Critical Response Archive: The Aleph

Before postmodern literature gained momentum in the sixties, there were several writers here and there who flouted even the conventions of modernism, the forerunners of the stylistic and conventional trends to come. Jorge Luis Borges’ story collection The Aleph is an example of the prototypical postmodern literature, combining intellectual and philosophical mind-games with artistic skill and innovation. His short stories question the nature of reality and truth, and reveal the nuances of human consciousness.

One of the most notable aspects that ties all these stories together is authorial presence: Borges himself is often called by name, and the main narrator often remains outside of the action, while another character tells the main story, as it occurs in “Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth” and “Rosendo’s Tale.” Even in the stories where the narrator is present, even among the main action, he can be identified as Borges, which the author gives away in the commentary at the end of the book, revealing the names of characters based on people he had really known. In “The Aleph,” the narrator does go by the name of Borges. This blurs the line between reality and fiction even in the real world, though most presume that no such things as Alephs exist.

By presenting fantastic events such as universe-viewing, time travel, and legendary weapons in a frank manner, often told from the person who had witnessed the event, Borges takes on three things at once: the denial and revelation of science-defying phenomena by human beings, the flaws in human perception, and the gullibility of memory. In many of his stories, all three are at work: in “The Aleph,” Borges first accepts that he had indeed witnessed it, but later came to question whether it was an aleph, or if he had seen one at all; in “The Other Death,” the men whom the narrator speaks to remember a cowardly Damian, then can’t remember him at all, then remember him as a war hero who died in battle—all due to a possible fluctuation of the time-space continuum as the past was somehow changed, possibly. Above all, Borges tells his fiction like nonfiction, eyewitness accounts of newsworthy events (even if the news media would not have heard of it); and this creates the feel of a true story, or a legend…it may be true, but it probably isn’t. This creates a certain illusory realism within the tone and content of his work.