- ‘The Aleph’ – Jorge Luis Borges
- ‘El Matadero’ – Esteban Echeverria
- ‘Where and How the Devil Lost His Poncho’ – Ricardo Palma
- ‘The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga’ – Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
These four very different stories share much more than a common culture, a common language and a common geographical setting. They all explore the past – the distant past of Latin America, roughly at the time when it was breaking away from Spain. Borges’ ‘The Aleph’ is the exception to this because it explores the personal past of the author, but all four stories possess what I would call a narrative instability (even the Borges), because within each story there are carefully placed hints that what we are being told is the truth according to rumor or gossip or received opinion passed down the ages. This narrative instability is enhanced because of the nature of some of the events described and through the prevailing tone of the author/narrator whose sophistication is clear through his syntax and vocabulary which often distances him from the brutal effects of what he describes – especially in the stories of Echeverria and Sarmiento. Three of the stories can be said to make frequent references to religion and to the dichotomy in man between saint and sinner- except the Borges which is more sophisticated and more intellectual and its tone and its frequent literary allusions. I will now examine this question of narrative instability in each story. There is a sense too that each story concerns itself with the inexplicable mysteries of life – whether they are religious, psychological or mental.
‘Where and How the Devil Lost His poncho’ comes across as a folk tale or parable. The story if full of quaint and deliberate anachronisms and is clearly not true, involving, as it does, a visit by Jesus and his disciples to a Latin American town called Ica. The visit by Jesus is reported in the regional paper and the Devil decides to visit Ica and, when he does, he spreads chaos, lust and drunkenness. The narrative instability is shown at the end when Palma comments, “it is said that since then, every once in a while, His Satanic Majesty, comes back to the city of Ica looking for his poncho. When this happens, the elbow-benders go on a proper spree and....” This is an attempt to explain through myth human weakness and sin.
‘The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga’ shares some themes with the story by Palma. The central character comes from a very good, respectable family but turns out to be a violent rogue and murderer. The narrative instability is everywhere in this story, because we are not sure what is true and what is rumor, since Quiroga is a larger than life villain: everything about him is known through stories which may or may not be true. What is important, I think, in his presentation is that he is given no reason for being as he is: he commits random and unexpected acts of extreme violence on total strangers, on people who oppose him and also on those closest to him. He is a purely evil and sadistic man who likes to control other and dominate them through pain. The narrator’s cool and detached tone in writing about him suggests no particular criticism, but as intelligent readers we may see in this story a satire on earlier less civilized times in Latin America. The fact that Quiroga rises to a position of power and political influence by the end of the story demonstrates Sarmiento’s hatred of tyranny when he comments that Quiroga, “Incapable of commanding noble admiration, [he] delighted in exciting fear.”
Echeverria’s ‘El Matadero’ is set in the 1830s in Buenos Aires and the historical distance allows the narrative voice to look at the chaotic events one Lent with cool, slightly ironic eyes as if describing events from another, unknown world. ‘El matadero’ means the ‘slaughter house’ and as the story progresses the slaughterhouse takes on symbolic qualities, so that it represents some of the tensions and the worst tendencies in Argentine society, culminating in the disgraceful and demeaning treatment of the Unitarian who stumbles unknowingly into the area. In one sense, Echeverria is satirising the barbaric nature 0f early Latin American society, just as Sarmiento does in ‘The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga’. Echeverria’s ironic tone is evident at the end when, once the Unitarian has died, he comments of the slaughter house people that “they had brought to an end one of their innumerable feats of valor.”
Borges’ ‘The Aleph’ stands out because it is not set in the distant past, although there are copious references to the narrator’s own personal past. Borges story is also different because he moves, in the story in a cultured and civilized milieu, his vocabulary is more erudite and what he describes is a far cry from the slaughter house and the barbaric life of Juan Facundo Quiroga. However, there is still a narrative instability at the heart of the story. Towards the end his acquaintance, Carlos Argentino allows him to look at his Aleph . The aleph has a mysterious, other worldly quality: it is a sphere in which the narrator “could clearly see... every point in the cosmos.” In a sense, what Borges sees through the Aleph is everything that has ever existed in the world – including the barbaric acts described in the stories by Sarmiento and Echeverria. Borges story, one might argue, is the one that binds the other three together.
