in Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger,
trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 1999),
pp. 225–229.
20. The metaphoric image of dream as “la materia incoherente” echoes Prospero’s lines
in Shakespeare’s The Tempest when he says “. . . We are such stuff/As dreams are made on”
(Act IV, scene1).
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21. This appearance of the God of Fire as a reflection of the magician’s dream echoes Luther’s
words quoted by Nietzsche in his description of the condition of God: “God himself can-
not exist without the wise man” (The Gay Science 191).
22. Such critics as Stephen E. Soud and Ivan Almeida associate the functioning of “ruinas” with
a metaphor for the fragmented literary presence of “intertextuality” in this story.
23. Oscar Hahn and Soud extensively and thoughtfully discuss the presence of the golem ele-
ment in this story. Borges himself accepts the golem-oriented interpretations of his story (see
Cortínez (ed.), Borges the Poet).
24. “The Disk,” trans. Andrew Hurley in Borges, Collected Fictions. (New York: Penguin, 1998),
pp. 477–480.
25. In Antiguas literaturas germánicas and Literaturas germánicas medievales, Borges et al. refer to
Odin, a mythical pagan Scandinavian god who has a gift of prophecy, as one of the main
figures in medieval Germanic literatures.
26. This almost naturalistic scene of Isern’s death evokes Jacob Grimm’s observation about The
Volsunga Saga: “La saga de los antepasados de Sigurd . . . se caracteriza por una barbarie
que es índice de su mucha antiguedad” (qtd. in Borges et al. LGM. 182–183) [“The saga of
the ancestors of Sigurd . . . is characterized by the barbarity which is a sign of its antiquity”]
The death of “Isern” can be also interpreted along the lines of the Old English Riddle #58
from the Exeter Book, which Borges admired. According to L. Blakeley, the phrase “isernes
dael” in this riddle signifies “much iron,” this meaning is both present and ironized in the
Borges’s story, where one blow of the axe takes Isern’s life. As this scholar of Old English
further explains, there are two forms of the word “iren” and “isern.” While the first one,
she suggests, is more typical for poetry, and can be found, for instance, in Beowulf; “Isern”
is more colloquial, it appears four times in the Exeter book, and it is a form that is usually
used in West-Saxon dialect, that is in standard Old English. I think this is why Borges prefers
to use “Isern” in the story, where realistic setting and the narrator’s colloquial style domi-
nate. Also, one may notice that the king introduces himself as “a king of Secgens,” which
is defined as “an unknown Germanic tribe” in the Cambridge Old English Reader. The word
“Secgens” turns out to be almost a homophone of the old English verb “secgan” which is
“secgen” in its present tense in the first, second and third person plural. This verb means
“to say” or “to tell,” the word “saga” is most probably derived from it. “The king of
Secgens,” therefore I suggest, can be interpreted in as a ruler, or leader of storytellers.
27. The marking of the place where an object fell is a recurrent motif in German folklore (see,
Antti Aarne’s. The Types of the Folktale (Helsinki: Tampere, 1964), p. 385.
28. “The Book of Sand,” trans. Andrew Hurley, in Borges, Collected Fictions (New York:
Penguin, 1998), pp. 480–484.
29. An indirect quotation of this image, “que tejer una cuerda de arena” (Obras 1:452) [“than weav-
ing a rope of sand” (47)], and a synonymous expression of an impossible object “que amonedar
el viento sin cara” [“coining the faceless wind” (47)] also appear in “Las ruinas circulares.”
30. In his conversation with Antonio Carrizo, Borges refers to the history of the title of the story
and the book and points out that he was primarily influenced by Las montañas del oro and
wanted to call his text El libro del arena [The Book of the Sand], but “después me dí cuento
que era absurdo y que tenía que ser El libro de arena . . . un libro imposible, porque se
disgrega” (47) [“afterwards I realized it was absurd and that it had to be The Book of
Sand . . . an impossible book which disintegrates”].
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31. For example, the narrator of Snorri Sturluson’s creation says: “Then Hogni sailed after him
all the way to Orkney” (121).
Chapter 2
1. Julio Cortázar. Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Random House, 1966).
2. For a detailed discussion of the novel’s structure, see Alazraki’s essay “Rayuela: Estructura.”
3. In his conversation with Prego, Cortázar tells that for several years before he has started writ-
ing the novel, he has identified himself with Oliveira: “. . . cuando me puse a escribir
Rayuela había acumulado varios años de Oliveira, de haber enfocado la realidad como
Oliveira la enfoca. Eso se va explicitando después a lo largo del libro, pero ya estaba en mí
cuando empecé a escribirlo” (Prego 143) [“When I have started writing Hopscotch, I have
already accumulated several years of Oliveira, of his perception of reality. This becomes
explicit in course of the book, but it was in me already when I’ve started to write”].
Oliveira and Cortázar appear to share anxiety caused by the prospering of distorted
Peronist values and the limiting nationalistic vision of the country dominant in the cul-
tural discourse of the time. In Rayuela the allusion to this situation can be found in the
narrator’s description of Oliveira’s vision of his city, its past and its present: “. . . Oliveira
no tenía más que remedar, con una sonrisa agria, las decantadas frases y los ritmos lujosos
del ayer, los modos áulicos de decir y de callar. En Buenos Aires, capital del miedo, volvía
a sentirse rodeado por ese discreto allanamiento de artistas que se da en llamar buen sen-
tido y, por encima, esa afirmación de suficiencia que engolaba las voces de los jóvenes y
los viejos, su aceptación de lo inmediato como lo verdadero” (75: 496) [“all that Oliveira
had to do was put on a wry smile and imitate the exaggerated phrases and the luxurious
rhythms of yesterday, the auclic ways of speaking and keeping still. In Buenos Aires, the
capital of fear, he felt himself surrounded once again by that discreet smoothing of edges
that likes to go by the name of good sense and, on top of it all, that affirmation of sufficien-
cy which lumps together the voices of young and old, its acceptance of the immediate as
the true” (388)]. In his conversation with Luis Harss, Cortázar refers to his youth experi-
ence in Argentina, a combination of anxiety and disappointment which motivated his
immigration: “La gente soñaba con París y Londres. Buenos Aires era una especie de cas-
tigo. Vivir allí era estar encarcelado.” (257). [“People were dreaming of Paris and London.
Buenos Aires was a kind of punishment. To live there was as to be imprisoned”].
Considering Cortázar as both most Argentinean writer and intellectual exile who resides
in Paris from 1951, Harss observes that it has been too late for the writer to disengage from
“los vínculos con su país, que lo ha perseguido con todos sus fantasmas al exilio” (257) [“the
bonds with his country, which followed him with all the phantoms of exile”]. Cortázar’s
Buenos Aires in Rayuela, the novel written in Paris, vividly exemplifies this critic’s per-
ceptive observation.
4. Cortázar, for example, expresses his sympathy with existentialism in his Teoría del túnel (see,
for instance, pp.115–125), which in Saul Yurkievich’s opinion “constituye el pretexto de
la práctica novelesca de Cortázar” (29) [“constitutes a pretext for the novelistic practice of
Cortázar”]. In this essay he develops his theory of the novel applied later in his own works,
and particularly in Rayuela [Hopscotch]. He also published in 1948 a review of Leon Chestov’s
book Kierkegaard y la filosofía existencial.
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5. Cortázar refers on various occasions to the works of Balzac and Dostoevsky, which con-
tributed to his formation as a reader and a writer. An explicit reference to Le Pére Goriot
appears in Teoría del túnel (50). He also wrote an essay “Del sentimiento de no estar del todo”
[“On Feeling Not All There”] included in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, where he also
mentions Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (39). In Rayuela itself, he mentions Eugene Rastignac as
an archetypical dramatic character (297).
