WRITING ABOUT WRITING

An Allegorical Interpretation of Las Ruinas Circulares by Jorge Luis Borges

Sahil Singh Gujral

Rice University Houston, TX August, 2006

A Bruce W. Dunlevie Summer Writing Fellowship Project Mentored by Professor Robert Lane Kauffmann

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was made possible through generous financial support from the Rice University Dunlevie Summer Writing Fellowship during the summer of 2006. I thank Bruce Dunlevie for funding this opportunity as well as Dr. Harvey Yunis for selecting my project proposal. The staff of the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library system graciously assisted me in tracking down numerous publications I would otherwise not have had access to. I owe an inestimable intellectual debt to the support, suggestions, and continued guidance of my faculty mentor, Professor Robert Lane Kauffmann. Finally, my friends and family were invaluable to me throughout the course of writing this paper and without their support and encouragement I might have given up long ago. As the saying goes, any success in this work should be attributed to the above-named but all mistakes are entirely my own.

We work in the dark we do what we can we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." Dencombe in The Middle Years, Henry James Dreams have a magical, mystical quality that Quevedo's texts lack that quality found in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I suspect that Quevedo never dreamed, and that he did not seek the realm of dreams, which is generally inhabited by the uncertain and the illogical. I have said that there is no emotion in his work, and it is very possible for that reason he could not enter the realm of dreams. Jorge Luis Borges in an interview with Roberto Alifano, (Twenty Four Interviews with Borges)

Ronald Christ, author of the only critical monograph about the works of Jorge Luis Borges that Borges himself read and praised, has commented that
I have frequently pointed to the pervasiveness of reading and writing in all of Borges' fiction: I should add here that he has consistently built a picture of himself as a man who has devoted his life to those pursuits rather than to living, almost as if in conscious conformity with the myth that has been perpetrated about Henry James and Flaubert. Characters in Borges' stories are frequently literary figures - like Pierre Menard, Herbert Quain, Nils Runeberg, Carlos Argentino, Averros, and Borges himself whose lives, to the extent that we know them, are defined in and by their literary pursuits. Literature is for Borges not an activity in one's life, not even a way [emphasis original] of life, but an acceptable metaphor for life itself...The majority of his stories are either centered in the effort of writing, as in Pierre Menard's attempt to write Don Quijote, the effort of criticism and interpretation, as in Three Version of Judas or in the effort of reshaping life from literary principles, as in Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Some of his fiction most notably Death and the Compass pose the effort of criticism Lnnrot's unraveling of the text against the effort of creation - Scharlach's weaving the net of clues. But whatever the balance of these activities in his fiction, there is a constant demand that we recognize the acts of reading, writing, and elucidating as basic metaphors for the metareality Borges tries to represent. [emphasis added]1

In this work, I would like to extend Christ's thesis to Borges' frequently analyzed tale of Las Ruinas Circulares.2 Specifically, I will explore the notion that TCR is both an extended metaphor for and commentary upon the creative process that writers (and other artists) must frequently struggle through in the production of their texts.3

1 The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion (118-119) 2 The Circular Ruins. All quotations from this story are taken from De Giovannis translation done in direct cooperation with Borges. The story is hereafter referred to as TCR. 3 Naomi Lindstrom in Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of His Short Fiction (42-43) touches on this possibility in passing but does not exhaustively explore it. Also see Stephen E. Soud's Borges the Golem-

Background of the Protagonist When you begin to read a book, you are immersed in your everyday world, and then you have to remove yourself to another world, the world of the book. That long opening sentence [by Cervantes in Don Quijote] seems very successful because when you read it you forget the things around you." Jorge Luis Borges, 91, Twenty Four Conversations with Borges

From the beginning, TCR situates us within a nebulous landscape of the unknown and unexplored. The only geographical hint we are given of the story's location comes in that famous, loosely constructed, meandering first sentence: the quiet man had come from...the numberless villages upstream...where the Zend language is barely tainted by Greek... 'Zend' here refers to Avestan, an ancient Persian language in which many of the holy texts of the Zoroastrian religion are written, a religion also unmistakably alluded to in TCR's scattered references to fire worshipping. But what to make of the second part? Where and when on earth was the Avestan language tainted by Greek? Here we have a classic (but, as we shall shortly see, quite significant) Borgesian red herring. Both in Borges' own time and in ours so little is known about early Zoroastrian culture that the literature on Avestan-Greek linguistic interaction, if such interaction ever actually occurred, is virtually nonexistent. Most of what is known about early Zoroastrian culture, however, comes to modern scholars from
Maker in Modern Language Notes 110.4 (1995) 739-754.

