Been re-reading some of Borges these days. It seems to me that his stories usually contain at least one gruesome element (severed bodies, a wild cry while being shot, murders etc) although that is never- in my view- the climax of the story. In fact his stories do not often have obvious points of climax.
Rather than constructing the story with an introduction, a middle piece, and a powerfull ending. he seems to rely on intricate and arabesque folding of his sentences into all the more complicated meanings. He also does so without constructing particularly long sentences, unlike writers such as Poe or Kafka.
I re-read "The man on the threshold", which is about a narration of the dissapearence of a high-judge in India, and how one came to find his remains in an anonymous backyard of a town-house.
The story has an interesting form (Borges himself terms it "having the simplicity, perhaps, of the 1001 Arabian nights). It begins as a clear quest to find a missing person, only narrated after it all happened and after the narrator reached the other side of the earth, in Buenos Aires. Back in India he worked for the Crown, and was sent to the town the high-judge reigned before dissapearing, so as to find him. In a piece which reminds strikingly of a scene in Kafka's The Trial, the narrator is being summoned from house to house, being told lies, being fed hope that they are not lies, but being certain that they indeed remain unalterably so. Then, presumably as he is about to lose all hope of achieving anything, he sees a very old man, dressed in rags, sitting on the threshold of some house in the suburbs of the town.
The old man is asked if he knows something about the high-judge's dissapearence, and immediately begins narrating a long tale about a judge, but of an ancient, bygone era, who just happened to also have had vanished.
Slowly the information is given that the judge had been cruel, and crooked, and the people kidnapped him to put him on trial.
As the pages draw to a close, the story reaches its just ending in the first revelation that all of that happened in this town they were now, and then, after the ancient man stands up and leaves, the narrator makes his way through a sea of people who appear to all be comming from the endless yards of the house, only to find a naked man with a sword being kissed and praised, and then, in the final yard, the severed body of the high-judge.
All of this strikes me as a very melancholic story. Surely it had made a strong impression on me when i first read it, and when i re-read it i still felt emotional about it.
I would like to ask if you have read the story, but even if you have not, if, by my short account of it, you see any important pattern in its formation. Here are some of my own notes on it:
-The high-judge of the past, and the high-judge of the present are one, but in a way this also signifies perhaps that all time is one, as one reads in essays by Borges, or in other stories [eg "(...) perhaps deep down we all know that we will live forever, and know all things"].
-The infinite is not only present in the form of time, but also of space. "India is as large as the world" is one phrase recalled in the narration. "In India spaces are generous". The yards of the town house appear to be multiplying, or at least to have inside of them an infinite number of people, all of who are witnesses and members of the make-shift court set to judge the old judge himself.
-The judge himself is not described a lot. He is "cruel", "corrupt", "unjust", and "the executioner's sword has never ceised to work all this time" (under his command). But generally he only exists as a character in a cryptic way, being kidnapped in the beginning fo the tale, and severed in its end. He does not live a single moment outside of captivity for the entire duration of the story's time. On the contrary the old man goes into detail about the ethics of the make-shift court that judges the opressor of the people. They select a "madman" as the chief judge, because they cannot find any of th emythical "four just people of each generation". The corrupt judge himself is said to accept that arrangement, reasoning that only a madman would let him live. But in the end the madman, pressumably out of reasons of his own, calls for the death of the judge anyway.
I think i will stop this OP in this point, for already it has become (once again) rather long, and there is always the question of participation in such threads...
Rather than constructing the story with an introduction, a middle piece, and a powerfull ending. he seems to rely on intricate and arabesque folding of his sentences into all the more complicated meanings. He also does so without constructing particularly long sentences, unlike writers such as Poe or Kafka.
I re-read "The man on the threshold", which is about a narration of the dissapearence of a high-judge in India, and how one came to find his remains in an anonymous backyard of a town-house.
The story has an interesting form (Borges himself terms it "having the simplicity, perhaps, of the 1001 Arabian nights). It begins as a clear quest to find a missing person, only narrated after it all happened and after the narrator reached the other side of the earth, in Buenos Aires. Back in India he worked for the Crown, and was sent to the town the high-judge reigned before dissapearing, so as to find him. In a piece which reminds strikingly of a scene in Kafka's The Trial, the narrator is being summoned from house to house, being told lies, being fed hope that they are not lies, but being certain that they indeed remain unalterably so. Then, presumably as he is about to lose all hope of achieving anything, he sees a very old man, dressed in rags, sitting on the threshold of some house in the suburbs of the town.
The old man is asked if he knows something about the high-judge's dissapearence, and immediately begins narrating a long tale about a judge, but of an ancient, bygone era, who just happened to also have had vanished.
Slowly the information is given that the judge had been cruel, and crooked, and the people kidnapped him to put him on trial.
As the pages draw to a close, the story reaches its just ending in the first revelation that all of that happened in this town they were now, and then, after the ancient man stands up and leaves, the narrator makes his way through a sea of people who appear to all be comming from the endless yards of the house, only to find a naked man with a sword being kissed and praised, and then, in the final yard, the severed body of the high-judge.
All of this strikes me as a very melancholic story. Surely it had made a strong impression on me when i first read it, and when i re-read it i still felt emotional about it.
I would like to ask if you have read the story, but even if you have not, if, by my short account of it, you see any important pattern in its formation. Here are some of my own notes on it:
-The high-judge of the past, and the high-judge of the present are one, but in a way this also signifies perhaps that all time is one, as one reads in essays by Borges, or in other stories [eg "(...) perhaps deep down we all know that we will live forever, and know all things"].
-The infinite is not only present in the form of time, but also of space. "India is as large as the world" is one phrase recalled in the narration. "In India spaces are generous". The yards of the town house appear to be multiplying, or at least to have inside of them an infinite number of people, all of who are witnesses and members of the make-shift court set to judge the old judge himself.
-The judge himself is not described a lot. He is "cruel", "corrupt", "unjust", and "the executioner's sword has never ceised to work all this time" (under his command). But generally he only exists as a character in a cryptic way, being kidnapped in the beginning fo the tale, and severed in its end. He does not live a single moment outside of captivity for the entire duration of the story's time. On the contrary the old man goes into detail about the ethics of the make-shift court that judges the opressor of the people. They select a "madman" as the chief judge, because they cannot find any of th emythical "four just people of each generation". The corrupt judge himself is said to accept that arrangement, reasoning that only a madman would let him live. But in the end the madman, pressumably out of reasons of his own, calls for the death of the judge anyway.
I think i will stop this OP in this point, for already it has become (once again) rather long, and there is always the question of participation in such threads...
The original Greek as translated from Spanish, by a respectable translator, so i would think it was a competent work.