6. Similarly to Balzac, who has been considered as “[a]nother writer of the romantic genera-
tion” (Auerbach 468), Cortázar also states that he belongs to the romantic tradition in the
conversation with Prego, where he defines “Romanticismo” as “la ruptura” [“a break”] with
the previous literature: “A lo largo del siglo XIX la llegada del Romanticismo significa la liq-
uidación del período neoclásico anterior” (147) [“During the 19th century, the arrival of
Romanticism signifies a liquidation of the previous neoclassical period”].
7. The French writer Paul Claudel describes a typical room in Paris as “a sort of geometrical
site, a conventional hole, which we furnish with pictures, objects and wardrobes within
wardrobe” (qtd. in Bachelard 27).
8. In his analysis of the influence of Balzac on Dostoevsky, Leonid Grossman mentions
that Dostoevsky’s first published work was his translation of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet
(see pp. 21). Bakhtin also mentions Balzac’s influence on Dostoevsky in Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics (see, for instance, p. 34).
9. Cortázar’s familiarity with Bachelard’s works becomes evident, for instance, in his conver-
sation with Garfield (94).
10. The desire to find the center, in contrast to the postmodernist “awareness of the absence of
centers” (MacHale 46), echoes an epistemological quest considered by Brian MacHale as a
dominant feature of modernism, whose representatives are preoccupied with the following
questions: “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?” (9).
11. An ideal city as the way of liberation in Rayuela [Hopscotch] is an embryonic image of the
city in 62: Modelo para armar [62: A Model Kit].
12. Traveler, Horacio’s friend and double who appears in the second part of the novel makes a
similar statement about Horacio’s ambitions when he describes his Doppelgänger in a
following way: “Una especie de cátaro existencial, un puro. O César o nada, esa clase de tajos
radicales” (278) [“A kind of existential puritan, a purist. Caesar or nothing, that kind of
radical demand” (340)]. Traveler’s comment can be considered as an example of mise-
en-abyme, abundant in the novel.
13. The city-woman image is maintained also in the second part of the novel where Traveler
accuses Oliveira of “su manía de encontrarlo todo mal en Buenos Aires, de tratar a la
ciudad de puta encorsetada” (190; italics added) [“his mania for finding everything wrong with
Buenos Aires, for treating the city like a tightly girdled whore” (228; italics added)].
14. As Jones points out, “Both heavenly city and earthly city are united in the figure of La Maga,
who is related to Babylon through a series of references . . . suggesting that the sensual life
must be an essential part of the new Jerusalem” (230).
15. Marcelo Alberto Villanueva emphasizes the symbolic importance of the metaphysical
rivers and the water associated with the origin of reality in mythical thinking: “Ya en los
mitos de Sumeria se encuentra la idea del diluvio universal como aquel en que se reitera que
la diosa de las aguas fue primordialmente el origen de toda realidad. También la Biblia afir-
ma que antes de la creación de los animales y las plantas ya ‘el Espíritu de dios se movía sobre
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la faz de las aguas’ ” (44–45) [“The idea of the universal deluge can be found already in myths
of Sumeria, where the godess of water was the primarily the origin of reality. Also, the Bible
affirms that before the creation of animals and plants already ‘the spirit of god moved above
the face of the water’ ”]. See, for example, Genesis 1:2.
16. In his conversation with Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Cortázar mentions a multilevel
importance of the symbol of mandala for his writting of Rayuela which originally he wanted
to call Mandala: “Cuando pensé el libro estaba obsesionado con la idea del mandala, en parte
porque había estado leyendo muchas obras de antropología y sobre todo de religión tibetana.
Además había visitado la India, donde pude ver cantidad de mandalas indios y japoneses”
(266) [“When I thought about the book, I was obsessed with the idea of the mandala,
partially because I was reading many book on anthropogy and Tibetan religion. Also, I was
visiting India, where I could see a lot of Indian and Japanese mandalas.”]
17. In addition of having the philistine reasoning of “the people with strong nerves,” Gregorivious
displays striking similarities with Dostoesvsky’s character Svidrigailov from Crime and
Punishment. Both characters, for instance, are engaged with the activity of spying. Whereas
Svidrigailov listens in to the conversation between Raskolnikov and Sonia, Gregorivious
follows Horacio on the streets, and La Maga calls him “Espía” (112) “[s]py” (127).
18. Mentioning just some of the possibilities, one may suggest that The Underground Man could
prefigure Kafka’s anonymous protagonist in The Castle, the “absurd man” in Albert Camus’s
Myth of Sisyphus, and Hermann Hesse’s “outsider” (Steppenwolf).
19. As Daniel López Salort perceptively observes, a motif of a search with no particular purpose is
also vividly present in Buddhism and ancient Chinese poetry. He gives and example of T’sen
T’sang classical poem “Hsin-Hsin-Ming” (606 AD) [“Verses on the Faith Mind”]. For a
recent comprehensive exploration of an impact of Buddhist philosophy on Borges’s and
Cortázar’s fiction, see Chien-Yi Tu’s Borges, Cortázar and el Budhismo (Borges, Cortázar and
Buddhism).
20. Oliveira’s meditations about the endless search can be considered an example of the inter-
nal dialogization defined by Bakhtin as an opposite to the external, marked dialogue. In the
internal dialogization “The word lives, as it were on the boundary between its own context
and another, alien, context” (284).
21. As Lotman points out, “The city is a complex semiotic mechanism, a culture-generator, but
it carries out this function only because it is a melting-pot of texts and codes, belonging to
all kinds of languages and levels.” (194).
22. One of the critics who considers Morelli to be Cortázar’s “alter-ego” is Fernando Alegria,
who refers to “La posición Cortázar- Morelli” [“a position Cortázar-Morelli”] in Rayuela (92).
23. Hector Castellano-Giron analyses Galdos’s ‘presence’ in Rayuela and suggests an interest-
ing reading of the chapter 34 in light of Galdos’s Lo prohibido.
24. I use the term “overt metafictional” as defined by Linda Hutcheon in Narcissistic Narrative.
The Metafictional Paradox, where she points out that “[o]vert forms of narcissism are present
in texts in which the self-consciousness and self-reflection are clearly evident, usually
explicitly thematized or even allegorized within the ‘fiction’ ” (23).
25. “Break of the Day,” trans. Stephen Kessler, in Borges, Selected Poems, ed. Alexander
Coleman (New York:Viking, 1999), pp. 23–24.
26. “Patio.” trans. Robert Fitzgerald, in Borges, Selected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman, p. 15.
27. “Unknown Street.” trans. Alexander Coleman, in Borges, Selected Poems, p. 11.
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28. Oliveira’s return to Buenos Aires can be interpreted in a way similar to Borges’s approach
to Wakefield, the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthrone’s Twice Told Tales where “la honda
trivilidad del protagonista . . . contrasta con la magnitud de su perdición” (Obras 2:55) [“the
protagonist’s profound triviality, [which] contrasts with the magnitude of his
perdition” (Selected Non-Fictions 223)].
29. I also follow Hutcheon in her use of the concept of parody. She adopts the definition orig-
inally proposed by Russian formalists, which in her opinion is particularly applicable to
metafiction: “Parodic art both is a deviation from the norm and includes that norm with-
in itself as background material” (50).
30. “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,” trans. Anthony Kerrigan, in Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 189–193.
