Considering Various Themes in the Literature of Borges

As a cultural product of Argentine identity and philosophy, the short stories and essays authored by the celebrated writer Jorge Luis Borges give evidence to the rise of a critical genre and movement in fictional work during the middle of the twentieth century. The concept of magic realism, a literary category usually including texts that synthesize elements of classical “magic” with social or natural realism (narratives founded in a solid and logical reality), was expanded significantly by the mystically creative short stories and lyrical essays by Borges. Through the use of the classical philosophy of dualism in combination with the careful dynamic between surrealism and magic realism, Borges wrote two pieces of literature, “Borges and I” and “The Circular Ruins,” that serve as aesthetic objects demonstrating the societal struggle to secure an identity in the early 1900’s. The developments within an artistic community (specifically the world of Latin-American literature) towards a more surreal and avant-garde perspective on time, spirituality, and existentialism were fueled by his allegorical stories, all facilitating the profound observation of a fundamental human nature, an introspection plays a major role in the struggle for personal and cultural identification.

The high-point of the avant-garde movement in the early twentieth century brought with it the famous art of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, perhaps two of the most well-known artists of the movement. As intellectuals’ alienation – adversarial orientation – increased as a result of two World Wars and the Great Depression, more and more writers and artists found an emotional and creative escape through their work. Another artistic movement that is perhaps more relevant to the magic realism in the short stories of Borges (and one that is often considered to be a consort of the Avant-Garde movement) is surrealism. Yet another hallmark feature of the famous Salvador Dalí, the dream-like elements of surrealism are found extensively in the following two pieces by Borges – much of his literature features the unreal and dissociative narration of early twentieth century surrealism. J. Agassi writes in his paper “Philosophy as Literature” about Borges’s characteristic surrealism and dissociation:

It is the Schopenhauerian principle in Borges which makes him wonder what is real and what is illusory in our common experience. And it is this which makes him deliberately blur the borderline between his fiction and his essays: as if in order to imitate nature he blurs the boundary between reality and dream. The result may easily be that his essays be deemed a new form of fiction: besides the reportage novel we may see the non-fiction novel. (288)

Thus, the creation of this new kind of fiction is the defining feature of Borges’s literature, and a critical aspect of the study of his short stories such as “The Circular Ruins” and “Borges and I.” This difference between “what is real and what is illusory” and the “boundary between reality and dream” that is so often blurred by Borges are the fundamental principles of art and literature that are defined in surrealism. José Jiménez states in the introduction of his book Surrealism and the Dream:

With surrealism, then, a whole series of steps are taken from earlier conceptions of the dream to what is posited in it: the dream as an eminently pictorial realm, a privileged space for the viewing of images. Of human images of desire. Left behind are conceptions of the dream as a mythical or religious manifestation of supernatural powers. (30)

This aspect of the dynamic between dreams (the unconscious) and reality (involving human desire and the “pictorial realm” of wished-for concepts) is what influenced many famous and critical works of art and literature after 1924, both in the United States and in other countries – such as Argentina, in the case of Borges. This desire-based context of the extremely popular surrealist movement and dissociative Avant-Garde revolution provides a slightly incomplete, but thematically appropriate backdrop for the study of Borges’s magic realist fiction as a representation of both personal and cultural identity.

“Borges and I,” originally “Borges y Yo” in Spanish, is a short and slightly lyrical essay with no didactic end or academic purpose. Jorge Luis Borges as the author of the essay speaks about himself as two separate people, and the narrative focuses on the splitting of consciousness within Borges and the outside observation of himself from the point of view of this “counterpart” or “Other.” This sense of confused identity is clearly present in “The Circular Ruins” as well (a short story that contains more surreal qualities of magic realism than “Borges and I”), but this brief essay and examination deals mostly with the simple duality of the self, and the dissociative identity crisis that is reflected in the cultural and political climate of the Great Depression and World Wars. To summarize “plot” and “action” (or lack thereof): the essay begins with a first-person narration, walking through the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This “I” continues to describe a “Borges” that is separate and fundamentally other, observed by the narrator and criticized by him for his vain tastes and dependence on literature, language, and tradition. In the last line of the essay, Borges states: “I do not know which one of us has written this page,” demonstrating that after this introspection and examination of his own duality, the author himself has become lost within his own identity.