Greek historians, as a brief glance at the article on Zend-Avesta in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Borges' favorite general reference, (or - postBorges but arguably more Borgesian in spirit - the Wikipedia) will confirm. There is thus no verifiable geographic or chronological reference to be found here, only a vague suggestion of one. Like George Lucas' A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Borges has effectively opened his tale by situating us in the middle of nowhere and everywhere, telling a tale that could be happening to anyone and yet is happening to no one we can particularly find. Even the language is contradictorily multi-sourced. As Barbara Schaffer has observed, TCR begins with a man disembarking from a 'canoa de bamb.' Canoa (canoe) is a word derived from the language of the Arawak Indians of the Antilles, while bamb (bamboo) is from the Malay.4 This sense of it could be everyone, everywhere but it isn't anyone, anyplace you particularly know is the essential setting of a universal myth (even a myth about myth excavators). In this sense, it is no coincidence that the vague geographic and chronological suggestion Borges does give points to the lands of the original myths that lie at the foundation of Western Civilization Greece and the Near East. Joseph Campbell writes in the The Hero With a Thousand Faces that
This first stage of the mythological journey which we have designated the 'call to adventure' signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented...but it is always a place of...unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. (58)
4

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_paper_schaffer.html

By starting off with the generic in the middle of the unfamiliar (a man doing a recognizable action, landing a boat, in a place we cannot ever quite identify), Borges gives just enough concrete pieces of reality for the reader to hang onto the actions of the protagonist while willfully suspending inclination toward disbelief. As the story progresses we are drawn ever deeper into the and now I will finally use the word magical world Borges has created.

Preparation for the Act and The Invocation of the Muse

Having established the mythical universality of his tale in one opening sentence, Borges proceeds to depict in short order, I believe, both (1) the torment that many artists go through in deciding to pursue their creative act against internal pressures to the contrary and self-consciousness about societal perceptions and (2) the budding relationship with their internal resources of creativity (their muse to use Borges' own terminology5). The contrary internal pressures are represented by the brushy thorns that tore [the creator's] flesh on his way into the circular opening of the ruins, the temple, which represent the artist's creative mindset or creativity frame (TCR, 55). Writers and artists must often tear through the bramble of their internal self-critic, as it lists all the reasons the project will likely fail before the creative process is even begun. Eventually, however, despite all that could go wrong, a decision simply to go ahead precedes the completion of all artistic works. Often, the creative process itself
5 See Jorge Luis Borges: An Interview," American Poetry Review 17.5 (1988): 25. Cited in Soud.

later heals the wounds inflicted by the internal self-critic, much as the temple god heals the wounds of the dreamer. On the other hand, self-consciousness about societal perspectives (and anxiety at the reception of the finished product) is presented in the story as those men who lived nearby [that] looked on his sleep with a kind of awe [and did not harm him because they] either sought his protection or else were in dread of his witchcraft. (56) Again, before beginning the creative process, there is always the nagging doubts of how the work will ultimately be perceived, a moment of selfconsciousness that many artists must wrestle with. The solution to overcoming both of these hurdles against the act of creation is the creative whirlwind itself, the vibrant force that takes hold of artists and gives them something higher to surrender to as they place their trust in the creative process and allow it to unfold. I take this creative force to be symbolized in the Fire god of the ruins (which the artist must initially reawaken in the story's beginning) and later the artist's dreams. When the dreamer enters the temple, he is beginning the process of reawakening the Fire god, much as artists must often reawaken the creative muse within themselves. Creativity like fire annihilates the existing thought landscape in order to lay a foundation for something new. Fire at first crackles, and brims, like creative sparks, flying chaotically before they yield a steady flame. The cycle of destruction and creation, as we see toward TCR's end, is indeed an eternal one, and inescapable one for both creators and their creations, since in the end both of these mutually affect one another. But what exactly is the nature of this creative force? One interpretation 5

comes from Edna Eizenberg's documentation of Borges' conception of divine inspiration and the Holy Spirit:
What strikes Borges most in relation to Scripture is the traditional view of the writer not as creator, but as amanuensis, not as originator, but as transmitter of something which comes from outside him, from beyond. (The Aleph Weaver, 71)

