Django Bensimon Tree Essay Example For Students

Django Bensimon Tree Essay English 1AEssay #4: Jorge Luis BorgesIn Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges attempts to skew the fundamental principlesby which most people govern their lives. He constructs roughly allegoricalworlds that reflect reality in their complexity and scope. By pulling thereader deeper into these labyrinths, Borges stories subtly and without mal-intent, demand a reexamination of the way we collectively relate to theworld. Specifically, Borges questions the reliability of the past something by which individuals, ethnicities and nations define themselves. In the first story of the collection, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borgessets the precedent for later stories, by describing a completelyfictionalized world that becomes a reality. By writing, we know nothingabout it with any certainty, not even that it is false, Borges comments onthe futility of attempting to determine that something is either true offalse, when confronting it through writing. Therefore, the moment an act isrecorded, it becomes an entity of its own neither fact nor fiction. InPierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, Borges writes, historical truth,for Menard, is not what took place; it is what we think took place.History, as Menard understands it, resists commonplace phraseology liketruth and fact altogether instead, it becomes merely a widelyaccepted account of a lost moment in time. In Theme of the Traitor and theHero and Three Versions of Judas, Borges presents two individualsstruggling with the realization that our present-day conceptions of thepast may be inconsi stent with the actual truth. By undermining thetraditional concepts of hero and traitor, as they are presented inhistorical and religious narratives, Borges calls into question theabsolute faith with which people place their trust in what may amount tojust another story. picIn Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, Borges assembles a collectionof storytellers, whose variations on the theme of betrayal cast doubt onthe reliability of both literal and literary accounts of history. Thenarrative begins suspiciously, setting the scene as Poland, Ireland, orthe Republic of Venice. The generalizing technique immediatelyuniversalizes both the story of Kilpatrick and the experience of Ryan thebiographer. The narrator quickly explains that although Ryan iscontemporary, the narrative related by him occurred toward the middle orthe beginning of the nineteenth century. This comment serves as a subtlereminder that even Ryans version of Kilpatricks fall is subject to thesame skeptical scrutiny as any historical account. The list of storytellerswithin the historical narrative includes: the historical biographers ofKilpatrick, Shakespeare and the writer/producer/director of Kilpatrickselaborately staged assassination James Alexander Nolan. Borges notion offalse history reveals itself through these three storytellers: asShakespeare fictionalizes the death of Julius Caesar; Nolan plagiarizes theplays of Shakespeare in orchestrating his plan, and finally, as thegatekeepers of history record only the superficially relevant events of adeeply involved labyrinth of historical value. The interaction between thestorytellers produces a tangled web of correspondences where truth and liesmeld inextricably and the fiction of Shakespeare becomes as factuallyaccurate or inaccurate as a history textbook. Borges illustrates theblurring of literary and historical value by writing, that history shouldhave imitated history was already sufficiently marvelous; that historyshould imitate literature is inconceivable. Borges draws his conclusionson the unreliability of history through this recurring theme of writing asstorytelling. Borges seems to suggest that the act of touching pen to paperimmediately abstracts the conventional notions of fiction and nonfiction to the p oint where a conceivable work of fiction exists more tangibly thanan extraordinary account of historical fact. My Extraordinary Adventures EssaypicRunebergs regression into unyielding assertions creates new problemsfor examining Borgess theory of truth and untruth in historicalnarratives. Runeberg begins rationally, with impressive, generalcomparisons between Judas and Jesus, and Heaven and Earth. It requires acommendable sort of mental reprogramming to regard Judas and Kilpatrick asboth traitors and heroes in equal parts. However, his logic leads him toconclude definitively that Jesus was Judas. This single declarativesentence pulls Runeberg from the abstract world of textual interpretationinto Ryans world of narration. In three words, he succeeds in writing hisown narrative of the life of Christ. Seamlessly, Runeberg traverses theline between positive rethinking of history and a rewriting of history. Bythis, Borges seems to suggest that, within the reader/writer organicrelationship, the reader inevitably forces an interpretation to the pointwhere that interpretation reinvents the details of the narrative. Theimpassioned memory of Ireland, in Themes of the Traitor and the Hero,now acts more like a critical reader of Shakespeare than the collectiveminds of a town taking in the scenes, hearing the actors, interpretingand drawing concrete meanings. As readers becomes narrators, the cyclecontinues with the infinite revising and rewriting of the same events,none of which being more true or untrue than any other. picThis intentional undermining of conventional truth emphasizes thevalue found in the story, rather than the storys basis in fact. Borgesseems to find merit in the notion that a single event in history, much likeboth of these stories, can be manipulated and contorted to fit a dozeninterpretations. The craft of writing, historical or literary, carries withit the intimate relationship between writer and reader, which facilitatesthe cyclic morphing of reader into narrator. As Pierre Menard teaches us,history serves well as the mother of truth, rather than a truth untoitself. Through the progression of history, the readings, interpretationsand rewritings of narratives create a thousand different meanings wherehistory, religion and literature twist and turn in Borges labyrinth andeverything becomes just another story.