El Aleph
1949
- cuentos
- short stories
- translations into italian
- social life and customs
- fiction
- continental european fiction (fictional works by one author)
- study guides
- examinations
- argentine short stories
- aleph (borges, jorge luis)
The story
In Borges' story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. The story traces the theme of infinity found in several of Borges' other works, such as "The Book of Sand". As in many of Borges' short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved, named Beatriz Viterbo, and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail. Later in the story, a business on the same street attempts to tear down Daneri's house in the course of its expansion. Daneri becomes enraged, explaining to the narrator that he must keep the house in order to finish his poem, because the cellar contains an Aleph which he is using to write the poem. Though by now he believes Daneri to be quite insane, the narrator proposes without waiting for an answer to come to the house and see the Aleph for himself. Left alone in the darkness of the cellar, the narrator begins to fear that Daneri is conspiring to kill him, and then he sees the Aleph for himself: "On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak
What it’s like
Dense, dry, and bright in the mind rather than on the eye: this is a book of small rooms, dusty cellars, and Buenos Aires streets rendered in a precise, formal Spanish-inflected prose that reads like a careful lecture delivered with a faint smile. The voice is calm, learned, and wry, full of erudite asides and deadpan understatement, while the central image, a tiny iridescent sphere holding every place at once, supplies a single flash of dazzling, almost painful light against an otherwise muted, shadowy world. Its mood is cerebral wonder tinged with absurdity and quiet dread, the kind of unsettling comedy that grows as a self-important poet's obsessions spiral into something cosmic. It suits a slow weekday evening, a sleepless hour alone with a lamp, or a patient reread with a notebook nearby. The pacing is measured, with long reflective passages broken by sudden shifts into vertigo. The narrator's grief and his grudging entanglement with the cousin give the emotional arc its warmth. Intensity is low: no gore, little physical violence, and only a brief stretch of menace in the cellar. It is for readers who enjoy philosophical puzzles, labyrinthine ideas, and playful, exacting prose.
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