31. The references to encyclopedias appear in several Borges’s texts. A paradigmatic example
of Argentineans involved in study of the encyclopedia may be found in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius.”
32. Borges in his conversations with Grau, for instance, discusses the importance of Piranesi’s works
for his own texts and recalls his first acquaintance with Piranesi’s engravings and drawings:
“Yo conocí a Piranesi através de Thomas de Quincey. Es muy curiosa la descripción de las
Carceri . . . Yo tengo en casa un grabado de Piranesi, “Avanzo del Tempio del Dio Canopo,”
y otro de un discípulo suyo.” (150) [“I became familiar with Piranesi through Thomas de
Quincey. A description of the Carceri is very curious . . . I have at home a print of Piranesi’s
“Avanzo del Tempio del Dio Canopo” and another one by his student.”]
33. All references are to James E. Irby’s translation of “El inmortal” as it appears in Labyrinths,
pp. 105–119.
34. Some carnivalesque features already appear in the first part of the novel (e.g. doubles),
however they culminate and obtain metafictional significance in Buenos Aires.
35. Numerous critics such as Boldy (see p. 85) and Villanueva (see p. 44) analyze the plank
episode as a metaphorical representation of the Buenos-Aires/Paris dychotomy and as a
metaphysical exercise. In her reading of the novel as utopian space, Ana María Amar
Sanchez suggests that the failure to cross, the impossibility of crossing, also reminds us that
“ there is no way across, that there is no between to stand on” (32). I suggest a metafiction-
al reading of this episode.
36. As defined by Bakhtin, “Eccentricity is a special category of the carnival sense of the world
organically connected with the category of familiar contact; it permits—in concretely sen-
suous form—the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves” (Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 123).
37. In contrast to Dostoevsky’s doubles, whose representation according to Bakhtin “always pre-
served alongside the tragic element an element of the comic as well” (117), in Cortázar’s dou-
bles the comic aspect is dominant.
38. Some examples of doubles in Dostoevsky’s works include for Raskolnikov Svidrigailov,
Luzhin, and Lebeziatnikov; for Ivan Karamazov—Smerdyakov, the devil, Rakitin. Oliveira’s
in Cortázar’s Rayuela also has two doubles with opposite functions: Grigorovius and Traveler.
39. Sonya, for instance is an embodiment of compassion in Crime and Punishment. When she
first hears about Raskolnikov’s crime, Sonya experiences her “first passionate and poignant
impulse of sympathy” (“pity” is the most appropriate word for the Russian “sostradanie” (348;
italics added)).
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Chapter 3
1. All references are to Andrew Hurley’s translation of “Utopía de un hombre que está
cansado” as it appears in Collected Fictions, pp. 460–466.
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2. The title of the story and its tone allude to the presence of Quevedo’s poetic world in Borges’s
text, particularly Quevedo’s sonnet “Represéntase la brevedad de lo que se vive y cuán nada
parece lo que se vivió” where the lyric voice characterizes himself in a following way: “soy
un fue, y un será, y un es cansado” (11) [“I am one who was, who will be, and who is tired”].
For the detailed analysis of Quevedo’s influence on Borges, see Giuseppe Bellini’s Quevedo
y la poesia hispanoamericana del siglo XX: Vallejo, Carrera Andrade, Paz, Neruda, Borges and
Christopher Maurer’s “The Poet’s Poets: Borges and Quevedo.”
3. Quevedo translates page and a half of More’s book and quotes it in his political work
“Carta a Luis XIII” (1635).
4. Eudoro Acevedo’s self-introduction and his last name which is that of Borges’s mother
alludes to the fictional presence of the writer in the text.
5. “The Postulation of Reality,” trans. Esther Allen, in Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot
Weinberger, pp. 59–65.
6. One of the most evident ambiguities of More’s Utopia appears in the chapter “Their Gold
and Silver, and How They Keep It” where the reader learns that utopians “hold gold and
silver up to scorn in every way” (More 44), but at the same time they recognize the value
of gold because it is used for the employment of mercenaries to wage their expansionist war.
7. An identification of the religious writing with the fantastic fiction produces comic effect
of “transposition” (Bergson 136).
8. The peculiarity of Yahoos, their insensivity to pain and pleasure are also addressed in
Borges’s story “El informe del Dr. Brodie” which enters in an explicit dialogue with Swift’s
canonical text.
9. A description of Someone’s death where history and fiction intertwine evokes Borges’s cri-
tique of violence brought by WWII. In his essay “Anotación al 23 de Agosto de 1944,”
Borges’s emphasizes the brutality of Nazism by referring to it as “una irrealidad,” [“unreal-
ity”] that is fiction and by describing it as “una imposibilidad mental y moral.” (Obras 2:106)
[“mentally and morally impossible” (Selected Non-Fictions 211].
10. Someone’s words and suicide also echo the Utopian’s approach to death suggested in More’s
pioneer book: “the Utopians believe that a man whose life has become torture to himself
will be—and should be glad to die” (More 65).
11. All references are to Alastair Reid’s translation as it appears in Borges a Reader (New York:
Dutton, 1981), pp. 163–165.
12. An overlap between the past and the future can also be noticed in More’s text. The land
of future, he describes, for instance, “had previously been called Abraxa” that “connotes mys-
tical antiquity” (34). In his convincing interpretation of More’s book, Arthur Morgan sug-
gests that a description of the life and social system in Utopia very closely corresponds to
Ancient Peru: “There is a strong evidence that several Portuguese voyages, both before and
after Columbus, reached the east coast of South America in time to have met the condi-
tions required by More’s narrative. . . . This narrative seems the more probably as factual
account in the light of what we now know of the first acquaintance of Europeans with the
Inca Empire.” (230–231).
13. Borges’s allegory of the imperial map in “Del rigor en la ciencia” (El Hacedor) [“On
Exactitude in Science” (The Maker)] produces similar effect.
14. These lines suggest a pun based on the beginning of Esteban Echeverría’s “La cautiva”: “. . . El
desierto inconmensurable, abierto/y misterioso a sus pies/se extiende” (43) [“The Captive”]
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[“At their feet unmeasurable, open, and mysterious, stretches the Desert” (3)]. Someone’s ref-
erence to the ruins of Bahía Blanca located in Brasil also manifests mise-en-abyme relation-
ship between the narrative levels of discourse and the characters in this story (Obras 3:54).
15. Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit, trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Random House, 1972.
16. I will refer to the City using capital letter as the narrator does at the beginning of the novel.
He switches to the low case letter, however, to emphasize the City’s ‘habitual’ nature.
17. Malva E. Filer convincingly argues that the City exemplifies a poetic search for place that
is at the core of Cortázar’s ouevra: “La búsqueda de palabras espacio y el diseño de territo-
rios poéticos da impulso a toda su obra [de Cortázar], en verso y en prosa, y cristaliza
emblemáticamente en la ciudad, el espacio mágico” (49) [“The search for the words, space
and design of poetic territories gives impulse to all of his [Cortázar’s] works in verse and
prose, and crystalizes in an emblematic way in the city, the magic space”].
18. As the author himself points out this novel has been inspired by the Chapter 62 of Rayuela.
It seems interesting to mention whether it is just a curious coincidence or not, that Freud
uses as an example the number 62 in his essay “The Uncanny” when he speaks of the invol-
untary repetition that renders uncanny and seemingly inescapable what might otherwise look
like innocent chance. He shows the number 62 recurring close together on addresses, hotel
rooms, railway compartments, and how a person will be “tempted to ascribe a secret mean-
ing to this obstinate recurrence.” (43). A comparable atmosphere might be said to pervade
Cortázar’s novel, yet he never made such reference in any of his statements about the book.
