Adventure classics -- When every story was new

“The Aleph”

by Jorge Luis Borges

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When did fantasy become calcified? Carrie Vaughn, leader of this fall’s writing workshop at the Dallas FenCon and herself no slouch as a fantasy writer, took a moment to bemoan some of the tropes that have become de rigueur in her own subgenre. “Why does urban fantasy have to have a love triangle?” she asked. “Why not a love quadrangle?” (I think she was joking about that one.)

One of the joys of writing this blog about classic stories has been to let me see original genre tropes before they became clichés. Originals like the subject of today’s post, “The Aleph,” and Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, the man who wrote it and inadvertently fathered the subgenre of magical realism.

South America wasn’t exactly a literary hotbed in the 1940’s when Borges and a small group of friends took control of a new literary magazine, Anales de Buenos Aires. As was often the case with new publications, Borges not only edited the magazine but wrote a great deal of its copy, reports Andrew Hurley in the introduction to his 1998 translation of the Borges collection, The Aleph and Other Stories.

Borges described many of his stores as fantasies. But what fantasies they are, dealing not with magical creatures or distant galaxies, but with life and death and immortality, with libraries and mazes and puzzles, often set in the mundane (at least to the writer) world of contemporary South America.

“The Aleph” begins with the determination of the narrator to remain faithful to the memory of unrequited love for the lately deceased Beatriz Viterbo. “I knew that more than once my futile devotion had exasperated her;” Borges writes. “now that she was
dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory¾ without hope, but also without humiliation.” Doggedly visiting the family of his dead love, the narrator comes to know¾ and detest¾ the pompous cousin he suspects had taken his place in Beatriz’s affections.

With the aid of healthy doses of cognac, the narrator learns that the family home contains a phenomenon not only transcendent, but essential to the cousin’s continued work as a poet. It is the Aleph, “the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists¼ ”

And see it the narrator does: “a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness¼ Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.” And among those infinite things are the “obscene, incredible, detailed letters” in her well-known handwriting, of Beatriz to her cousin.

With the house that holds this vision is about to be demolished, a destruction that threatens the narrator’s tie to his dead love as well as his rival’s work and sanity, the cousin asks insistently, “You did see it?”

And so gives the scorned lover his chance for revenge. “I refused, with gentle firmness, to discuss the Aleph; I clasped him by both shoulders as I look my leave and told him again that the country¾ peace and quiet, you know¾ was the very best medicine one could take.”

Was the vision true or false? “Did I see it when I saw all things, and then forget it?" the narrator asks finally. "Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.”

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics looks at L. Frank Baum’s American fairy tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.)

Adventure classics -- Love & magic in the kitchen

Like Water for Chocolate

by Laura Esquivel

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For an English-speaking reader, the title of the magical 1989 novel Like Water for Chocolate needed a little explanation. When first published in Spanish, Mexican author Laura Esquivel could assume her audience would understand surface obvious meaning -- the simmering to a boil of water used to prepare the ancient Aztec beverage of chocolate.

Just to be sure, Esquivel obligingly explains, at least in the English translations as being “on the verge of boiling over.” It’s an apt expression also of the inner turmoil of young Tita de la Garza, cook and flunky of an early twentieth century Mexican border family, whose emotions are repressed to the boiling point by her abusive mother, jealous older sister Rosaura, and feckless sweetheart Pedro.

Don’t worry, though, that I’m giving you a heavy end to this June of writings about Texas and the Southwest. Think of Like Water for Chocolate as a palate-cleansing sorbet between the heartier courses of a dinner. (And speaking of palate cleansers, I’m eager to try the simplest of Tita’s recipes, the one for jasmine sorbet at the end of the November chapter, as soon as I can lay hands on some organically-grown jasmine flowers.)

Esquivel arranges the novel in twelve chapters, one for each month of the year, like a serial in an old-fashioned woman’s magazine. With that nod to its antecedents, each chapter includes a signature recipe, plenty of home remedies and housekeeping hints, and enough magic, adventure and romance to propel a telenovela through several seasons.

(The most famous recipe is that for quails in rose petal sauce. But since its aphrodisiac effect depends on the infusion of blood Tita gives the petals by clasping her lover’s bouquet of roses to her breast, I can’t promise it will have the same effect on everyone.)

The novel, narrated by Tita’s great-niece, begins with her birth, brought on by her excessive weeping in utero due to the onions her mother Mama Elena was chopping. “Her wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labor. . . Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that pilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor.”

Mama Elena will be widowed two days later when her husband dies of shock from the effects of another family secret (to be revealed, of course, in a later chapter), and decrees that Tita, her youngest daughter, will never marry but become responsible for caring for her mother for the rest of her life.

Denied any education or contact with the outside world by this destiny, Tita takes control over the only venue left to her -- the kitchen -- and her cooking becomes a reflection of her emotions. When she cooks happily, her meals are delicious and nourishing.

But when Mama Elena refuses Pedro’s request to marry Tita, on the grounds of the terrible destiny decreed for her, Pedro accepts a chance to marry Rosaura, hoping this family tie will at least keep him closer to his first love. Now Tita cooks in anguish, infusing the enormous wedding cake with her sorrow. The results are memorably unpleasant.

“The moment (the wedding guests) took their first bite of the cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing. . . But the weeping was just the first symptom of a strange intoxication -- an acute attack of pain and frustration -- that seized the guests and scattered them across the patio and the grounds and in the bathrooms, all of them wailing over lost love.”

And so the story goes, with repeated episodes of heartache, separation, hope -- and plenty of cooking. Will Tita and Pedro ever find happiness? Will Mama Elena, who even reappears from beyond the grave, ever leave them in peace? Stay tuned for the dazzling finale.

Of course, there’s a movie, and both it and the book are readily available on
www.amazon.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a July of science fiction adventures with H.D. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.)