I suggest for a moment that the dichotomy Eizenberg has set up here is not a necessary one. If the writer truly is the link between divinity and mankind, willing to suffer the burden of the act of creation, to bring something from the realm of the divine into the realm of man, then what is uniquely his creation once it appears in the world of reality (TCR, 56) may still belong to unanimous (TCR, 55) creativity and divinity in the heavens of dreams. Another line of insight into the nature of the Fire muse can be discerned from the way it is used in the story when the creator suddenly becomes supremely frustrated with his clumsy and crude and elementary...Adam (TCR, 59). Borges writes:
Having exhausted his prayers to the gods of the earth and the river, [the creator] threw himself down at the feet of the stone image that may have been a tiger or a stallion, and asked for its blind aid. That same evening he dreamed of the image. He dreamed it alive, quivering; it was no unnatural cross between a tiger and a stallion but at one and the same time both those violent creatures and also a bull, a rose, a thunderstorm. This manifold god revealed to him that its earthly name was Fire, that there in the circular temple (and in others like it) sacrifices had once been made to it, that it had been worshiped, and that through its magic the phantom of the man's dreams would be wakened to life in such a way that except for Fire itself and the dreamer every being in the world would accept him as a man of flesh and blood. (TCR, 59)

The creator here is entering into a collaboration with his creative life force (or divinity, if you will) to bring his creation to ultimate life in reality, in a way such that only the two of them will know about it. The creator has finally acknowledged and turned to his creative life force to inspire and aid him to finish the job when all other options have been exhausted. The Fire muse also presents a masculine, virile, phallic fertilization (tigerstallionbullrose [phallic shape]thunderstorm) to the womb and fetus-like imagery of the man the creator is dreaming up directly beforehand:
He dreamed it throbbing, warm, secret. It was the size of a closed fist, a darkish red in the dimness of a human body without a face or sex. With anxious love he dreamed it for fourteen lucid nights...Before a year was over he came to the skeleton, the eyelids... (TCR, 58-59)

To quote Campbell on the archetype of supernatural aid in mythology (which aptly characterizes the Fire-muse):
What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as the past...that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One only has to know and trust, and the ageless guardian will appear...the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at this side. (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 71-72)

Formation of a Singular Goal and Brainstorming

I have diverged slightly in the last section from a strictly sequential treatment of TCR, but I would like to resume that mode here. To recount the story so far, the protagonist has left the boat, arrived at the temple, and gone to sleep. Immediately after awakening, he becomes aware of the surrounding people's impressions of him and then, finally, we learn of our protagonist's true purpose:
His guiding purpose, though it was supernatural, was not impossible. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him down to the last detail and project him into the world of reality. (TCR, 56)

Is this not the essential description of the creative act? To hone, particularize, and refine what were formerly only suggestively ethereal notions in the back of one's mind (or the collective unconscious, or the mind of divinity) and manifest them into the palpable, concrete reality of humankind? That this act is described as being both supernatural and mystical (TCR, 56) should be interpreted, I believe, as Borges the writer paying homage to the creative struggle of writers (and artists) everywhere. Indeed, we need only look to the next sentence to see that Borges is acutely conscious of the struggle involved.
This mystical aim had taxed the whole range of his mind. Had anyone asked him his own name or anything about life before then, he would not have known what to answer. (TCR, 56)

The creator in this story, like all creators, must at least temporarily forget his past, his particularities, and become a sort of everyman so that he may tap into the universal wellspring of creativity from which art comes. It follows that in attempting to 8

catalyze this process, the writer will enter a sort of mental (and perhaps physical) isolation and asceticism, depriving himself of sensory distraction like a Buddhist monk meditating to become a bodhisattva:
This forsaken, broken temple suited himself because it held few visible things, and also because the neighboring villagers would look after his frugal needs. (TCR, 56)

