On the difficulty of reading and interpreting a story when you don’t get the central references.
No, this isn’t the end of my Borges Marathon project—I’m not even a quarter of the way through. It’s a post about a short story called “The End”, which tells of a knife fight at a quiet, dusty general store cum bar in the middle of a vast plain.
“The End” was a difficult story for me to read and review because it relies heavily on allusions that would be obvious to Argentine readers in 1944 but are lost on many of us in other parts of the world today. The whole story is a retelling of the ending of the epic poem Martín Fierro, with Jorge Luis Borges imagining a different ending from the one provided by the author, José Hernández.
I only know this thanks to the footnotes in my edition of the Collected Fictions, which explain that even before the character of Martín Fierro enters the story, Argentine readers would recognise the references to the unnamed black singer, a song contest and knife fights and would see the connection to the famous poem. Borges was a fan of the Martín Fierro epic, writing a collection of essays about it and joining an avant-garde literary group that published a magazine named after it.
Without the context, “The End” is just a traditional story of vengeance through blood. Change the knives for guns, and it would be a classic tale of the American West, from the stranger riding into town on a horse under a wide-brimmed hat to the laconic conversation and the final deadly confrontation.
It’s the context that makes the story, and since I only knew about it afterwards through footnotes and Wikipedia entries, it didn’t really resonate. For readers familiar with Martín Fierro, however, it would probably be an interesting twist. The original gaucho epic, after more than 2,000 lines of knife fights and bloodshed, ends on a more conciliatory note, with vengeance avoided. The black man is the younger brother of a man Fierro murdered in a duel, but the expected fight is prevented. In “The End”, Borges imagines what would have happened if the duel had gone ahead.
Although he’s providing a more violent, vengeful ending, however, Borges does not glorify the act of vengeance. Here’s how the killer reacts to his final victory after a seven-year wait:
“Unmoving, the black man seemed to stand watch over the agonizing death. He wiped off the bloody knife in the grass and walked slowly back toward the houses, never looking back. His work of vengeance done, he was nobody now. Or rather, he was the other one: there was neither destination nor destiny on earth for him, and he had killed a man.”
This is hardly the stuff of epics. It’s a sad anti-climax, with a strong sense of futility and loss. The phrase “he was nobody now” is particularly powerful. It suggests to me that the pursuit of vengeance has so consumed the man that he has no existence without it. Fierro is dead, and his killer has gained nothing from it.
Although it’s a very different ending from the original ending of Martín Fierro, in a way it’s the same. Hernández denies the reader the expected sense of resolution by avoiding the knife fight altogether; Borges lets the knife fight happen and shows that there’s still no resolution.
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I’ve read a number of Borges stories which have references I really don’t get, so thank goodness for the notes in those cases! The collected edition I have is fortunately very good for this.
Yes! I’m reading the Penguin edition of Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, and it comes with a good set of notes. I still find that with a story like this, I don’t get so much out of it as I would if I’d got the references more naturally. Knowing that it was all a reference to Martin Fierro gives me some intellectual satisfaction after the fact, but of course it’s not the same as reading the story and making those discoveries myself.
ah ah, yes, I also wrote I don’t think I understood it!
Yes, it’s difficult when we’re coming from a very different cultural context, isn’t it? So much of reading is about the assumptions and experiences we bring to it, and this is one of those cases where Borges was clearly writing for a different audience with different shared experiences and references.
Yeah, that’s a tough one! While it might not have had the same resonance without knowledge of the allusions, it sounds like you still managed to piece together the meaning, or rather a meaning, that fits well with the point of the story.
Yes, the notes in my edition are very good, so it helped me to piece it together. But still not as satisfying as reading it and getting those references at the time.
I like reading about other people’s experience of reading, even, as in this case I don’t know the author and barely know the country (Australia competes with Argentina to sell beef). Interesting that Borges came up with a new variation to show that bloodshed or no bloodshed, revenge serves no purpose.
Yes, it was an interesting variation. I don’t know the original Martin Fierro epic, as I mentioned, but Borges’s ending seems more powerful – to give the character the revenge and then make it completely hollow.
ohmygawwwwD, you and your love of spoilers. Now you just call your posts The End and quote the ending of what you read? How are we even friends? |grins| (But, seriously, what a SAD ending. I sank a little in my chair even without reading the rest of the story.)
Haha! Sorry, did I forget to mention? Spoiler alert! 🙂