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Estela Canto's literary biography

发布时间:2017-04-22
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According to Estela Canto, '"El Zahir" es uno de los cuentos menos logrados de Borges.' Is this a fair assessment of the story?

"El Zahir" is an enigmatic tale based on the projection of an erotic attachment for a woman onto a growing obsession of a single mystical object: a twenty-centavo coin.

Wilson and Barth commentary - about their relationship

EC comment - The stories are about her

Their relationship and break-up

The similarities between the women are v clear - street name

Perhaps this is the reason for Canto's comment that it was most unsuccessful ---- she feels personally objectified

It is important to look at the characterisation of Tea to analyse whether this is a fair assessment of the story

...........

In Estela Canto's literary biography, Borges a contraluz (1989), she relates her personal experiences with Jorge Luis Borges. She argues that Borges dedicated his short stories 'El Aleph' and 'El Zahir', among others, to their relationship which failed because of Borges' inability to commit to her sexually, and a condition that ultimately led Canto to turn down his marriage proposal. Klingenberg explains Canto's biography:

"It describes a failed love affair whose parties split because of an impassé which begins as a narrow personal issue and is subsequently seen by Canto as a crucial piece of a national puzzle."[1]

Perhaps add something here on Canto and Borges relationship - the failure, their feelings after the break-up

Moreover, Canto commented that "'El Zahir es uno de los cuentos menos logrados de Borges". Despite Wilson's note in his biography that, "Estela Canto was clearly Dante's Beatrice to Borges, the promise of love and bliss,"[2] and Barth's reference to "El Zahir" as simply a love story based on Canto and Borges' love affair, the parallels between the woman with whom "Borges" is erotically obsessed and Canto are unambiguously palpable. In this respect perhaps the characterisation and ill-fate of Teolodina Villar - the erotic obsession - who is portrayed as conventional and "cursi"[3] (vulgar) in the narrative may have been possible reasons for Canto's negative comments on "El Zahir". The references to the bar on the corner of Chile and Tacuarí streets were in fact where Estela Canto lived

  • Characterisation of Teodolina
  • Lindstrom
  • The monotony of the relationship
  • "He is repelled and bored by her unvarying pursuit of, as he puts it, perfection in preference to beauty"
  • Comically grotesque examples of her single-mindedness, such as her concern that a Nazi-occupied Paris might be unable to transmit new fashion designs"
  • "He cannot dismiss this object from his mind. Subsequently Borges learns that he is not the only one with his thoughts involuntarily trained on one object; a plague of monotonous preoccupation with the Zahir is ravaging the area and threatening to engulf humankind. Perhaps because both the woman who emblematises the Zahir and the monomania the phenomenon provokes are unexciting (Borges compares Zahir-fixation to anaesthesia)
  • Lindstrom theorised it as a story centred on the concept of the hypostat[4]
  • Comparison to the Aleph
  • "While the errant, capricious Beatriz can provoke enduring love and rancour, the monotonous Teodolina leaves Borges little about which he might care
  • "El Aleph" was dedicated to her as well
  • Beatriz was
  • Canto felt objectified personally/ offended?
  • With all the similarities to her and the transmission of an obsession with a woman projected onto a coin - a sensation that parallels to anaesthesia
  • An obvious reason for her attitude to the short story

Even if this story is about Estela Canto, and a critique of Argentine high society, there is more to the story - perhaps her argument is flawed and an impulse/instant rhetoric to her

Disguised under the narrator's erotic obsession for this woman's disdainful character, her beauty and his unforgettable memory, this story is equally as wide-ranging, enigmatic and extravagantly original as Borges' other stories, if not more. As in all his stories there is reference to "labyrinthine hells from which there is no escape"[5], the haunting memories that drive his protagonists to insomnia, the motif of life as a dream, if not a nightmare, are dominant and pervade through "El Zahir".

Borges' background

Jorge Luis Borges possessed a profound interest in literature, critical theory and philosophy and used his essays, short stories and poetry to comment on these subject areas. However, he also used his writing as a means of questioning the authenticity of these particular systems of expression and explanation upon which they were based, and criticised their role in influencing the subjectivity of human knowledge. Given his fluency and expertise with different languages and cultures - especially those of Arabic and Muslim origin - Borges was conscious of the problems related to the expression of ideas.

