In its basic concept, there’s some similarity between “The Secret Miracle” by Jorge Luis Borges and the famous American short story by Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge“. The style and approach, however, couldn’t be more different.

In both stories, a man is facing execution and is desperate to cheat death and live longer. He succeeds, not by actually surviving the execution but by experiencing more of life in his imagination in the moment before his death.

In the Bierce story from 1890, however, the reader is kept in the dark and believes that the man, Farquhar, really has survived and escaped against the odds. We root for him and are shocked by the final reveal that the man is dead after all, and most of the story has taken place in his mind in the time it takes to fall from the bridge before his neck snaps.

Borges chooses a different approach in “The Secret Miracle” (1943). Whereas the extension of time in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” was a surprise for Farquhar and the reader, Borges makes it explicit. The condemned man, Czech playwright Jaromir Hladik, begs God to grant him a year to complete his play, The Enemies, of which he has so far only written the first two acts.

The pen picture of Hladik will probably ring uncomfortably true for many writers out there:

“Hladik was past forty. Apart from a few friends and many routines, the problematic pursuit of literature constituted the whole of his life; like every writer, he measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do. All the books he had sent to the press left him with complex regret.”

In a mysterious dream featuring a blind librarian searching for God in one of the letters in one of 400,000 books, Hladik touches a letter in an old atlas and hears a clear voice saying, “The time for your labor has been granted.”

The following morning, just as the Nazi firing squad lines up and Hladik feels a drop of rain fall on his cheek, time stops. He understands that he will have the year he wanted, but not in the manner he’d imagined:

“God had performed for him a secret miracle: the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, but in Hladik’s mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles.”

He can now complete his play—not for any audience that will ever see it, but at least in his own mind. The play itself concerns the distortion of time as the plot progresses but dead or discarded characters return, and the time remains stuck at 7pm. Finally the audience realises they are stuck in the “circular delirium” of a minor character in the play, a spurned lover who imagines himself to be the hero.

The death of Hladik is not a surprise for the reader as the death of Farquhar was. We have been in on the miracle all along. The success of “The Secret Miracle” comes not from suspense but from its exploration of what it would be like for time to stop. Is it enough for Hladik to complete the play in his head, without ever finding an audience? Is a secret miracle as satisfying as a public one? And will Hladik manage to write a play that satisfies him, or will it leave him “with complex regret” like his previous works? Even if he does, will death be any easier to face after a yearlong reprieve?

Borges leaves us to imagine the answers, but he does provide a hint in the manner of Hladik’s death:

“He began a maddened cry, he shook his head, and the fourfold volley felled him.”

This post is part of a years-long exploration of the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. It may never be completed, but you can follow along on my Borges Marathon page, and please join in if you want to.