The Aleph

Inside the stories the subtractive test finds almost nothing. Borges builds them backwards from their turns: in “Emma Zunz”, “La otra muerte” and “Deutsches Requiem” every circumstance is a premise of the end, and “La casa de Asterión” is two pages in which no sentence could go without the last line losing its force. The book as a whole is less compelled. Its order is felt but loose: “El inmortal” must open, since its claim that one man is all men is the key to every later identity of opposites, and “El Aleph” must close. Between them, “Abenjacán el Bojarí” and “El hombre en el umbral” are lesser variations on devices the book has already used, and “Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos” is an emblem the labyrinth stories make redundant. Remove any of the three and the book knows nearly the same. That holds the axis at the foot of the eleven.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The book discloses meanings rather than moods, and they can be stated. That a life is decided in one instant of self-recognition, proved on the sergeant in “Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz” who crosses to fight beside the outlaw Martín Fierro. That immortality would empty every act of worth, since everything is done by everyone in the end. That the heresiarch and his prosecutor are, in God’s eyes, one man. That understanding is bounded by a culture: Averroes, translating Aristotle, cannot conceive of a theatre while children play at one below his window. That the Nazi’s self-justification is a theology of violence that wants its own defeat. That a just revenge may be built on a lie in which only the circumstances are false. These hold. Held below the top because the disclosures are of thought more than of the lived human condition, and the social world is seldom the thing uncovered.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Height is frequent and mostly cold: the sublime of vertigo and of the infinite. The vision in the cellar of “El Aleph”, a single sequence of sentences that passes from the teeming sea to Beatriz’s obscene letters and the narrator’s own viscera, and ends on the inconceivable universe. The City of the Immortals, a palace of senseless stairs and inverted doors, built by the mad. Tzinacán reading the god’s sentence on the jaguar’s skin, and the Wheel in which all causes are visible, and then declining to speak it. Asterión waiting gladly for his redeemer. Cruz’s recognition at night in the grass. Warm height is rarer: the end of “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva”, the barbarian who crosses into Ravenna. Held off the top because several of the later pieces, “La espera” and “El hombre en el umbral”, rise only at the turn, and the comic frame of “El Aleph” is meant to cool the heat it gives.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Myth is built, not evoked, and this is the book’s deepest reach. “La casa de Asterión” retells the Minotaur from inside the labyrinth, and the myth bears weight to the last line, so that the monster’s longing for death and the hero’s victory are one event. “El inmortal” makes Homer a Wandering Jew: the troglodyte Argos is the poet who has forgotten the Odyssey, and the immortal soldier Rufus becomes all men. The labyrinth is the book’s single figure, built five times: the City of the Immortals, Asterión’s house, Abenjacán’s, the Arabian desert, the point in the cellar. The Aleph and the Zahir are a cabbalistic pair, the point that holds all things and the coin that effaces all things. And the gaucho stories make Argentine myth of Martín Fierro and of Masoller. Held a step below the summit only because a few emblems, “Los dos reyes” first among them, are myth stated rather than worked.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The inheritance is the fantastic tale of Poe, Stevenson, Chesterton and Kafka, the detective story, the gaucho literature of Hernández, and Borges’s own Ficciones (1944). The turn here is real and costs something: the metaphysical fiction is carried out of the library into history and the pampa, into the Argentine civil wars (“La otra muerte”, whose premise is that the past itself can be altered), the Nazi’s confession and a factory girl’s revenge; and the narrator of “El Aleph” is named Borges and made petty, jealous and comic inside a vision of the infinite. The stake was that the device would cheapen these matters or that the matters would weigh the device down, and for the most part it holds. Held below the top because the larger departure was made in Ficciones five years before, and much here extends a method already proved.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The short fiction that passes for a document, a manuscript found in the last volume of Pope’s Iliad, a biography with dates in its title, a condemned man’s own statement, knows what no novel could: that a life or a doctrine is a text, open to forgery, compression and annotation, and that the reader is always reading at second hand. “El inmortal” ends by doubting its own authorship because its words are other men’s; the doubt is the form. “La casa de Asterión” knows the Minotaur only because it withholds the name until the last word. “El Aleph” sets the vision of everything in one paragraph between pages of literary satire, and the disproportion is its argument about language and totality. Held off the top because in a few of the later pieces the frame is a container and the turn could have been told another way.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over three quarters of a century of return. The title story has been read through the cabbala, through Dante (Beatriz Viterbo, Carlos Argentino Daneri, the vision at the end), through the Argentine literary scene, and later as an image of the network and the database; “El inmortal” through Homeric authorship, Plotinus and the problem of identity; “Emma Zunz” through feminist and psychoanalytic reading; “Deutsches Requiem” through the history of fascism and Argentina’s place in it; “La busca de Averroes” as a parable of translation and cultural limit, reread in postcolonial criticism. The questions stay open, and they are in the text: whether the Aleph in Garay Street was false, as the postscript suggests; whether Emma’s story is true; whether Asterión’s redeemer is a gift. The footnotes, postscripts and attributions repay counting. Held below the top only by the brevity of the lesser pieces.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The field is twentieth-century fiction in Spanish, and with it, as Borges entered it through translation from the 1950s, the world’s short fiction. The intrinsic force: with Ficciones, the book reorganised what short fiction could hold, making metaphysics, theology and erudition the matter of narrative and the story a mode of thought. Charged: much of this reach belongs to Borges’s fiction as a whole, and the larger share to Ficciones; this book is the second instrument of one rupture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the writers of the Latin American Boom wrote in its light, and Cortázar, García Márquez and Fuentes named Borges as a liberation of the language; Calvino, Eco, whose blind librarian is Jorge of Burgos, Perec and the postmodern fiction of the 1960s and after drew on it; and the Aleph passed as a name and an image into common use, in Coelho and in writing about the internet.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over seventy-seven years from 1949 and seventy-four from the edition of 1952. Form: the text survives whole as Borges fixed it, with nothing lost, and the two editions are both known and differ little. Presence is continuous and wide: in print in Spanish since publication, taught across the Spanish-speaking world and in departments of literature everywhere, translated into most written languages, with at least three English versions of the whole or of part. Fabric: the literary vanities of Buenos Aires in the 1940s are a frame the book mocks, and nothing depends on them. Held short of the widest presence its span could show because much of the widest presence of Borges’s fiction runs through Ficciones, and this book is read entire somewhat less often than its title story is read alone.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The command is of the sentence and the adjective: the first sentence of “El Aleph”, “La candente mañana de febrero en que Beatriz Viterbo murió”, sets heat, date, name and death in one breath and tilts at once into irony. The prose is compressed and exact, with an archaic gravity in the Oriental and classical tales and a dry Argentine plainness in the gaucho ones, and Borges moves between them without a seam. The enumeration of the Aleph is a set piece of controlled excess. The construction is the other half of the craft: endings that reverse the whole (“La casa de Asterión”, “Los teólogos”, “La espera”), plots built as proofs (“Emma Zunz”), false documents with plausible scholarly apparatus. Held below the top because the devices repeat across seventeen pieces, the mirror, the labyrinth, the doubled man, the revealing last sentence, and in the weaker pieces they show as manner.