Next Borges presents a brilliant metaphor for the brainstorming process: a teacher presenting to his students, each one representing an individual idea or thought, hoping that eventually one of them will challenge him and tug back when he tugs at it, this process being aptly summarized by Borges as the transition from chaotic to dialectic[al] thinking (TCR, 56). In addition to this attempt to winnow a brainstorm down to the best, core ideas, the students also represent the numerous other ideas contributed to the universal creative wellspring by other writers and the general Fire-muse creative force (hence the resemblance of the temple to the amphitheater, the mention of centuries of distance). The creator's classroom is the creative wellspring itself, filled with the ideas of the collective unconscious and the brainstorm of the creator himself. Or as Borges writes:
The stranger dreamed himself at the center of a circular amphitheater which in some ways was also the burnt-out temple. Crowds of silent disciples exhausted the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest of them hung centuries away from him and at a height of the stars, but their features were clear and exact....The faces listened bright and eager, and did their best to answer sensibly, as if they felt the importance of his questions, which would raise one of them them out of an existence as a shadow and place him in the real world. When asleep or awake, the man pondered the answers of his phantoms and, not letting himself be misled by impostors, divined in certain of their quandaries a growing intelligence. He was in search of a soul worthy of taking a place in the world. After nine or ten nights, he realized, feeling bitter over it, that nothing could be

expected from the pupils who passively accepted his teaching but that he might, however, hold hopes for those who from time to time hazarded reasonable doubts about what he taught. The former, although they deserved love and affection, could never become real; the latter, in their dim way, were already real. [emphasis added] (TCR, 57)

The bitterness the creator experiences is a feeling known to any writer, artist, or creator who has ever had to discard a good idea or tidbit (or at least temporarily put it aside) because it simply could not fit the work that was being created, was not real or substantive enough to be worthy of manifestation. Consider also that it is the inevitable truth of art that you need to work with ideas that you, yourself find provocative and challenging if you are ever to provoke or challenge your audience.

Selecting an Idea and Dealing with Obstacles

Immediately following the text quoted above, the writer-artist finally selects an idea from his brainstorm that does tug back, that will form the basis of his completed work (notwithstanding the obstacles that the artist runs into slightly later in the story):
One evening...he dismissed his vast dream-school forever and kept a single disciple. He was a quiet, sallow, and at times rebellious young man with sharp features akin to those of his dreamer. (TCR, 57)

Obviously continuing the metaphor here, Borges is perhaps also alluding to the fact that writers and artists tend to settle on those ideas that are not only rebellious enough to challenge them, but also in some ways reflect the deepest (if least recognizable) parts of who they are (hence the sharp features akin to those of the

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dreamer that the young man possesses). Having settled on an idea, the writer now begins trying to nurture it, only to immediately run into obstacles, as artists on a mission are prone to do:
His progress, at the end of a few private lessons amazed his teacher. Nonetheless, a catastrophe intervened. One morning, the man emerged from his sleep as from a sticky wasteland...and realized he had not been dreaming. All that night and the next day the hideous lucidity of insomnia weighed down on him. To tire himself out he tried to explore the surrounding forest, but all he managed, there in a thicket of hemlocks were some snatches of broken sleep, fleetingly tinged with visions of a crude and worthless nature. (TCR, 57)

This is the first of two major obstacles the dreamer/writer will encounter on his path to bringing the work to life. While this obstacle consists of an aporia or inability to move forward, the second one centers around the frustration the artist experiences with the imperfection of his creation and his inability to craft his work to meet his own expectations quickly enough:
As clumsy and crude and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams wrought bu the nights of the magician. One evening the man was at the point of destroying all his handiwork (it would have been better for him [emphasis added] had he done so), but in the end he restrained himself. (TCR, 59)

Both of these types of obstacles should be acutely familiar to anyone who has ever sat down to write, paint, or otherwise enter the creative process with the intent of producing a finished work. In both cases, it is often by internal cleansing and catharsis, prayers to spiritual gods (Campbellian magical resources), or the pursuit of an alternative course of action (the banal modern analogy of reversing and driving around the brick wall comes to mind) that the writer/artist manages to continue. 11