First, the ambiguity of the character “I” begs discussion; in order to understand fully the significance of this text one must understand the complex (and not entirely defined) relationship between the two “characters” of the essay. Kane X. Faucher discusses this conflict of identity in his piece entitled “The Decompression of Meta-Borges in ‘Borges and I,’” where he posits two solutions to the question of the ambiguous “I.” His first solution states that the identity of the “I” is not Jorge Luis Borges, but the “other one,” which “implies a deictic indication of two figures insofar as we may presuppose a ‘one’ as distinct from a mentioned ‘other one’ … as if there were some doubt as to the real identity of the subject, as if we are dealing with an entity that merely bears the name of Borges,” (163). His second solution deals with the easily more plausible idea that the “I” is simply a dissociated version of the referred-to Borges, that the two “characters” are one. Here, he argues: “This formulation would strike the reader as more sensible, for even when considering fictional texts that utilize fictional characters, they are being ‘narrated’ into existence by an author who wrote the book,” (172). (Faucher does discuss a third theory: that there are three separate “characters,” segregated temporally and acting together as “One,” “Other,” and “Creator.” For the purpose of brevity this third option, while relevant, must be declared to be beyond the scope of our present study). Thus, I agree wholeheartedly with the second theory, considering undeniable evidence found in the text of “Borges and I,” and taking into consideration his other literary works that so often feature a dualism of the mind and spirit. Borges describes an almost parasitic relationship with his “Other” in the essay:

It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

In these lines, there is established a dependent relationship between the two beings – one thrives as a result of the vitality of the “Other,” while the latter gives everything away to the superior “self.” Knowing Borges as a self-critical and examinatory individual, the last line also supports this view: “...I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” and presents itself as Borges’s negative opinion of his own thoughts and actions. Thus, I firmly believe that the “I” discussed in the work represents not a separate being, but is Borges himself – representing a critical and introspective double. Of course, the initial struggle to understand this difference (and the subsequent confusion of the first part of the essay – who is narrating, and about who or what are they narrating?) allows the audience an amount of space to consider the implications of the two (or three) possible character dynamics. This permits the essay (as an object of literary art and a reflection of culture) to catalyze a search for identity in the minds of the readers and intellectuals of the mid-1900’s.

The significance of this assertion, that Borges has written an introspection and self-criticism that is so dynamic during a time of political and cultural turmoil (in South America and the United States alike), suggests itself in the relationship between “Borges and I” and its author, including the society in which the two were created (another dualism and art-human partnership to continue to consider after the close of this paper). As Avant-Garde literature rose to great popularity across the globe, the crisis of many individuals to secure an identity became more intense. Borges’s fiction reflected the need for self-identification and self-criticism by both intellectuals and the layperson, during a time of intense political conflict and persecution. Borges also describes the desire to change himself in the essay (“Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things”), reflecting the diverse movement and personal development of individuals (especially Hispanic and African-American individuals) who were forced to immigrate, flee, hide, or become ex-patriates of their countries of origin. In this manner, the centuries-old refrain of “Art imitates life imitates art…” exemplifies itself in the search for identity observed in the work of Borges.

Second, it is necessary to analyze the predicament and conflict of “dualism” that is proposed in the essay. In her dissertation regarding identity and “The Other” as written by Jorge Luis Borges, Giovanna Bartucci makes a critical point about Borges’s extensive dualistic images: “Much of Borges’s preoccupation with identity, in this case its duality existent in “the double”, is reflected in his conceptualization of language and reality… Thus, reality is dubious and uncertain; the universe is considered as a total oneness in which individuality is a mere illusion,” (Bartucci 16). This idea is evidenced in the first line of the lyrical essay, in which Borges uses the “conceptualization of language” quite literally: “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.” He uses the iconic phrase of “The Other” to refer directly to his proposed dualism, conceptually introducing the existential/identity crisis of the piece. This is also seen later in the essay: “Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.” In this statement, Borges demonstrates the end of his duality, creating the ultimate dynamic between the two separate “characters” of the narration by comparing “him” to “oblivion” and categorizing the two together, expressing the splitting of a consciousness in order to truly achieve introspection.

