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... f reality. He needs to show them just how extraordinary their ordinary world is. The collection's first story, "Tln, Urban, Orbis Tertius, " accomplishes this expertly. Borges spends most of the story establishing an elaborate fantasy world whose commonly held philosophical truths are incongruent with our own. "The nations of that planet [Tln] are congenitally idealist.
Their language, with its derivatives -- religion, literature, and metaphysics -- presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tln, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to monde.
The moon rose over the sea would be written... upward, beyond the on streaming it mooned. "The previous passage refers to the languages of the Southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere... the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective.
Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky or some other accumulation. " (Borges 23) The very organization of thought required to exist in such a world is an assault on our sensibilities. Borges presses this attack, showing how the thinkers of Tln reduce a materialist philosophy (closer to our own territory) to nonsense, demonstrate its inherent absurdity. Then he goes on to claim that objects on Tln are created and exist solely by the power of suggestion -- they are a sort of consensual hallucination.
These objects, called hair, the imaginary objects of an imaginary planet imagined by an imaginary country, are beginning now to invade our own world, he says -- our own "Orbis Tertius. " How can this fail to make us question whether we ourselves are not truly imaginary? "English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet, " Borges' narrator says. "The world will be Tln. I take no notice. " (Borges 35) His casual disposition toward the uprooting of our established patterns of thought leaves the reader with a chill. The magic of Borges' ideas, of his storytelling, has not failed to take root. A recently published story entitled "Borges Rides the Cyclone" tells the fanciful tale of the author himself, in his old age, blind and wandering in a mystical haze around Coney Island, trying to discern why all passers-by encourage him to "Ride the Cyclone": "Ride the Cyclone, 's ays a man from a wheelchair, scuffing Borges's wingtips, rolling brutal on his shifting feet... "Excuse me, 's ays Borges, this time not meaning it quite as much, wondering already (returning to walking, his walking stick tickling the buckled pavement before him like an insect), What is this Cyclone? A beast, after all, in the middle of this mess?
A Grendel to the masses... " (O'Brien 83 - 84) In a dream, a doctor, a friend of Borges', has revealed to him in metaphor what the Cyclone is already -- what it really is, and what it will be to him. "A train within a church, " he calls it, "A train running through a thousand churches, each church housed within the other, no church any smaller, yet churches all within the same church, each identical but for the religion practiced upon its altar, each religion the same but for its different god. " (O'Brien 84) The churches, I believe, are people: their religions, those people's worldviews. The Cyclone is the vehicle which will carry Borges through all those people and all their unique perspectives, which are somehow all the same. In the end, Borges discovers that the Cyclone is, in fact, a popular roller coaster, and he manages to take a ride on it himself. And it does grant him a sort of transcendence, a rare ability to experience what others have experienced before, though he thought he could not. It also allows him to defy seemingly immutable law, as he has attempted to in his stories: "And then the great beast awakes.
The groggy Cyclone coughs, sputters, rises from the ground. "Borges lifts into the sky. Thinks Borges, rising, What am I doing? If I could see, what would I be seeing? Climbing the sky like a Pegasus, the clack and thunder of this mechanical monster (could the Cyclone really be a monster? would a monster bring me so much joy? ) lifting against gravity, against what is undeniable, against what is real. Thinks Borges, this is really quite fun. " (O'Brien 93) This, then, is magical realism: a sort of extreme form of symbolism, an exaggeration to the point of impossibility for the sake of driving home a metaphor, a vivid illustration of what the audience ought already to have noticed, though they have not.
It is an art form which hopes to let us see what we have not yet seen, though it has been right before our eyes all along. I admire magical realism and its practitioners for their relentless pursuit of this worthy goal, and in addition for their beautiful and poetic execution of it. But even greater in my estimation is the artistic form of surrealism. By this I mean a deliberate, sometimes calculated, incongruity within the work of art itself. Good surrealism ought to be jarring to the audience, at least initially; like magical realism, it should strike the audience with its unorthodoxy and unexpectedness, but unlike magical realism, it should only rarely suggest its meaning so directly. It must force the audience to tease its meaning out of it, or to arrive at their own meaning for it.
Antonin Artaud describes something like this in The Theater and Its Double, in which he describes what he calls a "theater of cruelty. "To create art is to deprive a gesture of its reverberation in the organism, whereas this reverberation, if the gesture is made in the conditions and with the force required, incites the organism and, through it, the entire individuality, to take attitudes in harmony with the gesture... "I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of higher forces. "A theater which... recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection. " (Artaud 81 - 83) Artaud is joined by many in claiming that art is not entertainment: its job is to make the audience take something away from it, to make them think something or feel something. 1 But he is unique in being willing to go the extra distance and say that art must be cruel, that it must assault the audience, that they should feel its effects whether they want to or not. Such is the case, for example, with Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. I have spoken with very, very few people who failed to use the word "boring" to describe this play. I once sat through a showing of this play with companions who later said the experience was agonizing. But this is precisely Beckett's objective.
The play is meant to be boring and agonizing, because Beckett's intent is to show us how our daily lives are boring and agonizing in just the same way. The irony of Godot is that Vladimir and Estragon have lived this way for years, and may continue to do so for years to come, without ever realizing, or in any case properly addressing, the futility of their plight, of their existence. But were they to come into the theater and watch the play, they would howl with laughter at the characters who were in fact themselves. So should we do the same: we must realize that Vladimir, Estragon, Porno, Lucky, and perhaps even the messenger boy, are us.
It is we who are up there on stage, making fools of ourselves; we who sit in the audience, making fools of ourselves by laughing at ourselves making fools of ourselves onstage. But surrealist art (of which Godot may not be the best example, anyway) need not be offensive in contrasting perception and reality. Much of the greatest surrealism is, in fact, quite funny. Allow me to reprint, in its entirety, one of my favorite surrealist works.
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Research essay sample on Deliberate Alienation Surrealism And Magical Realism