Concerning the magical resources and gods to which the writer gives reverence, I read agents of the divine inspiration from which the author is working (see the Eizenberg quotation above) in the case of the first obstacle (the gods of the planets...the all-powerful name (TCR, 58)) and, in the case of the second, the Fire/creativity muse already discussed above (the stone image that may have been a tiger or a stallion (TCR, 59)). Why would it have been better for the artist to destroy all his handiwork? I believe the key to understanding this sentence comes from the words for him. This applies both in the sense of the internal sanity an artist often regains once he or she exits the creative process and in the more immediate sense that the artist of TCR would not have been destroyed (by being someone else's dream) at the end of the story, if he had simply failed to complete the work. As Borges himself has commented in an interview with Donald Yates, the obstacles that the dreamer encounters in TCR parallel the obstacles Borges encountered in writing the story (and I would argue the obstacles that all artists encounter in their creative process):
Yates: In one story you wrote, "The Circular Ruins," your groping became part of the story since the magician or the stranger - whoever - was trying to find a way to imagine or dream or create another person, and he tried several things that didn't work. These were your attempts to write the story. Is that right?

Borges: Yes, of course I was. I am sure I was very clever to have woven them into a story.

--Interview with Donald Yates (1982) Reprinted in Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, Edited

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by Richard Burgin (page 192) (published in 1998)

It is deep in the throes of the creative struggle, faced with the possibility of utter failure while confronting his first obstacle (his inexplicable insomnia and inability to dream), that the artist realizes what is one of the most profound truths about the creative process a realization that all artists must come to at some point if they create for long enough, though perhaps some more viscerally than consciously:
He realized that, though he may penetrate all the riddles of the higher and lower orders, the task of shaping the senseless and dizzying stuff of dreams is the hardest that a man can attempt much harder than weaving a rope of sand or of coining the faceless wind. He realized that an initial failure was to be expected. He then swore he would [attempt another way]. (TCR, 58)

As Borges has portrayed it here, there are few things more frustrating, more initially unrewarding, more infuriating than attempting to create art, and the recognition of the struggle inherent in the process is perhaps the first step to overcoming that struggle. Again, we should also be keenly aware of the mythical elements at work here, helping to make this tale both universal and archetypical. As Campbell writes on the The Road of Trials in world mythology:
Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. (The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 97)

Nurturing the Work as a Child Going back to a chronological reading of TCR, after encountering the first obstacle of being unable to dream, the artist, having cleansed himself and prayed, begins to 13

dream a different dream altogether. I believe it is fairly apparent that the description that follows (Almost at once he had a dream of a beating heart...The countless strands of hair were perhaps the hardest task of all (58-59, TCR)) parallels that of the process of embryological development after conception, and, within the context of the larger analogy to the creative process, this phase represents the first half of the artist's nurturing, development, and expansion of their initial germ of an idea. The creator must literally construct the skeleton and body of his idea; he must flesh it out, allowing it to grow until it reaches the necessary critical mass. Critical mass for what? Nothing short of taking on a life of its own. It is once this occurs that the second half of nurturing may begin, in which the artist must test his or her fleshed out idea as much as possible, submitting his child to all the challenges, tasks, and objections the artist can possibly anticipate that the outside world may one day present it with. The second half of nurturing is thus represented by the actual training of the dreamed man, the rearing of the child, if you will, once he wakes up. What about the needed intervention of the creative-force-come-Fire-god in between the two halves of nurturing? According to the story:
Having exhausted his prayers to the gods of the earth and river, he threw himself down at the feet of the stone image that may have been a tiger or a stallion, and asked for its blind aid. That same evening he dreamed of an image. He dreamed it alive, quivering; it was no unnatural cross between a tiger and stallion, but at one and the same time both these violent creatures and also a bull, a rose, a thunderstorm. This manifold god revealed to him that its earthly name was Fire, that there in the circular temple (and in others like it) sacrifices had once been made to it, that it had been worshipped, that through its magic the phantom of

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the man's dreams would be wakened to life in such a way that except for Fire itself and the dreamer every being in the world would accept him as a man of flesh and blood. The god ordered that, once instructed in the rites, the disciple should be sent downstream to the other ruined temple, whose pyramids still survived, so that in the abandoned place some human voice might exalt him. In the dreamer's dream, the dreamed one awoke. (TCR, 59)