19. I coincide with Kerr’s approach to the characters in this novel as both “controversial
concept” and “conventional category” (“Betwixt Reading and Repetition (apropos of
Cortázar’s 62: A Model Kit)” 94).
20. See, for example, More’s Utopia or Lord Bacon’s New Atlantis among many others.
21. For Cortázar’s explanation of the meaning of “paredros” see his conversation with Garfield
(122–123).
22. In his conversation with Ernesto González Bermejo, Cortázar refers to his personal vision
of “la Ciudad” as different from the derived from a novelistic convention: “[e]sa ciudad
existe en mí y a su manera: hace ya muchos años que empecé a soñar con ella, a conocerla
paulatinamente tal como se describe en “62”; entre mis papeles guardo un plano de la
ciudad, al que fui agregando detalles, plazas, el canal del norte, a medida que mis sueños
me iban internando en ella” (70–71) [“[t]his city exists in me in a particular way: many
years ago I have started dreaming with it and familiarize myself with it gradually”]. The city
in the novel, however, appears to escape any plan or map.
23. This approach to language as a challenge to epistemology can be a result at least of double
influence. It can be inspired by Zen Buddhism which has been an object of his interest recur-
rently mentioned in Rayuela and Nabokov’s Pale Fire which has been among Cortázar’s read-
ings at time he was writing 62: Modelo para armar. As described by Roland Barthes, who also
felt an affinity with Zen’s intuition of something beyond connotation, beyond the codes, and
beyond what Barthes calls ‘the vicious infinity of language’, “All of Zen . . . is no more than
a panic suspension of language, the blank which erases in us the reign of the Codes, the breach
of the internal recitation which constitutes our person” (74–745). Similar idea is vividly pre-
sent in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a text of absolute epistemological uncertainty. Cortázar
extensively refers to this Nabokov’s work as one of the sources of inspiration for his own novel
in his essay “La muñeca rota” [“The Broken Doll”].
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24. Vague characters and a recurrent difficulty in defying the narrative voice are other mani-
festations of the resistance to the idea of the “determinate knowledge” of the object which
culminates in the image of the City.
25. The City’s metapoetical functions may be regarded as an illustration of the parralel between
the works of architect and writer Cortázar draws in his essay “Notas sobre la novela
contemporanea” [“Notes about a contemporary novel”]: “El novelista se plantea su labor en
términos architectónicos. Procede análogamente al architecto que logra un orden estético equi-
librando la función directo del edificio . . . con la belleza formal que la contiene porque si la
iglesia es árida . . . Así también hay libros que se caen de las manos” (144) [“The novelist plans
his/her work in architectonic terms. He/She proceeds like an architect who achieves aesthetic
order by balancing the direct function of the building . . . with formal beauty, because if there
is a church which is too arid . . . there are also books which fall from hands”].
26. Similar metapoetical thoughts are most vividly presented in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius” (Ficciones) whose origin is due to Encyclopedia and a mirror.
27. Alazraki also emphasizes the prominence of the visual aspects of the City, an open-ended
literary construct, “espacio que corporiza un mundo público y convencionalizado, un mundo
que se impone no tanto por su verdad, como por la dureza de su visibilidad” (236) [“a space
which shapes the public and conventional world, a world which dominates not so much by
its verisimilitude, but rather by the prominence of its visibility”].
28. On numerous occasions Cortázar has referred to the image of the City as a “pesadilla”
[“nightmare”] (Prego 80) and “infierno” [“hell”] (Garfield 25).
29. Using Reyner Banham’s term, the city can be identified with an “autopia” that is a utopia
whose value lies “in the lines of connection between its disparate elements and where the
vision of the whole adheres in the physical reality of the connections themselves” (qtd. in
Siebers 28). The concept of autopia can be considered parallel to the notion of language
as a network which “defines a field across which textual activity occurs” (Wiseman 303).
30. On Cortázar’s globe-trotting experience as a translator, see his essay, accompanied by
details from Paul Delvaux’s eerie nocturnal cityscapes, “Noches en los ministerios de
Europa,” (La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos I, 113–119) (“Nights in Europe’s Ministries,”
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds).
31. It is interesting to mention essential overlap between Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and
Marin’s approach to the Utopia as “always a synthesis, a reconciling synthesis” (“Frontiers
of Utopia: Past and Present” 413).
32. Pointing to the disturbing function of city as any heterotopia, Andrew Bush considers
Cortázar’s novel to be “a tale of discovery in which an apparently ficticious world, la ciudad,
invades, reforms, and disintegrates quotidian reality” (132).
33. In a sense the City is a door, which as heterotopia, “always presuppose[s] a system of opening
and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (26). In some sense, the
functioning of the city is similar to the door as described by Bachelard as “the Half-open”
which is “the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations” (222).
34. The motif of the mirror is also one of the most prominent in Nabokov’s fiction that
Cortázar admired. See, for instance, Invitation to a Beheading or Pale Fire among many other
examples.
35. All references are to James E. Irby’s translation of “La casa de Asterión” as it appears in Borges,
Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 138–141.
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36. See, for example, “El jardin de los senderos que bifurcan” (“The garden of forking paths”
and “Biblioteca de Babel” (“The Library of Babel”).
37. Foucault’s description of the double appears to be compatible with that which emerges in
Asterion’s mind: “the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in
man, but beside him and at the same time in an identical newness, in an unavoidable dual-
ity” (The Order of Things 326).
38. This is different from the conventional interpretation of the outside/inside dichotomy as
one which “forms a dialectic division” (Bachelard 211).
39. Marta Spagnuolo suggests Hernández’s “Martin Fierro” as another source of inspiration for
Borges’s story. She discusses literary and psychological parallelisms between the two texts;
and finds affinities between Asterion and Fierro’s oldest son.
40. According to Foucault, the idea of combining elements pertaining to different times, epochs
and one may continue texts, as well as contradictory attitudes “belongs to our modernity.” (26).
41. Julio Cortázar. The Winners, trans. Elaine Kerrigan, London: Allison and Busby, 1986.
42. Reminding one of Borges’s “Lotería en Babylonia” (“The Lottery in Babylon”), the novel
starts with the image of chaos.
43. Felipe Trejo’s hesitation in his relationship with Raúl as well as the fact that he has
been raped by the sailor, exemplify the novel’s affinity with Melville’s sea-narratives such
as White -Jacket; or the World in a Man-of-War and Billy Budd where ship opens the spatial
condition of possibility defined by engaging in homosexual practices.
44. The co-presence of narration of events and the sections which reflect Persio’s meditations
illustrate Cortázar’s vision of the novel as a hybrid genre developed in his essays written prior
to his novel such as “Notas sobre la novela contemporánea” (“Notes about contemporary
novel”) and “Situación de la novela” where he defines a novel as “la simbiosis de los modos
enunciativos y poéticos del idioma.” (Obra crítica 2:143) [“a symbiosis of the enunciative
and poetic modes of the language.”].
45. On multiple occasions Borges refers to this Schopenhauer’s creation. See, for example,
“Nueva refutación del tiempo” (Otras inquisiciones) “New Refutation of Time,” “El budismo”
(Siete noches) “Buddhism” and “Historia de la eternidad” (Historia de la eternidad) (“A
History of Eternity”) among many others. In his recent article “De Borges a Shopenhauer,”
Ivan Almeida suggests an illuminating analysis of Borges’s perceptions of this German
philosopher, and offers insights into the writer’s creative interpretations of Schopenhauer’s
ideas, vividly present in the former’s oeuvre.
