Death and the Compass
This is one of Borges' more willfully banal short stories. I've been reading his collected stories all week (awesome) and have gotten a pretty good idea of the themes that usually occupy him: labyrinths, libraries, God, chance, time, repetition, and infinity. The stories are an obsessive-compulsive's anguished plea that there be some secret order to chaos, some meaning or consequence to our actions, no matter how dire the repercussions are. As such, the stories often end with some hilarious and/or cruel magical element that makes us reflect on the presence or absence of a God or divine design, and whether the presence or absence is preferable.
"Death and the Compass," in Borges' usual way, begins with thick suggestions of that magical element. The plot is a kind of scavenger hunt that a detective embarks upon in order to solve a murder. Each of the clues unveils a letter of the name of God - and each clue is a new murder, or "sacrifice," as an informant calls it. The detective solves the riddle and arrives preemptively to the scene of the last murder/final unveiling of God's name. He learns then that the entire scavenger hunt was an elaborate hoax, a trap set for him by a personal enemy who capitalized on the detective's desperate insistence that the first murder was not an ordinary wrong-place-wrong-time accident, but rather a mystical event that would reveal to him the proof of God's existence, and thus the proof that nothing is an accident.
Of course the joke is that the pseudo-riddle was not an accident, since it was self-fulfilling prophesy of the detective's own unjustified faith - and yet it is what proves definitively the absence of a God, at least in those events. The detective's final words before he is killed by his enemy is a request that in their next life, the enemy set the trap for him within the infinity of time. Certainly this is ironic because we have no reason to believe in infinity or the transmogrification of souls, in light of plot, and yet the detective persists in his delusion that there was a mystical cause and effect, rather than a common, unremarkable revenge.
I call this story willfully banal because it frustrates a lot of the expectations the reader forms when reading Borges in series, as I did. Borges usually prefers the opposite conclusion, namely that what appears to be banal and ordinary is in fact the workings of an unfathomable order. The reverse of that is funny to read, but at the same time it's a little disappointing. The feeling I got at the end of "Death and the Compass" was similar to that feeling I get with stories that employ the "so it was all a dream!" resolution. That is, instead of supplying a real resolution to a complex set of problems that have been painstakingly developed, the author simply decides that everything was an artifical machination with no consequence.
But even though I found the end of "Death and the Compass" to be rather deflating, I was quite intrigued by the story because of that very fact. The detective's attitude makes the banality interesting: essentially he declares, in the face of contrary evidence, that there is God and order. I thought that was a fascinating insight into human desires: believers would choose to get fucked over by their beliefs, a hundred times over, rather than stop believing.
This morning I found myself making the same choice as the detective. Yesterday I took the LSAT and fucked up one section in the most devastating way: I accidentally skipped a question and ended up shifting down the answers for 3 questions. The knowledge that I did that is CRIPPLING. I worked so hard for so long and gave up so much for this, my last chance, and in the end I'll always know that it was not the best I could do, and that I was screwed by the stupidest of all oversights, rather than a lack of ability or effort or something else within my control.
Then this morning, as I was laying in bed crippled with disappointment and regret, I had a thought: maybe that oversight was some divine retribution I got for trying to sneak myself an advantage. Without going into too much detail, I remembered that there were 3 other questions that I should have missed, but I managed to correct them. 3 and 3. This was the first thought I had that was comforting. Instead of a meaningless, chaotic, and cruel accident, my mistake was an act of justice, and the belief in that was so much easier to face. I've had the thought before, that even if I had to burn in a lake of fire for a thousand years, I'd still have an immense sense of relief knowing that God does indeed exist. The LSAT was a little like that.
"Death and the Compass," in Borges' usual way, begins with thick suggestions of that magical element. The plot is a kind of scavenger hunt that a detective embarks upon in order to solve a murder. Each of the clues unveils a letter of the name of God - and each clue is a new murder, or "sacrifice," as an informant calls it. The detective solves the riddle and arrives preemptively to the scene of the last murder/final unveiling of God's name. He learns then that the entire scavenger hunt was an elaborate hoax, a trap set for him by a personal enemy who capitalized on the detective's desperate insistence that the first murder was not an ordinary wrong-place-wrong-time accident, but rather a mystical event that would reveal to him the proof of God's existence, and thus the proof that nothing is an accident.
Of course the joke is that the pseudo-riddle was not an accident, since it was self-fulfilling prophesy of the detective's own unjustified faith - and yet it is what proves definitively the absence of a God, at least in those events. The detective's final words before he is killed by his enemy is a request that in their next life, the enemy set the trap for him within the infinity of time. Certainly this is ironic because we have no reason to believe in infinity or the transmogrification of souls, in light of plot, and yet the detective persists in his delusion that there was a mystical cause and effect, rather than a common, unremarkable revenge.
I call this story willfully banal because it frustrates a lot of the expectations the reader forms when reading Borges in series, as I did. Borges usually prefers the opposite conclusion, namely that what appears to be banal and ordinary is in fact the workings of an unfathomable order. The reverse of that is funny to read, but at the same time it's a little disappointing. The feeling I got at the end of "Death and the Compass" was similar to that feeling I get with stories that employ the "so it was all a dream!" resolution. That is, instead of supplying a real resolution to a complex set of problems that have been painstakingly developed, the author simply decides that everything was an artifical machination with no consequence.
But even though I found the end of "Death and the Compass" to be rather deflating, I was quite intrigued by the story because of that very fact. The detective's attitude makes the banality interesting: essentially he declares, in the face of contrary evidence, that there is God and order. I thought that was a fascinating insight into human desires: believers would choose to get fucked over by their beliefs, a hundred times over, rather than stop believing.
This morning I found myself making the same choice as the detective. Yesterday I took the LSAT and fucked up one section in the most devastating way: I accidentally skipped a question and ended up shifting down the answers for 3 questions. The knowledge that I did that is CRIPPLING. I worked so hard for so long and gave up so much for this, my last chance, and in the end I'll always know that it was not the best I could do, and that I was screwed by the stupidest of all oversights, rather than a lack of ability or effort or something else within my control.
Then this morning, as I was laying in bed crippled with disappointment and regret, I had a thought: maybe that oversight was some divine retribution I got for trying to sneak myself an advantage. Without going into too much detail, I remembered that there were 3 other questions that I should have missed, but I managed to correct them. 3 and 3. This was the first thought I had that was comforting. Instead of a meaningless, chaotic, and cruel accident, my mistake was an act of justice, and the belief in that was so much easier to face. I've had the thought before, that even if I had to burn in a lake of fire for a thousand years, I'd still have an immense sense of relief knowing that God does indeed exist. The LSAT was a little like that.
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posted by Rex at 12:44 PM
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