Thus creativity, though many faced (a thunderstorm in this situation, a bull in that) is ultimately the same unified force, and though it demands the artist's utmost sacrifice, is ultimately the truest collaborator the artist has in helping to bring the dreamlike conception to life. Also, it is often the case that if a work is successful, then all autobiographical traces of the artist's identity are purged, and individuals recognize the work as autonomous and possessing a life of its own (real) and not simply an extension of the artist himself. In this regard, it makes perfect sense that the phantom of the man's dreams would be wakened to life in such a way that except for Fire itself and the dreamer every being in the world would accept him as a man of flesh and blood for that is the goal of almost every artist and his or her creativity. But most humans, especially in the modern era, have forgotten their inner creative instinct and it still haunts the deeper recesses of their souls, waiting to be discovered; in this respect it makes sense that sacrifices had once [emphasis added] been made to it. Finally, the request to send the finished man to the temple downstream likely represents the need for the work to leave the direct supervision of the artist and go out (published) into the world for others to consider. As Lindstrom writes,
The advice this god offers makes the mental creation of a human being sound tellingly similar to the raising of a naturally conceived child as well as to the presentation of an artistic

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work. The new being cannot thrive until its maker takes the step of sending it away to another ritual site located on the same island. As well as the parent's obligation to loosen its hold on a maturing child, this requirement parallels the creator's needs to give autonomy to his or her work when it goes out among audiences who read it in ways beyond authorial control. (Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of The Short Fiction, 43)

Polishing and Revising, The Anxiety Preceding Release, and Release Itself

In the next scene, the dreamer finally enacts the second half of the nurturing process, akin, as mentioned above, to rearing the child, as well as to putting the finishing touches (polishing and revising) on a work that is already bursting to be set free:
The magician...devoted a period of time (which finally spanned two years) to initiating his disciple into the riddles of the universe and the worship of Fire. Deep inside, it pained him to say goodbye to his creature. (TCR, 59-60)

In that last sentence, of course, we have the understandable sorrow it causes almost every creative being (or parent) to realize that the end of the process is near, that soon the finished work will be ready to face the world on its own. (This is later echoed in He realized with a certain bitterness that his son was ready and perhaps impatient to be born.) This realization only intensifies the drive to make the most of the time for revision the artist/parent/writer has left:
Under the pretext of teaching him more fully, each day he drew out the hours set aside for sleep. Also, he reshaped the somewhat faulty right shoulder. From time to time, he was troubled by the feeling that all this had already happened... (TCR, 60)

Along with recognizing that their creative process, their childrearing, has an end, the artists must recognize too that they are not alone in creating, both in the sense that 16

there are countless other beings going through the creative process at any given time and that no work ever truly is the product of only one man or woman.
But for the most part his days were happy...Little by little, he was training the young man for reality. On one occasion he commanded him to set up a flag on a distant peak. The next day, there on the peak, a fiery pennant shone. He tried other, similar exercises, each bolder than the one before. (TCR, 60)

As mentioned earlier, this phase of the dreamer's creation process is similar to the testing of an almost finished-work that all successful artists and writers must put their creations through. The next step is to attempt to cleanse the work of as much of the author, the autobiographical element, and the author's creative spirit as possible, so that the work may stand on its own:
At the very end (so that the boy would never know he was a phantom, so that he would think himself a man like all men), the magician imbued with total oblivion his disciple's long years of apprenticeship. (TCR, 60)

And now the task is complete. Or is it?

Aftermath of Publication

The final phase of The Circular Ruins, the denouement that isn't one, is to this reader by far the most interesting. What happens once the work is finally released into the world at large, once the man finally has been project[ed] into the world of reality? There is of course certain exhaustion at having worked so intensely, as well as nagging curiosity and doubt about how ones work is being received. That is, just what it is doing with its newfound life of its own? :

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His triumph and peace were blemished by a touch of weariness. In the morning and evening dusk, he prostrated himself before the stone idol, perhaps imagining that his unreal son was performing the same rites farther down the river in other circular ruins. At night he no longer dreamed, or else he dreamed the way all men dream. (TCR, 60)

But there is something more as well. As Borges foreshadows in the following sentence, the creative self itself that is, the creator is beginning to fade:
He now perceived with a certain vagueness the sounds and shapes of the world, for his absent son was taking nourishment from the magician's decreasing consciousness. (TCR, 60-61)