46. The topos of the interchangeability and fluid nature of human identity appears in numer-
ous Borges’s stories. See, for example, “La lotería en Babilonia” (“The Lottery in Babylon”)
and “Historia del traidor y del heroe” (“The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”).
47. The parallelism between human life and the game of chess is recurrent in Borges’s fiction
such as “El milagro secreto” (“The Secret Miracle”), the poem “Ajedrez” (“Chess”) among
many others.
Chapter 4
1. Carlos Cortínez et al. Con Borges (texto y persona). (Buenos Aires: Torres Aguero Editor,
1988).
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2. Various critics have pointed out the importance of these texts as “a necessary complement
to the stories of Ficciones and El Aleph” (Irby 10) and as “fundamental reading for the full
understanding of his creative work” (Rodriguéz-Monegal 345).
3. Derrida’s notion of archive can be contrasted with the one offered by Michel Foucault in
his Archaeology of Knowledge, which associated archive with systematization and order:
“we have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events . . .
and things. . . . They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I
propose to call archive” (128).
4. “Coleridge’s Dream” trans. Eliot Weinberger, in Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, pp. 369–373.
5. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud distinguishes two major mechanisms of dream-work:
“condensation” and “displacement” (278).
6. Sylvia Molloy also points out Freud’s and Borges’s common interest in “the uncanny as an
organizing principle” (78).
7. In his essay “Valéry como símbolo” he refers to “la era melancólica del nazismo y del
materialismo dialéctico, de los augures de la secta de Freud y de los comerciantes del sur-
réalisme” (Obras 2:65) [“a melancholic era of nazism and dialectical materialism, of augurs
from Freud’s sect and merchants of surréalisme” (198)].
8. In a sense, Borges is also a follower of Schopenhauer’s and Jung’s approaches to dream-
creativity. Both Schopenhauer’s statement that “everyone, while he dreams, is a Shakespeare”
and Jung’s metaphor that dream is “a theatre, in which the dreamer is a scene, player,
prompter, director, author, audience, and critic” are adopted by Borges, who directly and
implicitly refers to these philosophers in his conversation with Ernesto Sábato. Whereas
Jung’s metaphor, without mentioning the name of the philosopher appears internalized in
Borges’s discourse (see 141), he comments about Schopenhauer: “escribió que la vida y los
sueños eran hojas de un mismo libro, y que leerlas en orden es vivir, y hojearlas, soñar” (141)
[“he wrote that life and dreams are pages of the same book, and to read them in order is to
live and to leaf through them is to dream”]. Freud also mentions Schopenhauer on numer-
ous occasions in The Interpretation of Dreams (see, for instance, pp. 293, 503), and appears
to be influenced by his philosophy.
9. A motif of music as the highest art form explicitly appears in “La muralla y los libros” [“The
Wall and the Books”].
10. A very similar place to the palace “Xanadu” discussed in “El sueño de Coleridge” [“Coleridge’s
Dream”] appears in Borges’s later text, “Parábola del Palacio” [“Parable of th Palace”],
where a striking similarity between a palace and a poem both gives and takes the poet’s life:
“Aquel día el Emperador Amarillo mostró su palacio al poeta. Fueron dejando atrás, el
largo desfile, las primeras terrazas occidentales que, como gradas de casi inabarcable
anfiteatro, declinan hacia un paraiso o jardín cuoys espejos de metal y cuyos intrincados
cercos de enebro prefiguraban ya el laberinto” (Obras 2:179) [“That day the Yellow Emperor
showed his palace to the poet. Little by little, step by step, they left behind, in long pro-
cession, the first westward-facing terraces which, like the jagged hemicycles of an almost
unbounded amphitheatre, stepped down into a paradise, a garden whose metal mirrors and
intertwined hedges of juniper were a prefiguration of the labyrinth” (Collected Fictions
317)]. The Emperor appears to be stricken by the similarities between the palace and a poem,
“El texto se ha perdido; hay quien entiende que constaba de un verso; otros de una sola
palabra. Lo cierto, lo increible, es que en el poema estaba entero y minucioso el palacio
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enorme” (Obras 2:179) [“The text has been lost; there are those who believe that it con-
sisted of but a single line; others, of a single word. What we know—however incredible it
may be—is that within the poem lay the entire enormous palace.” (Collected Fictions 318)].
Being afraid that the poem would replace the building, he orders to kill the poet killed:
“Emperador exclamó: “ ‘¡Me has arrebatado el palacio!’, y la espada de hierro del verdugo
segó la vida del poeta” (Obras 2:180) [“ ‘You have stolen my palace!’ [the emperor] cried,
and the executioner’s iron scythe mowed down the poet’s life” (Collected Fictions 318)].
11. Freud’s use of continuous displacement as a narrative strategy appears to be influenced by
Immanuel Kant’s idea about orientation and a parallel he draws between mind and terri-
tory. In his essay “¿Qué significa orientarse en el pensamiento?” Kant observes that “sólo
me oriento geográficamente gracias a un principio de diferenciación subjetivo” (qtd. in
Almeida 10) [“I can orient myself geographically thanks to the principle of subjective dif-
ferentiation” (318)]. The German philosopher associates orientation with an inference
which indicates rather then demonstrates. As Almeida explains in his perceptive article
“Conjeturas y mapas Kant, Pierce, Borges y las geografías del pensamiento,” to orient one-
self, for Kant, does not necessarily imply that one will come to know the unknown place.
Kant’s idea was familiar to Freud, and possibly explains his choice of displacement as an orga-
nizing principle of the discourse in The Interpretation of Dreams. Displacement is also a com-
mon narrative strategy in rabbinical interpretations of the secret kabbalistic books. This
allows one to suggest a double influence of both Kantian though and rabbinical practices
on Freud’s use of displacement as an organizing principle of his discourse.
12. In her illuminating essay, “The model of Midrash and Borges’s Interpretive Tales and Essays,”
Myrna Solotorevsky considers “El sueño de Coleridge” an “exegetical writing” in which
“various interpretations are incidentally pitted against each other” (256). In my reading,
I try to show that they are not “incidentally pitted,” but rather form a spiritual/intellectual
voyage related to the places where the dreams happened.
13. Another allusion to this Hinduistic belief appears in “El enigma de Edward Fitzgerald.”
14. Borges expresses his admiration for Buddhism, in his lecture on “El budismo,” which he
closes in the following way: “Para mí el budismo no es una pieza de museo: es un camino
de salvación” (Obras 3:254) [“Buddhism is not a museum piece; it is a path to salvation”
(Seven Nights 75)].
15. References to Plato are recurrent in Borges’s works. In his essay “El ruiseñor de Keats” he
refers to the distinction Coleridge drew between “aristotélicos and platónicos,” In “Historia
de eternidad” Borges talks about “inmóvil y terrrible museo de los arquetipos platónicos,”
the vision which radically changes as he confesses in a prologue to the 1953 edition of the
Complete Works: “No sé cómo pude comparar a “inmoviles piezas del museo” las formas de
Platón y cómo no sentí leyendo a Escoto Erígena y a Schopenhauer, que éstas son vivas,
poderosas y orgánicas” (qtd. Balderstón et al 261). Both the idea and the concept of arche-
type are recurrent in Borges’s essays and fiction. See, for instance, “La esfera de Pascal” (Otras
Inquisiciones) and “El inmortal” (El Aleph), among many others.
16. “The Wall and the Books,” trans. James E. Irby in Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 180–183.
