The False Artaxerxes: Borges and the Dream of Chess
1993; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/469414
ISSN1080-661X
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez
ResumoN BORGES'S first collection of pure fictions, Garden of Forking Paths (1941), the game of chess is mentioned in four of the volume's eight stories and alluded to in the epigraph to a fifth. Let me recall briefly three of these references. the volume's final tale (the detective story that gives the collection its title), Stephen Albert, the murder victim, asks the killer Dr. Yu Tsun, In a guessing game to the answer is chess, word is the only one prohibited? To Yu Tsun replies, The word is chess.' the volume's sixth story, An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain, the narrator, summarizing Quain's literary career, outlines the plot of his detective novel God of the Labyrinth: An indecipherable assassination takes place in the initial pages; a leisurely discussion takes place toward the middle; a solution appears in the end. Once the enigma is cleared up, there is a long and retrospective paragraph contains the following phrase: 'Everyone thought that the encounter of the two chess players was accidental.' This phrase allows one to understand that the solution is erroneous. unquiet reader rereads the pertinent chapters and discovers another solution, the true one. reader of this book is thus forcibly more discerning than the detective.2 third example is from the volume's opening story, T1in, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. the tale Borges recalls a figure from his childhood named Herbert Ashe, an English engineer and friend of his father, who, Borges later realizes, was part of a group involved in the creation of the idealist world of Tlon and in the secret project of insinuating that fictive world into the real one. Borges remembers that when he was a boy the childless widower Ashe and Borges's father beat one another at chess, without saying a word, sharing one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. One would assume that if an image occurs in half the stories in a collection, it reflects some central concern of the volume as a whole, and part of the rationale for listing these three examples in
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