Additionally, the dualism described in the essay presents itself as incredibly morbid, and Borges continually states that one cannot survive or live without its counterpart, expressing his inner turmoil regarding a (perhaps) stubborn and suffering artistic persona. This aspect of the identity of the piece is evidenced in numerous instances (“...I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me.” “...I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him.” “...I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.”), and the dualism expressed compounds itself paradoxically (and almost infinitely) the problem of the text: “Whenever an author portrays him- or herself in writing, there is always the trouble of dualism, between life and work, a true etymological sense of (auto)bio-graphy. Borges ushers this problematic to a new limit by depicting himself depicting himself…” (Faucher 162). This observation demonstrates another aspect of Borges’s surreal and dualistic fiction, at this point in a direct relationship with the identity searched for by artists and writers alike during the mid-1900’s.

Dualism is an extremely popular theme in literature, and presents itself as a theme that is easily analyzed and understood by those who are troubled by a seemingly “split” consciousness– the generations of poverty and war during the early and middle twentieth century attached themselves to this work of Borges. Those who knew his struggle for introspection and self-criticism eagerly consumed this newly existential and dissociative fiction, a genre that spoke to and referenced their profound internal conflicts as individuals who had survived traumatic political and sociocultural upheaval. This proves the significance of “Borges and I” as a contemporary and surrealist aesthetic object that based itself upon the traditional and classical philosophy of dualism and the “duality of man.” Borges’s manipulation of this classical concept provided the basis for a universally relatable and dissociative work of literature, founding a new wave of fiction during a time of political conflict across the globe.

An additional factor that should be mentioned as an aspect of this fiction is its escapism – escapism referring to the ability to transcend oneself and observe life from the perspective of an outsider. In her book entitled “La Expresión de la Irrealidad en la Obra de Borges,” Ana María Barrenechea writes regarding the representative characters and unreal qualities of Borges’s fiction:

Muchos críticos han observado que Borges mezcla continuamente los seres históricos y los ficticios, los autores verdaderos y los apócrifos. Es fácil comprender por qué lo hace. Al analizar los cuentos fantásticos ha insistido en que necesitan algún detalle concreto que les preste realidad. (178)

Barrenechea discusses the mixture of Borges’s real and imagined characters, and the way in which he uses them in order to distance himself and his readers from his literature. This relates more to the qualities of “magic realism” in his works – he uses the concrete and real characters (the “Borges” that is understood to be real) to juxtapose and create a foundation for the less real and more fictional ones (the “I” of questionable reality in his essay). This partial escapism from reality and any definition of identity lends itself to the emotional turmoil of his contextual artistic period, providing evidence for the essay being a cultural artifact, or aesthetic object of societal representation.

Another highly allegorical and metaphorical work of Borges’s fiction is “The Circular Ruins” (originally “Las Ruinas Circulares” in Spanish), a lyrical short story that is famous for its surrealist and magical realist significance. The story begins with a mysterious man arriving at a ruined and neglected temple, later deciding that this is the location in which he will carry out his “purpose.” This purpose is revealed to be the ability to dream a man, and then project this man into reality. The man spends most of his time at this ruined temple sleeping (as the villagers deliver him sustenance), having intricate dreams that allow him to choose a figure upon which he will elaborate in his dreamscape. As his dreams become more stressful and complex, he takes a break from his intense dreaming in order to rest, and in doing so, is again able to work on creating this “man.” He trains this man to be moved into reality little by little, and finally the “son” leaves him and is real. After this, the man has a crisis in which he worries that the dreamed man will understand the root of his consciousness and be humiliated. Finally, fire from the gods comes to earth (as if this is expected and prophesied) and as the fire “caressed him and flooded him without heat or burning,” he suddenly understands that he, too, is the product of someone else’s dream.