Score: 9.3 / 10

One law governs the whole: the infinite or the total is present in a finite point, a coin, a cellar, a jaguar’s skin, a single night of a man’s life, and in its presence opposites become one, heretic and orthodox, hunter and hunted, Minotaur and Theseus, the immortal and the mortal. Take the two most distant elements: the cosmic vision of “La escritura del dios” and the factory girl of “Emma Zunz” counting her money in a Buenos Aires street. They obey the same law: one act or one moment decides a whole fate, and the truth of it lies under false circumstances. The gaucho stories and the metaphysical ones are one book. Held at this figure because the range, wide in place and time, is narrower in register, one ironic and erudite voice speaking everything, and some of the late pieces repeat the law rather than extend it. Narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged on what a book of short fictions holds. The sacred and the metaphysical, fully: the god’s writing, heresy, eternity, the cabbala. History, widely: Rome and the barbarians, the Arab and Christian middle ages, the Aztec conquest, the British in India, Nazism, the Argentine civil wars. Consciousness, in the confessions of Zur Linde and Tzinacán and the jealousy of the narrator of “El Aleph”. The state and violence, in war, the knife-fight and the camp. Literature itself, as an order of reality. They are integrated by the one law, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count and the vantage: the family and love appear only as Beatriz’s absence and Emma’s father; labour only in Emma’s factory and the gaucho’s trade; the natural order as emblem rather than world; and no story holds a society across time. A low mark on a small form describes the form.

Score: 7.9 / 10