17. Borges translated and admired Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” In the prologue to his
translation of the collection of Kafka’s stories under the title La metamorfosis, Borges
observes: “En el más memorable de todos ellos [cuentos]—La edificación de la muralla china,
1919—, el infinito es multiple: para detener el curso de ejércitos infinitamente lejanos, un
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notes 177
29. Both Borges’s and Kafka’s texts also suggest a relationship between repetition, repression, mem-
ory and archive, as originally suggested by Freud. Whereas in Borges’s text this relationship
can be seen through the mutually annihilating acts of the destruction of the books and
construction of the wall, the very structure of the wall in Kafka’s story evokes Freud’s repre-
sentation of memory as thread with breaches. As René Major perceptively observes, “[s]ince
Freud, memory is represented through the differences of breaches ‘frayages’ ” (298). This drive
for non-reconciliation is also another manifestation of the possible confluence between
deconstructionist thought and Kabbalist tradition, the latter no doubt familiar to Kafka. As
Krenz observes, “The dynamic, ever precarious tension between essentially irreconcilable
opposites was always at heart of the Jewish tradition and is still a source of its enduring
vitality” (110).
30. This symbolic parallelism between the building of the wall and the approach to the
aesthetic phenomenon can also be regarded as an extension of Kant’s use of the notion of
“architectonic” for the description of the epistemological system and his recognition of the
determinant importance of “the form” for the positionality of the parts of knowledge.
31. In many of his stories, Borges uses a similar device when he combines almost documentary
introductory paragraphs with overtly fictional development. In “El jardín de los senderos
que se bifurcan” [“The Garden of Forking Paths”], for example, a detective like metaphys-
ical story has a realistic frame.
Chapter 5
1. All references are to Paul Blackburn’s translation of “Lejana” as it appears in End of the Game
and Other Stories. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967) pp. 274–286.
2. All references are to my translation of “La puerta condenada” as it appears in Appendix,
pp. 135–141.
3. All references are to my translation of “Cartas de mamá” as it appears in Appendix, pp. 141–156.
4. In his letter to Yurkievich, for example, he praises Los fundadores de la nueva poesía lati-
noamericana with a reference to Bachelard’s works: “. . . los análisis de poemas me parecieron
muy reveladores . . ., y conociéndome como me conocés no te asombrará mi alegría al ver
con qué frecuencia y eficacia te basás en la línea Bachelard o Eliade para mirar el fondo del
pozo.” (Cartas 3:1473) [“the analysis of the poems seem to me very revealing . . ., and
knowing me as you know, you would not be surprised by my enthusiasm, which springs from
the fact that your thoughts, at their basis, are frequently and effectively in line with
Bachelard and Eliade, when you look at the heart of the matter”].
5. Most prominent artistic examples influenced by this vision can be found in surrealist art
which considers the inner, subjective space, and where place obtains a life of its own. For
an illuminating discussion of the influence of the surrealist concept of place on Cortázar’s
works, see Marta Morello-Frosch’s “Espacios públicos y discurso clandestino en los cuentos
de Julio Cortázar.”
6. “Some Aspects of the Short Story.” Trans. Aden W. Hayes. The New Short Story Theories
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), 245–255.
7. Metapoetical references to a bridge are recurrent in Cortázar’s works. Alazraki also points
out the metapoetical importance of the bridge in this story, which is also compatible with
Morelli’s mentioning of the bridge in Rayuela when he discusses the creation of a new novel.
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8. As Sara Castro-Klaren points out, “La conciliación de los opuestos es un tema constante
en Cortázar.” (38) [“The conciliation of the opposites is a constant theme in Cortázar”].
Referring to Rayuela, La vuelta, and Ultimo round, she emphasizes that an annihilation of
the dichotomy “sujeto-objeto” [subject-object] is among the central preoccupations in his
works. A parallelism between the notions of (the compound nature) of the self and city in
“Lejana” can be another example which illustrates this observation.
9. In tune with Lacan’s ideas, Irving Howe asserts in his essay “The Self in Literature” that
“the self implies multiplicity” (249).
10. An explicit identification of the bridge with the self occurs in Libro de Manuel: “Porque un
puente aunque se tenga el deseo de tenderlo y toda obra sea un puente hacia y desde algo,
no es verdaderamente puente mientras los hombres no lo crucen. Un puente es un hom-
bre cruzando un puente, che” (27) [“Because a bridge, even if you have the desire to build
one and if all works are bridges to and from something, is not really a bridge until people
cross it.” A bridge is a person crossing it, che (22–23)].
11. As Kerr suggests, there are a number of beliefs and superstitions attached to bridges (and
specifically the center as the meeting place of two or more people) which might offer cul-
tural explanations, and should be considered among sources of inspiration, for the use of
images associated with the bridge in this story. E. and M. A. Radford in the article “Bridges”
(Encyclopedia of Superstitions, ed. and rev. Christina Hole), point out that bridges are “obvi-
ous symbols of transition,” and that “from very early times they have been associated in men’s
minds with the passage of souls to the next world, and therefore with death” (67). The idea
of “the Devil’s Bridge” involves the devil as the builder of a bridge, who is repaid for his work
with the soul of the first person to cross it after completion. In many countries these old super-
stitions still hold and they always involve the themes of the devil and death: “One
well-known tradition says that if two people part on, or under, a bridge, they will never meet
again” (68). This, may explain what happens to Alina and the old woman in “Lejana” (147).
12. Drawing a parallel between the notions of the divided self and body, Lacan points out that
a “fragmented body usually . . . manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the
analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual” (4).
13. Cortázar points out that “en ‘Lejana’ . . . el sueño o el deseo usurpa a la vigilia” (Garfield
84) “in [“ ‘The Distances’ . . . a dream or desire usurps wakefulness”].
14. In his En busca del unicornio, Alazraki regards this meeting as a neofantastic resolution of
the confrontation between Alina’s true self and her false self. In his Lacanian interpreta-
tion, Alina sees her acts as those of the false I (see “Lejana,” pp. 181–200). I suggest it re-
mains impossible to decide between Alina’s true/false selves.
15. Visualizing Alina’s scream, Mercedes Blanco compares it to “the famous painting by Edvard
Munch, The Scream, a reproduction of which illustrates Cortázar’s essay on the fantastic.” (245).
16. Other examples of the transmigration of souls can be found in “Axolotl” (Final del juego)
where the narrator and the plant exchange selves, and “La noche boca arriba” (“The Night
Face Up”) (Final del juego) where a fusion between the 20th century protagonist and a
pre-Columbian Indian is dramatized.
17. According to Julio Rodríguez-Luis, this story is “an allegory of the search for the authentic
self” (68).
18. Wheelock perceptively characterizes this final act as that of “solipsism,” which he defines
as “a notion that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and states” (9).
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notes 179
19. In his study of a relationship between psychoanalysis and geography, Pile emphasizes
the importance of the link between “the body, the constitutive ambivalence of self, and the
construction of (deeply-felt) emotional geographies” (89).
20. In his work Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Freud discusses “the representation
through the opposite” (56) as a mechanism of wit.
21. As Cortázar tells Garfield, this interest in the magic of words has been evoked by “las expe-
riencias surrealistas” [“surrealist experiences”] and “algunos textos sobre la cábala” (91)
[“some texts about Kabbalah”].
22. An impossibility to distinguish between a ‘true’ self and a ‘false’ one is one of the leitmotifs
in Anton Chekhov’s and Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, admired by Cortázar.
