I am reading this short story as part of a Short Story Month on Beyond the Bookshelf’s substack focusing on Borges story The Aleph. So far we have explored the joy of short stories which was interesting because I am not a natural short story reader, the genius of Borges and today The Circular Ruins structured as a fugue in music.

The advice when reading Borges is to find the fugue and hold on to it strongly and that helps when reading The Aleph because there are so many themes and ideas in it. The story opens with the death of Beatriz and the narrator, read Borges, remembering her each year by visiting her family and inveigling himself into staying for a meal and then overnight, eventually getting Carlos Argentino Daneri drunk enough to expound on his theories of modern man.

“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins…” He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.

Even more true today. Just imagine what AI could do for Mohammad and the mountain.

The narrator is less than interested in the ideas but never mind for Daneri has written them all down in a poem and proceeds to read out a stanza and then marvel at his own writing, the second line being from ‘Homer to Hesiod’. I love the idea mentioned of ‘bold apostrophes’. The narrator is then invited back and fearing he is to be asked to write a foreword (that must be a real fear of authors. They could spend all their time doing this.) is only asked to invite another ‘great’ author to write it. And so we have a second theme of jealousy perhaps from an author that is horrified by appalling writing but must endure it, so pleased with it is the poet.

Some time later Daneri contacts the narrator and tells him that his house is to be knocked down and that he will be unable to finish his poem

. . . because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.

This the narrator has to see and rushes over to the house and is eventually invited down into the cellar where there is total darkness and ‘ocular adjustment’ needed. And there is the Aleph for which words are not enough to describe it, nor metaphors applicable

In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency.

We then get one enormous paragraph with all sentences starting with ‘I saw . . ., I saw . . ‘ and a list of thousands of images all at the same time. The infinite, unimaginable universe. Here is our main theme. Infinity but cruelly, the narrator pretends not to have seen anything and suggests fresh air and quiet in the countryside to cure Daneri of his madness.

The post-script details Daneri’s winning the Second National Prize for Literature

. [“I received your pained congratulations,” he wrote me. “You rage, my poor friend, with envy, but you must confess — even if it chokes you! — that this time I have crowned my cap with the reddest of feathers; my turban with the most caliph of rubies.”]

Professional jealousy as a theme returned to particularly because the narrator got not one vote for his writing. The story ends with an admission that memory fades, as is the face of Beatriz and this is a third theme.

The Aleph is also a symbol of imagination – what is seen must be different for everyone – and is the source of creativity for all. Was it there – is the Aleph reality or a perception? Does it matter? All writing comes from these sources and so should be acknowledged.

What a remarkable story but what I am really enjoying are the articles which surround it and help to draw out understanding.