There is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe

Borges- The Aleph

This section was incredible. I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm guessing that The Aleph was put out as a collection of short stories far before it was compiled into this bigger collection. It seems as though these short stories must certainly have been written within a few years of each other or at least in the same decade or period for Borges. The obvious or underlying theme of each one has something to do with infinity, circular time, duality(of all sorts), mazes, mirrors, perception, the universe, the land, dreams, religion, the meaning of God. Some stories have even more specific ties- tigers are important symbols in both The Zahir and The Writing of the God. While in The Zahir, the tiger is said to have been the zahir and one point and caused men to "forget the universe." In The Writing of God, the mystery of the universe, of God, is written in the tiger's spots. The tiger can both torment a man's soul and lead him to God. He ends The Zahir, "perhaps behind the coin (the zahir) is God."

I also noticed that the number 14 was mentioned in at least two of the stories, and when it was, was synonymous with infinity. I tried to research this but came up empty-handed. It seems that this is another one of Borges constructions.

Other themes or points

• the transformation of man... the idea that there is one exact moment in a man's life that tells him who he is.

• everything is everything else and one in the same, and nothing at all:

"There are an infinite number of things upon the earth; any one of them can be compared to any other." (240)

"The house is as big as the world- or rather, it is the world."(221)

"I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world- which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not."(191)

• Aristotle vs. Plato

• memory and forgetting

• Qu'ran's two faces(duality)

• tigers are also part of Deutsches Requiem and Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth

• labyrinths

• blurred lines between life and death and dreams and the relationship of each to the other

• identity

• what God can and cannot do

• destiny, reincarnation, existence

Borges- Ficciones

The Garden of Forking Paths...
I love the way the first few stories in this section are constructed almost in the way Vonnegut constructs his novels- by creating made-up religions and different conditions of reality or unreality. The idea that without thinking about it we expect even fictional stories to adhere to or be based on our excepted and understood truths or environment is something I'd never really thought about. Borges explains his method best in the forward:

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books- setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius reminds me so much of House of Leaves( a novel written around a novel that does not exist but is quoted from and references a great number of other books that do not exist) or Tolkien. It's interesting that the story ends with Borges commenting that the ideas and even objects of Tlon are becoming so accepted and integrated into the world of his story that eventually people will not know what history is truth and what history has been made up. Which I think could possibly refer to our acceptance of things like religious histories and ideologies as truth.

The extent to which Borges constructs a language and culture for the people of Tlon complete with epistemological and metaphysical theories is ridiculous and almost unbelievable. The solid paragraphs of made-up information and facts would be overwhelming if they weren't perfectly balanced by and suspended among these dazzling weightless descriptions or observations. His ability to write a sentence that embeds itself in my head so beautifully or resonates so incredibly with me reminds me of Marquez or Camus- it is incredibly dense but feels so personal.

*I'm sorry if this isn't the most coherent. I'm nursing a mean cold and my brain is fuzzy. I'll try to add to it, but I wanted to get something down before class.

The Underdogs

My first impression of this novel was that the way in which he translator wrote the dialog was kind of funny and awkward. For some reason, I don't picture rural Mexican accent translating exactly into a backwoods southern accent. The dialogue, translated this way, gave the whole novel a very Cormac McCarthy feel. I had to keep reminding myself that it was taking place in Mexico, not Texas. And it felt out of place and very Americanized for a novel about the land, culture, and revolution of Mexico. I just wonder how different the atmosphere of the dialog would be if I had read it in Spanish.

I found it interesting that while the Underdogs could definitely fall under the canopy of naturalist literature, Azuelas still used a lot of very modern devices. For example, he changes tenses often when he steps outside the narrative to almost describe the character's motives and explain what is going on or give backstory. The way he did this once or twice in every chapter gave the novel an interesting flow. The perspectives shifted around quite a bit from Demetrio to Luis to the Federal officer and a few other characters. Hearing these different perspectives seems very important to studying and understanding any political uprising or war. I think the change of perspectives also helps us remember that in a war not only are all sides guilty of horrors but each person also has a story and a family and some innocence.

Loss of idealism and innocence is also a big themes in Underdogs. There is a very clear shift from part one to part two. By part two, Demetrio and his men have already started to lose the meaning of the revolution. Demetrio is seduced by power and success and his men have started looting and destroying the villages they pass through. At the beginning they saw the civilians as their own people but now they kill them for sport and rape their daughters. They have become all that they hated before in the Federales. Luis seems to be the only one who objects to their new habits, but only because it will give them a bad reputation, not because it goes against what they used to believe in- the revolution for the very people they have begun to terrorize.

By part three, Demetrio's inner circle is made up mostly of ex-Federales. He has turned into a war machine and the revolution has burned everything in its wake. The village people look at the soldiers with disdain and every man has been made to choose a side- there are no peaceful men left, Demetrio says, only Federales, revolutionaries, and deserters. And though the men have plenty of bills and gold in their pockets, the land is torn apart and there is no food for them to buy with all their money. They began to fight to save their land and their peaceful way of life but they have, in the end, destroyed it.

In the last few pages Demetrio is reunited with his wife and his son (who no longer recognizes him). When she asks him why he is still fighting, he tosses a rock over the side of the canyon and says "Look at the rock, how nothin' can stop it now..."

Other points:

• I thought it was interesting how both Demetrio's group and the Federales at least once, referred to the other as "dogs down below"

• Also, the way Azuelas describes the setting in this novel is so beautiful and rich. Every time they are in the Sierra, everything is described as blue, and as soon as they move to meet the rest of the revolutionary groups and invade the first town full of Federales everything is gray or white and smokey. In the last few pages Demetrio notices the sapphire mountain tops, but the second to last paragraph they are covered in white. "The Sierra is dressed in gala. Above its inaccessible peaks, a pure white fog descends like a snowy veil on a bride's head."

• Captain Solis is sort of the sage of the revolutionary army. He sees what the war is doing to the country and the people, but he is dismissed by Luis and the others as an idiot

• I noticed the ciccadas at the very beginning of the novel and again at the very end. Maybe they are a symbol for how the people of Mexico feel in the midst of the war and the pulling apart of their land- like helpless buzzing insects. They could also be a symbol of nature and consistency in the Sierra even after all the fighting.