23. As Claudio Cifuentes Aldunate points out, in Cortázar’s “relatos funadamentales . . . se
puede leer el problema aquí-allá correspondiendo a Europa, Latinoamérica o viceversa” (170)
[“major stories, one may read the problem “here-there” that corresponds to Europe, Latin
America and vice verse”].
24. David Lagmanovich in his pionerring book Estudios sobre los cuentos de Julio Cortázar.
(Barcelona: Ediciones Hispam, 1975) considers the beggar to be Alina’s “doppelganger,”
“un ‘otro’ que es bastante más que un eco o una suerte de emanación pasiva, en la medida
en que no solo duplica, sino . . . también frustra o invierte los actos del ‘yo’ ” (12) [“the ‘other’
who is rather an echo or a destiny of passive emanation in such a measure which not only
duplicates, but . . . also frustrates and inverts the acts (actions) of the ‘I’ ”]. Referring to the
process of the creation of “Lejana” in his conversation with González Bermejo, Cortázar
points out that “[e]l tema del doble aparece . . . con toda su fuerza en ese cuento” [the theme
of the double appears . . . in all its strength in this story], but not as a result of
literary influence: “No creo que se trate de una influencia literaria. Cuando yo escribí ese
cuento . . . ‘Lejana,’ estoy absolutamente seguro . . . esa noción de doble no era, en
absoluto, una contaminación literaria. Era una vivencia” (Bermejo 26) [“I do not believe
that the matter is one of literary influence. When I wrote this story . . . ‘Lejana,’ I am
absolutely sure . . . this notion of the double was not a literary contamination at all. It was
a life experience”].
25. Two classic texts which use a door as a symbol are H.G. Wells’ “The Door in the Wall”
(1946) and William Wymark Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902).
26. In his conversation with Prego, Cortázar also recalls his memories about his creation of this
story in the hotel Cervantes: “Yo quería que en el cuento quedara la atmósfera del hotel
Cervantes, porque tipificaba un poco muchas cosas para mí. Había el personaje del Gerente,
la estatua esa que hay (o habíá) en el hall, una réplica de la Venus, y el clima general del
hotel. Esa fue la vez que estuve más tiempo en Montevideo” (107) [“I wanted that the atmos-
phere of the hotel “Cervantes” would leave its mark on the story, because it typified a lot
of things for me. There was the character of the manager, the statue which is (or was) in
the hall, a replica of the Venus de Milo, and the general climate of the hotel. This was from
the time when I stayed for a while in Montevideo”].
27. Ilan Stavans draws a parallel between the images of the door and the bridge, suggesting that
in “La puerta condenada” the door “es un puente incomunicado, un vaso comunicante ais-
lado” (87) [“is a bridge which is impossible to communicate, an isolated communicating glass”].
28. The character of Petrone is among the most interesting for Cortázar in the story: “En ese
cuento hay una cosa que a mí me gusta y es que creo que acerté con el personaje, porque
08.qxd 29/8/07 6:28 PM Page 180
hice un hombre muy pied-a-terre, es un hombre de negocios que está en sus cosas, que vino
a terminar unos contratos, no es ningún imaginativo en especial. Y entonces a él la cosa
le cae con mucha más violencia, porque sale completamente de su orbita. Él no se imagina
jamás nada extraño hasta la ultima frase del cuento, en la que él tampoco dice nada pero
es posible imaginar lo que pensó. Supongo que él también huyó” (116) [“In this story there
is one thing which I like, and this, I believe, is what I have stated with the character,
because I created a very down-to-earth man, a businessman who deals with his things, who
came to finish contracts. There is nothing especially imaginative about him. And then the
thing falls on him with much violence, because it is absolutely out of his orbit. He does
not imagine anything strange till the last phrase of the story, where he also does not say
anything, but is possible to imagine what he is thinking. I suppose that he also ran away.”].
29. According to Rodríguez-Luis’ reading of this text, there are similarities between Cortazar’s “The
Sealed Door” and Borges’s “There are More Things.” In both these stories, in his opinion, “the
affirmation of the supernatural causes fear” (79).
30. For Cortázar, the wardrobe has a crucial significance for writing a story, as he describes in his
conversation with Prego: “Y fue entonces que me empezó a obsesionar un poco ese armario,
que estaba colocado en una posición artificial en la pieza. . . . Entonces, como no tenía nada
que hacer, lo saqué cinco centímetros para ver que pasaba y vi que el armario estaba puesto
ahí porque condenaba una puerta que daba a la habitación de al lado. . . . De golpe miré el
armario, miré la puerta y el cuento me cayó . . . así.” (112) [“And it was then that the
wardrobe, which had been located in a strange position in the room, started to obsess me”.
Because I did not have anything better to do, I moved it five centimeters forward so that
I could pass behind it, and I then saw that the wardrobe was there to block the door away
to the other room . . . Suddenly I looked at the wardrobe, I looked at the door, and the story
came to me”].
31. According to Marta Morello-Frosch, “la ubicación espacial . . . es agente que sobredetermina
el destino de los personajes” (76) [“the spatial location . . . is an agent which overdetermines
the destiny of the characters”].
32. For this interpretation, see, for instance, Rodríguez-Luis’ The Contemporary Practice of the
Fantastic.
33. According to Hernández del Castillo, the story also utilizes the house as “a symbol of the womb
or the mother”; the hotel is described as “sombrío, tranquilo, casi desierto,” [“gloomy, quiet, almost
deserted”] and its atmosphere is characterized by “la falta de sol y air” [the lack of sun and aire].
She finds it similar to the mansion in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
34. According to Prieto, this story along with “La salud de los enfermos” (“The Health of the
Sick”), “La señorita Cora” (“Nurse Cora”) contain “the most fully developed portraits of
mothers [Cortázar] ever drew” (49).
35. Garfield points to “[t]he relationship between false and visible reality and its actual hidden
meanings” in “Cartas de mamá” (49).
36. In her psychoanalytical reading of the story, Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz insists on autobio-
graphical connotations of the character of mamá and interprets her as “the betrayed
Eurydice safeguarding Cortázar’s Argentineness and the focus of his creative writing” (125).
She focuses her analysis on female characters.
37. The image of the bridge as a connection between territories and people or the impossibil-
ity of this connection, is a recurrent motif in Cortázar’s fiction. It appears, for instance,
08.qxd 29/8/07 6:28 PM Page 181
notes 181
in Rayuela, where one of the metaphorical functions of the bridge is the impossibility of
reconciliation between Oliviera-La Maga-Paris.
38. In both “Cartas de mamá” and Rayuela the dichotomy Paris/Buenos Aires and the blurring
of the boundaries between these places emphasize the characters’ existential alienation, in the
earlier story (“Cartas de mamá”), the blurring of the boundaries between these two cities brings
past and present to a single contradictory moment and is connected with a fantastic motif.
39. The word “ajena,” foreigner, in “Cartas de mamá,” as the word “lejana” in the story “Lejana,”
far away, in the story of that name, are metaphorically used to refer to both physical and
psychological displacement.
40. As Sosnowski points out, “el nombre ‘Nico’ era el túnel, la palabra mágica, a través de la cual
se manifestó lo que no tenía razón (ital) de ser” (Sosnowski 25–26) [“the name ‘Nico’ era a tun-
nel, the magic word, by means of which something which did not have sense to be was displayed”].