This story is the most successful exhibit of Borges’s magic realism, and provide the strongest evidence for this movement in his literature. Magic realism, or the blending of “magic” or supernatural qualities with a literary realism (typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), is described as follows in the book Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community: “...the principal thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances. The existence of the marvelous real is what started magical realist literature…” (Zamora 122). The Creator, then, does not look to copy or change the humanity that is represented in the Creation, but to analyze and manipulate the “secrets” of mankind and its qualities of “mystery.” Thus, “The Circular Ruins” as an aesthetic object of magic realism focuses on the relationship between the unnamed Man and his spiritual creation, his purpose of dreaming another being into reality. Zamora and Faris continue to discuss this tenet of magic realism: “The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality (as the realists did) or to wound it (as the Surrealists did) but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things.” This proposes an even more complex dynamic of Borges’s work: the relationship between surrealism and magical realism in his literature – a topic that is decidedly within the scope of our present discussion, and will be considered later in the analysis of the aforementioned short story.

One of the main themes that is addressed in Borges’s “The Circular Ruins” has to do with immortality, and invincibility against human vulnerability as evidenced by the protagonist and his “purpose” in dreaming a man into reality. Firstly, the idea of the “Circular Ruins” should be considered – the circular shape of the neglected temple clearly represents the continuity and consistency of immortality and an infinite lifetime. Slightly less obvious (but still clearly expressed), the creation of a man fabricated from the dreams of a human represents an attempt at immortality, and the defeat of death in a God-like manner. The fundamental “Otherness” of the son in the story appears in the lines: “Not to be a man but to be the projection of another man’s dreams – what an unparalleled humiliation, how bewildering!” (Borges 61). Thus, it is established that the young man is not a man at all, but a projection, inherently immortal and invincible – as he is not a real person (although this is challenged throughout the story – but it should be assumed for our purposes that the son is, in fact, something of a “higher” consciousness than the average human being). This is also the case of the creator in the story, who seems to be invincible and immortal. The second paragraph of the narrative describes this in detail, and it continues to be supported throughout the plot:

Wakened by the sun high overhead, he noticed – somehow without amazement – that his wounds had healed. He shut his pale eyes and slept again, not because of his weariness but because he willed it. He knew that this temple was the place he needed for his unswerving purpose; he knew that downstream the encroaching trees had also failed to choke the ruins of another auspicious temple with its own fire-ravaged, dead gods; he knew that his first duty was to sleep. (Borges 56)

The man sleeps, then, not out of necessity, but because he knows that he is supposed to. This creator is able to heal (in a generally accepted and matter-of-fact way: note the words “somehow without amazement”) his own wounds without outside intervention, and does not seem to have the definitive need to sleep out of “weariness” and physical exhaustion – he sleeps in order to dream, as “his first duty.” As time goes on, the man continues this habit, and does not sleep out of physical need, but out of motivation to complete his project. This reflects an invincibility against simple “human” weakness that is presented to an audience that is starved for motivation and escapism, demonstrating Borges’s ability to utilize language in creating a critical and allegorical aesthetic object of cultural significance.

The immortality depicted also expresses the magic realism of the work, in the ability of the man and his son (and all of these related figures: “...he understood that he, too, was an appearance, that someone else was dreaming him,”) to transcend the limitations of the human body, and in the magical diction of the narrative (“Whether asleep or awake, the man pondered the answers of his phantoms…” (Borges 57)). While the work is set in a contextual realism described in the opening of the story (“Nobody saw him come ashore in the encompassing night, nobody saw the bamboo craft run aground in the sacred mud, but within a few days everyone knew that the quiet man had come from the south...This opening is a temple which was destroyed ages ago by flames, which the swampy wilderness later desecrated, and whose god no longer receives the reverence of men.” (Borges 55)) the magical symbolism and the alchemy of transforming dreams into reality layers on top of this foundation in order to truly express Borges’s use of the genre. Scott Simpkins writes regarding Borges and his influence on this category of literature:

Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez contribute further to this supplemental discourse by examining the condition of textual magic itself in their own writings. Largely because of his close ties with the fantastic, the designation of Borges as a magic realist has created some critical dissension, although he is credited by some critics as one of the major early influences on the contemporary magic realism movement which has flourished internationally since the early part of this [the twentieth] century. (145)

This quotation demonstrates the significance of Borges in the Latin American literary canon, as a pioneer in the movement towards an increasingly magical and surreal fiction. In creating a specific literature that could aid in the self-identification of a general populace during the political conflict and cultural suppression of early 1900’s Latin-America, the immortality and escapism, in conjunction with the mystical experiences of the creator in the story, of Borges worked together to create a successful and critical portfolio for the author. During this time of confusion and profuse cultural interaction (that often yielded negative results) Borges wrote a character who was “in search of a soul worthy of taking a place in the world” (57), and subsequently provided a superhero tale of introspection and philosophical inquiry.

