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   kc4u Teacher
   College - Senior

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   Memory, as in the Modernist writers like Proust and Mann, is crucial to writers of late-modernism like Borges and Beckett. From Funes to many other stories in The Book of Sand, the failure or breakdown of memory and the linearity of time is a major theme for the induction of the magic-real for Aleph.

   Memory is important to the story in many ways. The love for Beatriz Viterbo that the narrator Borges has is itself a matter of memory. She has died a long time back and only exists to him in the form of a memory-trace, a radiant image. The otherwise unrequited love finds its response in this post-existential memory-game.

   Then, the aleph, which is like one point in space that encapsulates all spaces; from which all spatial points can be seen, is itself like a collective historical memory of all mankind at a universal level. The objectivity of its existence is an open issue in the story. It is more of a mythic node that unmakes reality, the centre of the magic-real. The aleph distorts the image of Beatriz like anything; shows Borges the dark and repulsive horror that lies beneath her radiant romantic outer-garb. It is significant, as the last lines of the postscript confirm, Borges starts to forget her image after his encounter with the aleph. It takes memory to its generic absolute; an overreaching arch, beyond which it encounters its own Icarian melting point. This is a point of absolutization of memory, which is also its point of self-cancellation. The aleph purges Borges off the imaginary excesses of her memory-image.

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   Posted by kc4u on Saturday November 7, 2009 at 8:45 AM