Finally, the creator hears factual news of how his work is being received, and at that very moment he is paralyzed with fear at the thought of it being discovered for the simulacrum that it inevitably is:
After a length of time...he was awakened one midnight by two rowers. He could not see their faces, but they spoke to him about a magic man in a temple up north who walked on fire without being burned. The magician suddenly remembered the god's words. He remembered that of all the creatures in the world, Fire was the only one who knew his son was a phantom. (TCR, 61)

Fire here is the creativity, not just of the author, but of the readers and audience as well, as they may somehow deconstruct and critique the work back to its root, unveiling it as a non-real (i.e. constructed) thing.
This recollection, comforting at first, ending up tormenting him. He feared that his son might wonder at this strange privilege and in some way discover his condition as a mere appearance. Not to be man but to be the projection of another man's dreams what an unparalleled humiliation, how bewildering! (TCR, 61)

The irony here, that the dreamer himself also undergoes the unparalleled humiliation he describes, is a keen statement on the postmodern turn. The 18

essentially modernist notion that a worthwhile subject must be discrete, whole, and somehow original (a pure referent) is sharply contradicted by the interconnectedness expressed at the end of the story, when the man discovers himself to be someone else's dream as well. Thus we come to the true end of the tale, and an inevitable truth all writers and artists must face:
The end of these anxieties came suddenly, but certain signs foretold it...For what had happened many centuries ago was happening again. The ruins of the fire god's shrine were destroyed by fire. In a birdless dawn the magician saw the circling sheets of flame closing in on him. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he realized that death was coming to crown his years and to release him from his labors. He walked into the leaping pennants of flame. They did not bite into his flesh, but caressed him and flooded him without heat or burning. In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he understood that he too was an appearance, that someone else was dreaming him. [emphasis added] (TCR, 61-62)

Simply put, not only is the author an influencer of the text, but the text as well must influence the author. As much as the text is inevitably tied to other texts, the subject of the author is also here fragmented; both are condemned to their intertextuality, or, if one would prefer the pre-postmodern words of Ecclesiastes, the shocking realization that:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun./ Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. / There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, KJV)

For every nuance, every organ, every strand of hair the author has conceived of his

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text in sculpting his creation, the text will eternally now resculpt the author as well.

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Bibliography Aizenberg, Edna. The Aleph Weaver : Biblical, Kabbalistic and Judaic Elements in Borges. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1984. ---. Borges and His Successors : The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Alazraki, Jaime. Borges and the Kabbalah : And Other Essays on His Fiction and Poetry. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Balderston, Daniel. Out of Context : Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Bell-Villada, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction : A Guide to His Mind and Art. Texas Pan American Series. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Biron, Rebecca E. Murder and Masculinity : Violent Fictions of Twentieth Century Latin America. 1st ed. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Borges, Jorge Luis. The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969, Together with Commentaries and an Autobiographical Essay. Trans & Ed. Norman Thomas De Giovanni. 1st ed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970. Borges, Jorge Luis, and Roberto Alifano. Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges : Including a Selection of Poems : Interviews, 1981-1983. Altamira InterAmerican Series. An Altamira Inter-American ed. Housatonic, MA Borges, Jorge Luis, and Richard Burgin. Jorge Luis Borges : Conversations. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Borges, Jorge Luis, et al. Borges on Writing. 1st ed. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1973. 21

Borges, Jorge Luis, Fernando Sorrentino, and Clark M. Zlotchew. Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Pub. Co., 1982. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series ; 17. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Christ, Ronald J. The Narrow Act; Borges' Art of Allusion. New York,: New York University Press, 1969. Cortnez, Carlos. Borges, the Poet. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1986. Costa, Ren de. Humor in Borges. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000. Dunham, Lowell, and Ivar Ivask. The Cardinal Points of Borges. [1st ed. Norman,: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Friedman, Mary Lusky. The Emperor's Kites : A Morphology of Borges' Tales. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. Gonzlez, Jos Eduardo. Borges and the Politics of Form. New York ; London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution : Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Lindstrom, Naomi. Jorge Luis Borges : A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction ; No. 16. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Merrell, Floyd. Unthinking Thinking : Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991. Molloy, Sylvia, and Oscar Montero. Signs of Borges. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 22

Soud, Stephen E. "Borges the Golem-Maker: Intimations Of Presence In The Circular Ruins." Modern Language Notes 110.4 (1995): 739-54. Sturrock, John. Paper Tigers : The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1977.

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