Borges recognised the impossibility of communicating such ideas in a perfect manner due to the inevitable differences between linguistic, cultural and historical perspectives and the limitations that they individually create. In his fiction, Borges suggested a new perspective that borrowed elements from various formal traditions such as literature, critical theory, as well as philosophy but did not submit to any of them specifically. Moreover, he viewed such traditions as somewhat subjective attempts to deal with different aspects of human existence.

"El Zahir" could be considered to be one of the least successful works of Borges because the author in this short story attempts to perfect his story in a parallel to the search carried out by his protagonist, which is implicit in this title of this story and comparable to Borges' short story "El acercamiento a Almotásim" (1936), about a law student in Mumbai obsessed with the existence of the "perfect man". Furthermore, there is a certain irony in the critical role of Borges. On the one hand, Borges satirises the cyclical and infinite nature of religion proposed by the fictitious author

He has displaced his obsession with Teodolina onto the coin

  • The coin is a way to achieve enlightenment
  • Sufi mysticism - repeating it over and over again
  • Thinking about it a lot - "I long to travel that path"

Barlach's monograph:

"I also recall the remarkable uneasiness I felt when I read this paragraph: "one commentator of the Gulshan i Raz states that "he who has seen the zahir soon shall see the Rose" and quotes a line of poetry interpolated into Attar's Asrar Nama ("The Book of Things Unknown"): 'the zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil.'"

This is true - a way to experience the divine in a mystical union - lose himself in the Zahir - Nunez - "he longs for the annihilation of the self"

However - the forces that ignite this

This labyrinth is centred around humour and on the relationship which was flawed - around a dead woman who he criticised and disapproved of

Therefore he is essentially satirising the cyclical and infinite nature of religion because his obsession was originally for a woman who represented the transience of human life, who "was the very epitome of "tackiness" and sought "the absolute in the ephemeral" - he even questions his own feelings - "shall I confess that moved by the sincerest of Argentine passions - snobbery - I was in love with her, and that her death actually brought tears to my eyes" - his feelings weren't particularly deep - therefore how can we believe his fixation on the Zahir - how can we believe that it isn't going to be as shallow as his feelings for Teodolina?

Satire is further increased because the fictitious author holds the same name as Borges - self-criticism but also implying the impossibility of finding a 'solution'

On the other hand, his act of criticism suggests his own superiority to the fictitious author and in this way parallels the cyclical nature of religion that he effectively tries to discredit. Furthermore, Borges' allegorical treatment of the protagonist's efforts to find a mystical union with God or experience a divine enlightenment through the zahir ("perhaps behind the coin is God"), conflicts with his own criticism of the use of the allegory. The resistance to meaning plays a central role in "El Zahir". At the beginning of this short story, the narrator, "Borges", enters a bar in order to erase the memory of his recently deceased wife and receives a twenty-centavo Argentine coin, called the zahir, which mysteriously occupies his thoughts and eventually leads him to the brink of insanity. Upon seeing and feeling the physical effects of the zahir on his daily life, which are paralleled to the feelings of lovesickness, the narrator tries, albeit unsuccessfully, to forget it.

Lovesickness - satire - psychiatrist

To alleviate his confusion and satisfy his curiosity, "Borges" consults various texts in order to find an explanation of the zahir. Unfortunately, the explanation that he finds serves only to confuse him further. Finally he purposely loses the coin in a desperate attempt to save himself. The uncertainty of the zahir's meaning is evident at the beginning of the story where Borges alludes to several of its different manifestations: a tiger in Gujerat, a blind martyr in the mosque of Java, an astrolabe in Persia, a sailor's compass in the prisons of Mahdi, a vein in a marble column of the mosque of Córdoba and the bottom of a well in a ghetto in Tetúan.

After reciting this list, "Borges" speaks of his own experience with the zahir. By presenting this experience as one of a long series of manifestations, Borges implies the infiniteness of the zahir and the impermanence of its form. In doing so, he suggests a variety of meanings and the absence of a single correct interpretation. Later Borges indicates that the superstition regarding the zahir is rooted in Islamic mysticism, according to which, "zahir" means something "notorious" and visible". It is one of the ninety-nine names of God and, therefore, an aspect of God. According to Islamic hermeneutics, "zahir" refers to the external interpretation of the Qur'an.

