Novel, Story, Plot

— J. Chr. de Vries

My memory deceives me ever more often, inversely proportional to the increasing power of my imagination. Whether it was an essay or a story by that Argentine giant, it was certainly not a novel, because the author didn’t do novels; in any case, he indicated in it that he found La divina comedia to be the very best work in literary history. He read and reread it many times. In another text, a story, or actually, an explanation of it, he wrote the following:

A quite exhausting, deteriorating folly: making extensive books; drifting for hundreds of pages on an idea which can perfectly be expressed orally in just a few minutes. […] Wiser, unqualified, lazier as I am, I have chosen to make notes to imaginary books.

Borges would never have been able (or wanted) to write La divina comedia, but perhaps we can consider El Aleph as his variant of (or response to) it, a counterpoint of the smallest possible size about the search for his beloved Beatriz.

I find myself sitting behind a work table in an enormous library, which is bathed in a golden light, and I am pondering over the text from that explanation. Although that light, and even that library, might only be the product of my imagination, the questions I had were real: If the novel was the ornament of the story, would this story then be the ornament of the plot? In El Aleph, ultimately two Alephs appear, could these be the two eyes of Beatriz, the two ‘Nebensonnen’ from Schubert’s Winterreise through which we perceive the cosmos in its full extent? Is that the ultimate plot?

— J. Chr. de Vries, Loosduinen, Februari 29, 2024