41. For Cortázar himself, the fantástic resides on “the real.” He defines “lo fantástico como nos-
talgia” [“the fantastic as nostalgia”], and continues “ [t]oda suspension of disbelief obra como
tregua en el seco, implacable asedio que el determinismo hace al hombre” (Ultimo 1, 79)
[“All suspension of belief operates as a truce from the harsh, implacable siege that deter-
minism wages on man” (166)] As Cortázar asserts, “es necesario que lo excepcional pase a
ser también la regla sin desplazar las estructuras ordinarias entre las cuales se ha insertado”
(80) [“the extraordinary must become the rule without displacing the ordinary structures
in which it is inserted” (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 166–167)].
42. Cortázar’s text is in tune with Camus’ “une morale dy bonheur” developed in Létat de
Siégeit, where the protagonist cannot escape from accountability despite the flight from guilt.
43. The presence of two brothers and a woman, and the Judaeo-Christian motif of guilt makes
the situation described in the story echo that of Cain and Abel.
44. Kerr interprets this connection as “the latent doubling process” (219) which “is not visi-
ble on the narrative level of the text” (126).
45. In addition to the texts analyzed, a similar connection between physical displacement and
psychological division can be found in such stories as “House Taken Over,” “The Gates of
Heaven,” and “Continuity of Parks.”
Conclusion
1. Heidegger characterizes biblical Aleph, a possible source of inspiration for Borges’s story, as
“the locus of an original disclosure of the ‘world’ ” (95).
2. It can be further suggested that this condition is caused by the dominance of superficial
values under Perón’s regime which Cortázar observed from Paris and Borges faced in Buenos
Aires. For a detailed description of humiliations Borges suffered under Peron’s power, see
Rodriguez Monegal’s Jorge Luis Borges. A Literary Biography and Edwin Williamson’s Borges.
A Life. For Cortázar’s vision of Peron’s Argentine, see his conversations with Luis Harss.
3. In his conversation with Richard Burgin, for instance, Borges refers to existentialism as a “pathe-
tic philosophy” (107) and confesses that he has always “felt repelled by [Kierkegaard]” (108).
4. For a perceptive survey on the influence of Borges’s and Cortázar’s works on Latin American
Modernist and postmodern fiction see Raymond Williams recent article “From modernismo to
the postmodern: the Twentieth-century Desire to be Modern and Spanish American Fiction.”
08.qxd 29/8/07 6:28 PM Page 182
5. Borges mentions this line also in his essay “De las allegorías and las novelas” [“From Allegories
to Novels”] (Otras Inquisiciones), where he omits the last “e” in “smylere.” Cortázar’s refer-
ence to this line which according to Borges initiates novelistic genre is also significant, given
Cortázar’s admiration for novels.
Translations
1. According to Roberto Alifano, “Prólogo a “Cartas de mamá’ ” was first published in Anthology
of Stories, illustrated by Argentine artists. He compiled it together with Borges in 1983.
2. Leopoldo Lugones’s story “Ysur,” translated by Gregory Woodruff, was published in the
Oxford Anthology of Short Stories, ed. Roberto González Echevarría (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
09.qxd 29/8/07 6:29 PM Page 183
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INDEX
Alazraki, Jaime, xi-xii, 184, 189, 191, Balzac, Honoré de, 32. Works: Pére
162n.1, 165n.2, 172n.27, 177n.7, Goriot 34–37, 166n.5; Eugénie
178n.14 Grandet 166 n.5, 166 n.8
aleph, the letter of the Hebrew Barranechea, Ana Maria, 8, 9,
alphabet, 2, 7, 8, 9, 163n.11 12, 33
Almeida, Ivan, ix, xiii, 164n.22, Beecher Stowe, Harriet. Work: Uncle
173n.45, 175n.11, 189 Tom’s Cabin, 44
Alonso, Carlos, xiii, 189, 169n.50 Bellini, Giuseppe, 170 n. 2
Amar Sánchez, Ana María, Benjamin, Walter, 34
168n.35 Bergson, Henri. Work: “Laughter” 8,
Apollodorus, 82. Work: The Library, 45, 170, 185
82, 195 Boldy, Steven, 38, 47, 168n. 35, 190
Borges, Jorge Luis: on Cortázar xi,
Bacon, Francis. Work: New Atlantis, 156–157
171n.20 Borges’s works:
Bachelard, Gaston, 2–4, 7, 10, 11, 13, “El Aleph” xv, 1–10, 24, 26, 48, 63,
34, 35, 108, 114, 117, 118, 120–123, 82, 129, 131, 162n.1, 162n.3,
160n.4, 166n.7, 166n.9, 172n.33, 162 n.5, 163n.13, 174n.2,
173n.38, 177n.4 175n.15, 181n.1, 183
Bakhtin, Mikhail, xiv. Works: “The Aleph.” See “El Aleph”
The Dialogic Imagination 102, 103, “Anotación al 23 de agosto de
104, 162n.4, 167n.20, 168n.36, 1944” (“A Comment on August
168n.37, 169n.43; Problems of 23, 1944”) 170n.9
Dostoevsky’s Poetics 47–52, 54, Antiguas literaturas germánicas,
166n.8 164n.25
Balderston, Daniel, 162n.9, 163n.9, “Amanecer”, 43
175n.15 “La biblioteca de Babel” (“The
Banham, Reyner, 172n.29 library of Babel”), 176n.18
10.qxd 29/8/07 6:30 PM Page 200
index 201
index 203
pain, 58, 59, 60, 88, 141, 163, 169, 184 Shaw, Donald, 15, 162n.1
parody, 41, 46, 59, 168n.29 Sommer, Doris, xiii
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 47, 48, 49, Soriano Nieves, Nieto, 169n.44-
168n.32 Spinoza, Baruch, 6, 7
Pellon, Gustavo, xiii Stevenson, Robert, 28
Perón, Juan, 63, 165n.3, 176n.22, Sturluson, Snorri, 165n.31
181n.2 Swift, Jonathan, 63, 64, 66, 88, 130,
Prego, Omar, xii, 36, 40, 42, 79,84, 170n.8, Work: Gulliver’s Travels
165n.3, 166n.6, 172n.28, 179n.26, 66–67, 71, 72
180n.30
Prieto, René, xiii, 180n.34 Thackerey, William, 67
Pile, Steve, 108, 117, 133, 179 Torah, 25
Thon, Sonia, 159n.3
Quevedo de, Francisco, 64, 170n.2–3
Quincey de, Thomas 168n.32 utopia xv, 61–83, 87, 88, 130, 131,
170n.6, 170n.12
Rabelais, François, 39
Ronai, Peter, 159n.3 Varon, Policarpo, 159n.3
repression, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, Villanueva, Marcelo Alberto, 166n.15,
104–105, 132, 176n.20, 176n.24, 168 n.35
177n.29
revelation, xv, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7–8, 10, 17, Walker, Janet, 35
101, 129, 131, 159n.4 Weiss, Jason, 73
Wells, H.G., 68–69, 71, 157.
Saer, Juan José, xiii, 133 Work: The Time Machine 101,
Said, Edward, 33, 57, 132, 161n.6 106–108, 130; “The Door in
Sambursky, Samuel, 159n.4 the Wall” 72–73, 114,
Sarduy, Severo, 133. Work: Cobra 133 115–116, 126
Second World War, 66 Wheelock, Carter, 159n.3,
Shakespeare, William, 174n.8 Works: 178n.18
Hamlet 7; The Tempest 163n.17,
163n.20 Yurkievich, Saul, xii, 76, 165n.4,
Seibers, Tobin 63. Work: Heterotopia: 169n,48, 177n.4
Postmodern Utopia and the Body
Politics 63, 66, 172n.29 Zampaglione, Hector, 38
Sharkley, Emmett Joseph, 56 Zohar, 1
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