tags : [[Jorge Borges]] [[Latin American literature]]
source : borges_hurley_1998
Fictions (Ficciones in Spanish) is a collection of short stories written by [[Jorge Borges]].
The texts are reminiscent of [[magical realism]] and [[surrealism]].
I’ve broken each story into their own note for the sake of making sense of them as separate entities.
The narrator lists off the complete works of Menard, who was an author
Many of the pieces that Menard wrote sound like treatises on philosophy
Menard wrote a copy of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
“My purpose is merely astonishing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms—is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.
Menard began his journey trying to be Cervantes exactly: he traveled to Spain, learned old Spanish, etc. but he gave up on this and decided to rewrite Quixote “through the experiences of Pierre Menard”
Menard’s Quixote knows of [[Nietzsche]] and [[Bertrand Russell]].
As I’m writing these notes I realize that Menard is actually rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and that this review is talking about interpreting Menard’s Quixote through the experiences of Menard
This story seems to be about the meaning of literary works. Menard’s Quixote, while being identical to the original, can be considered having been written in light of modern events.
A story about a man who enters some ruins wanting to dream a certain dream
He wants to dream a man specifically
He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality.
The man starts by dreaming of a classroom in an amphitheater and that he is a teacher
He becomes frustrated with the students
He then dreams about a beating heart for several nights, that he loves
This bit about the heart sounds like a drug trip
The following quote is a truly exceptional bit of literature:
In the cosmogonies of the [[Gnostics]], the demiurges knead up a red Adam who cannot manage to stand; as rude and inept and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dream wrought from the sorcerer’s nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his creation, but he could not bring himself to do it. (He’d have been better off if he had.) After making vows to all the deities of the earth and the river, he threw himself at the feet of the idol that was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt, and he begged for its untried aid. That evening, at sunset, the statue filled his dreams. In the dream it was alive, and trembling—yet it was not the dread-inspiring hybrid form of horse and tiger it had been. It was, instead, those two vehement creatures plus bull, and rose, and tempest, too—and all that, simultaneously. The manifold god revealed to the man that its earthly name was Fire, and that in that circular temple (and others like it) men had made sacrifices and worshiped it, and that it would magically bring to life the phantasm the man had dreamed—so fully bring him to life that every creature, save Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him for a man of flesh and blood. Fire ordered the dreamer to send the youth, once instructed in the rites, to that other ruined temple whose pyramids still stood downriver, so that a voice might glorify the god in that deserted place. In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke.
The man dreams someone who he comes to see as his son and who has supernatural abilities
Ultimately our dreaming man is consumed by fire and in his last moments finds that he too is a dream
The God of the Labyrinth: A detective story where the solution is incorrect.
April March: A book composed of thirteen chapters, with nine beginnings that all work backwards into time to a common ending
The book is composed of thirteen chapters. The first reports an ambiguous conversation between several unknown persons on a railway station platform. The second tells of the events of the evening that precedes the first. The third, likewise retrograde, tells of the events of another, different, possible evening before the first; the fourth chapter relates the events of yet a third different possible evening. Each of these (mutually exclusive) “evenings-before” ramifies into three further “evenings-before,” all quite different. The work in its entirety consists, then, of nine novels; each novel, of three long chapters. (The first chapter is common to all, of course.) Of those novels, one is symbolic; another, supernatural; another, a detective novel; another, psychological; another, a Communist novel; another, anti-Communist; and so on.
The Secret Mirror: A play where the first act is a work of fiction written by a character in the second act.
Statements: Eight stories designed to disappoint the reader. here The Garden of Forking Paths is a novel by the writer of this piece, which contains a story called The Circular Ruins
About a Chinese World War I combatant
About a soldier who committed some act of war that he now regrets
He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
Our protagonist meets with an Englishman (Albert) who owns (?) the grounds which belonged to the ancestor of our protagonist (Tsun)
Tsun’s ancestor built a labyrinth on his grounds and wrote an incomprehensible book before he died
The novel isn’t incomprehensible — it portrays different timelines
Tsun’s ancestor believed in a nonlinear time
Tsun ends up killing Albert, for it’s how he can communicate with the Germans what town to bomb
But then, all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed, perhaps we all have certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.
Short story by Borges about an Irish communist who betrays the man who saves his life, and he bears a scar on his face to remind him of that fact.
A story about a biographer telling a story about a man who was assassinated and his assassination was mythologized.
A short story by Borges about a detective.
Rendering context...