Next, our consideration should turn to an analysis of the surrealism in “The Circular Ruins,” closely related but fundamentally different from the magic realism of the story. Again, the quotation from Zamora and Faris in their book becomes relevant for a second time: “The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality (as the realists did) or to wound it (as the Surrealists did) but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things.” Borges uses aspects of both surrealism and magic realism in his story: he uses surrealism thematically, and magic realism more specifically, in the direct language and form of the text. His story has to do with dreams more than any other theme: the main character and “Creator” spends most of his time dreaming (with a purpose), his dreams create the reality of the “son” and are a direct cause of the culmination of the plot, and the portrayal of the delusional and aesthetic world of these dreams are a primary focus of the story as a whole. One could even consider the story to be the ultimate surrealist narrative, as it focuses on dreams inside of dreams (and so on – as revealed in the final sentences of the text). The critical aesthetic world of the Creator’s’ dreams are detailed and delusional – in them he is more than a weak and injured spiritual man, he is a professor, a father, and a leader:

At the outset, his dreams were chaotic; later on, they were of a dialectic nature. The stranger dreamed himself at the center of a circular amphitheater in which some way was also the burnt-out temple… Almost at once, he had a dream of a beating heart. He dreamed it throbbing, warm, secret… With anxious love he dreamed it for fourteen lucid nights. Each night he perceived it more clearly. (“The Circular Ruins” 56, 58)

This demonstrates the surrealist escapism of Borges’s literature, in which introspection and self-examination are fully achieved through a philosophical understanding of dreams (this begs an important discussion of Freudian influence on Borgesian literature which is, unfortunately, outside the scope of the present study). As in the case of Dalí, Picasso, Cortázar, and Márquez, Borges’s surrealism provided a lens through which one could understand their own cultural and political identity, as well as a canvas – available for the projection of metaphorical and allegorical subjects. As the Man created his Son in a spiritual sense, the audience looked at themselves as creators and artists of a certain reality, analyzing the surrealism in order to introspect and ask questions such as: What would/could I create with my dreams? How do I view God(s) and the universe? What does it mean to be multiplied in creation, and happily destroyed by a symbolic fire? The infinite implications of the story and its conclusion allow for the infinite projection of identity, and an allegorical portrayal of a raw and spiritual world that has since been lost to political and sociocultural chaos.

Thus, the fantastic, surrealist, and magical realist literature of Jorge Luis Borges offers itself as an aesthetic object for analysis, an escapist genre that has changed the world of lyric fiction indefinitely. Remembered as an Argentine intellectual who carried out literary conversation with the great philosophers (“Spinoza held that all things try to keep on being themselves; a stone wants to be a stone and the tiger, a tiger,” (“Borges and I” 152)), Borges wrote a successful philosophical literature that stimulated introspection and examination of the self in relation to society through his short essay “Borges and I” and his short story “The Circular Ruins.” At the surface, the two texts are intriguing and eye-catching, filled with mystical qualities of profound thought and existential themes – but upon closer examination, both works are literary evidence of the search for a Latin American (or otherwise) cultural identity during the middle of the twentieth century. The thematic treatment of dualism, surrealism, and magic realism allow the reader to examine the nature of the “self” and the “other” in terms of political and sociocultural thought. These fundamental principles of philosophy are critical in today’s political climate and will continue to require consideration in the future, as migration-related conflicts, antisocial acts of racism and sexism, and foreign policy crises play out daily. From the twentieth century through to the present day, Borges’s escapist and existential treatment of the identities of the “Other” and of the multiplicity of human nature continue to be important and relevant in a conflicted and complicated world.

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