Reading Notes on "La muerte y la brujula" ("Death and the Compass")
"La muerte y la brújula"
[Page numbers below from Borges' Obras completas in four volumes]
• Introduction: I read it for what it seems to show about forms of knowledge (and by implication reading) and practice
• The detective genre and epistemology
• The world consists of a disordering event and of clues (signs)
• The detective
• Must interpret the clues
• Discover the (criminal) logic that has determined the order of events
• Produce a perfect copy in his mind and in discourse of the real events that are hidden from view and concealed by appearances
• Restore order
• The transcendent epistemology that supports the genre
• The world = deceiving appearances
• Reality = behind appearances, similar to Platonic Forms
• Knowledge entails the suspicious decodification of appearances and the penetration of surfaces in order to form a mental copy of the Truth
• La muerte y la brújula
• The chaotic, confused, disorienting, almost dreamlike world (full of contradiction, fluidity, mirroring, interference, and inversion)
• [CITE P. 499]: water the color of the desert [fluidity, contradiction]
• [CITE P. 501]: the city was disintegrating [contradiction, fluidity]
• [CITE P. 501]: pink walls appearing to reflect sunset [mirroring, inversion]
• [CITE P. 501]: discord on the phone line [interference]
• [CITE P. 501]: phone line cut [interference]
• [CITE P. 502]: carnaval [inversion]
• [CITE P. 504]: afternoon like sunrise [contradiction, inversion]
• [CITE P. 504]: symmetry and repetition in the Villa [mirroring]
• Into this a concrete fact: Yarmolinsky is found dead.
• 4 Forms of knowing (all governed by desire, but varying in the way they configure: appearance, knowledge [truth], and purpose)
• Treviranus
• Typical police counterpart to the brilliant detective
• Short-sighted
• Tends to believe that things are as they appear [CITE PP. 500, 503]
• Looks for the shortest route to an arrest
• Lonnrot [CITE P. 499]
• perspicacity
• penetrating vision
• Tends to believe that things are not as they appear
• Pure reasoner
• Temerarious
• Blind to appearances
• Incautious
• Adventurer
• Reads everything transcendently
• Prescient but impotent, interested first in absolute knowledge, second in the arrest
• Mystical knowledge = the perspective of God, omnipotent eternal
• Red Scharlach
• Practical knowledge
• Prescient and potent - no form of knowledge is strange to him, but none relevant as a means to a transcendent truth - interested only in effects
• Conclusions
• Action
• The exercise of transcendent knowledge in a world such as this separates from our powers (thus Scharlach is powerful; Lonnrot powerless)
• How do we read immanently?
• The text and appearances
• The immanent reading that doesn't search for transcendent meanings
