Borges' and Frosts' Gardens of Forking Paths

Just as so many people, so many bloggers, misinterpret Frost's "Two Roads", so I think Borge's "Garden of Forking Paths" can be difficult to read. Both require the modern reader to consider the actual choices of words and to read closely rather than let the story unfold like a graphic novel. Some writing can be a pretty-picture-generating text, but others require one to really focus on the words and what they mean, may mean, and could mean in some other context. As a linguist, I love this game, and I find Borges at once exhausting to read and exhilarating to read. Frost is often just depressing. He didn't get a Nobel either. :-(

In the "Garden of Forking Paths," the pathos of the narrator is contrasted with the elegance of the scholar. The tone of writing changes, the words that describe their ideas contrast, and their relative perspectives on the world are different. The narrator feels trapped in the timeline he has created for himself, while the scholar dies with the conviction that in another timeline events unfolded differently. One of them is tortured, the other is at peace, but not in the way that the reader might have preferred. I think Borges requires a lot of a reader because we have to just let go of the narrative and let Borges do what he will with it. Then we have to think about that, and not what we might want to. I don't want the brilliant scholar to die, but I have to look at the philosophical manner of his death to appreciate this type of serenity and conviction that this life is only one of many. I don't want that miserable, scheming, little sneak to live and write this lovely memoir for me, but he writes the complex confession that allows the brilliant scholar to live on in the story, so, yay, I guess.

It reminds me of Shakespeare's sonnets where he goes on forever about how his beloved will be immortal and remain beautiful because he wrote these poems. And he/she does! And he/she is also, at the same time long dead, but is revived every time we read the sonnets and conjure that person up in our powerful reader imaginations.

The Work of Julio Cortazar

Whereas Borges commented that Cortazar just tries too hard, I find I really like this earnest aspect of Cortazar's writing. I like how "The Garden of Forking Paths" clips along like an express train. The brisk pace of the story makes it feel more urgent so that when the reader suddenly comes up on the ex-narrator in the velvet chair, it is like skidding to a halt for the end of the story to suddenly change one's mind about everything. I like that disorientation. I guess I find it fun in the same disorienting way that I enjoy roller coasters.

I find "Axolotl" to be more dreamy, but the transformation of perspectives from outside the tank to inside the tank is so subtle that by the time I, as the reader identifying with the narrator, find my self inside the tank looking out, the earnestness of the sweet little Axolotl makes the change in perspectives at once wistful and anxious. I love that disorientation in the same way that I like visiting places from the my childhood that I only dimly remember. And I love reading "Our Demeanor at Wakes" because it is at once so appalling and yet so funny, kind of like watching the Chapelle Show.

Maybe these stories are a little overly earnest, but I suppose I feel a little overly earnest, so it is easy to forgive. Who can ever write like Borges anyway? Aren't we all a little overly earnest in the shadow of his apparently effortless elegance?

So this strange disorientation that Cortazar creates with the twists and turns of his stories os how I feel every day. Sometimes I arrive at a place I have been driving, and I wonder how I got there, or I go to do something I do everyday, but somehow it feels like I have never done it before. In this way, the disorienting twists of Cortazar's stories feel familiar to me and somehow comforting. For example, in "Our Demeanor at Wakes," the idea that these people can fake-it-till-they-make-it so effectively is perversely inspiring. In many cases, this doesn't have to be a bad thing: we can talk ourselves into good things. Quotidian as it is, it is like going to the gym. I drag my feet until I am there, but once I start lifting, it is not so bad, and though I don't want to do it, I can talk very convincingly about why it is so great once I get started. Stealing some body's wake is a terrible example of this, but *funny*.

My views of compassion and sympathy are always challenged in a new way when I read "Axolotl." Actually, they are rather reinforced. I am in complete sympathy that it is through literature that we are taught to appreciate the suffering of people who are different from ourselves, or outside our experience. I find the choice of an axolotl as the vehicle for this sympathy every so poignant because they are so cute, even if they are damp. The idea of being in exile from one's home country is always so sad. I know I will never be able to return to the part of the country that I love, so I always feel a certain poignancy when reading about exile.

I agree with Borges, to an extent, that these stories have a feel of artifice to them, that they do not necessarily flow naturally. The plots are distorted, as in "The Garden of Forking Paths", and the language calls attention to itself, as in "Axolotl", but if I think of these stories as art pieces, not necessarily naturalistic short stories, then I can appreciate them the way I appreciate an Andy Warhol painting, like the soup cans.

Sure it's contrived, but what a cool contrivance, and what a cool idea. Maybe that is what I enjoy most about Cortazar's writing: it is an interesting intellectual exercise where there is a certain suspense about where things will end up.

Welcome to Latin American Literaure

This blog will have my reader responses to the stories that we are reading in the Winter 2011 Latin American Literature course. I love this literature because it is so imaginative, and it makes me stretch my understanding of people's motivations. Although we are reading these texts in translation, I think we have some good translators that offer us beautiful language in English, although I do enjoy reading these pieces in Spanish when I have a little more time. I am a particular fan of Borges and the amazing way he shifts reality in his writing so that dreams seem more real than the world we actually live in. In the literature that comes from Latin America it seems that there is a juxtaposition of gritty reality and dreamy magical realism. It seems that mixing the two creates a new way to endure difficulty because the magical realism extracts the suffering of everyday life into a mythical world where I get to feel like a hero because I just made it through another day. It makes even the prosaic marvelous.