External interpretation of the Qur'an and also the interpretations conducted by human beings - therefore there are going to be

errors

However, the Qur'an also has another interpretation that effectively questions the external interpretation and reading of the scripture. These two aspects of the Qur'an parallel the visible and the invisible aspects of God, which - while opposite - are reciprocal (Clark 1998 844-61). Each aspect of the Qur'an - or of God - complements the other and enhances the overall image, but neither effectively is complete by itself. The idea is also applicable to the zahir, since none of its manifestations provide an image of its totality or wholeness. The enigmatic quality of the word "zahir" is reiterated by its use in colloquial Arabic to refer to something that drives people insane (Cavallari 2001 53-70).

This is evident in the effect of the zahir on the narrator - on a metaphorical level, the zahir suggests that this overwhelm of insanity occurs as a consequence of pursuing total knowledge. Its different manifestations and interpretations reiterate the inability of a text to constitute itself totally. Moreover, they suggest indeterminacy (Balderston 1990 91-102). The idea of indeterminacy is implicit in the narrator's reaction to his dilemma. Faced with the impossibility of understanding the different meanings of the zahir - and thus its overall meaning - he considers the Sufi tradition of losing oneself in God by reciting his name ninety-nine times until they lose meaning - "until the names mean nothing anymore".

The narrator adds that each word in the language of God implies an infinite series of facts in a manner that is both explicit and simultaneous. He refers to Tennyson - "Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is". In a linguistic context, this implies the impossibility of establishing the precise meaning of a word (Cavallari 2001 53-70). This idea is reinforced by the parallel between the tangible and intangible aspects of the zahir and the literal and figurative meanings of language (Balderston 1990 91-102). If this idea is considered in an ontological sense, it suggests the human ability, or moreover, the inability, to understand the totality of the universe.

In this work Borges uses different levels of fiction and a combination of authentic and imaginary elements. The distinction between levels of fiction is evident in the references to other texts that comment on the zahir and in the allusions to pseudo-historical events and other books that demonstrate the influence of money and coins - "The thought struck me that there is no coin that is not the symbol of all the coins that shine endlessly down throughout history and fable". Furthermore, it can be seen in the narrator's description of his own personal experience with the zahir and his attempt to write a fantastic tale based on his experience (Cavallari 2001 53-70). Although they are fictitious, such autobiographical references serve to enhance the verisimilitude of the story (Cavallari 2001 53-70) - "The tale contains two or three enigmatic circumlocutions-sword water

instead

of

blood

, for example, and dragon's-bed for gold and is written in the first person" - Nunez states that the "substitution of the signifiers - "en lugar de" models the mechanics of the unconscious at work in the story."[6] - Biographical and fictitious - the author's difficulties in the relationship and Borges' active decision to write a story about the relationship - same as what "Borges" has done in this story. The mixture of authentic and imaginary elements consists of allusions to the characters and the stories, each of which has a connection with the zahir.

One important aspect is the critical commentary of texts from different and historical contexts that refer to the zahir. Such commentary includes references to authentic works, such as the Qur'an and the Talmud, and references to fictitious works such as a German monograph which the narrator supposedly discovers in a bookshop.

The lack of a fixed point of reference plays an important role in 'El zahir'. Aside from communicating its own meaning of "visible", "tangible" and "notorious" (Balderston 1990 91-102), the mention of the Zahir suggests other ideas as well. One of these is the concept of the "Batin" which signifies the invisible and the tangible according to Islamic philosophy and, thus, constitutes the opposite of "Zahir". Although both concepts - Zahir and Batin - pertain to the same cultural tradition, they imply different perceptions of the universe.

5


[1] P542, PATRICIA N. KLINGENBERG, 'Against Borges: Mapping the Feminine in Estela Canto', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 83, 2006, Miami University (541-562)

[2] Wilson P128

[3] El Z -

[4] Lindstrom p58

[5] P78, JM Cohen - Borges

[6] P165 Borges and Dante: Echoes of a Literary Friendship p161-197

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