Borges, The Aleph / House of Asterion

Though Borges accuses literature (and language) of being incompetent, in his hands it is anything but. A crashing and conflicted cosmos is ever at hand, pre- and post-Big Bang, simultaneously, as some physicists would agree. Emma Zunz is a marvelous contradiction/conflation of fact and point of view, both true and false at the same time, vengeful and redemptive. The Dead Man gets to live because he is already marked for death, therefore his actions do not matter (who is not marked, eventually, for death?) Flaminius Rufus realizes that he and the troglodyte (who will turn out, perhaps, to be Homer, more or less) have identical perceptions, but that they “live” in different universes: they coordinate and construct the same perceptions differently, in ways incomprehensible to each other.

I was very touched by one of the shortest stories: The House of Asterion. The progression of the story re-envisions a mythic tale and imaginatively evokes the budding awareness of a growing child. Asterion claims indifference to literature and words of any kind, but he is not entirely fulfilled in pure, marvelous, and unrelenting action and being. His favorite pastime is engagement with imagination, in which he envisions his “other” self.

Asterion is also a perfect image of the human experience: half beast, half human (drawing energy and substance from the organic element, controlling and developing its application with intelligent thought and intuition), these two forces must work together to create a whole, civilized being.


Borges marvelously involves the dissimilarities of belief and knowledge, how Asterion has come to understand that one thing in the world is singular—therefore outside the world, and alone—himself. Having been told, Asterion believes that he knows that his redeemer will come, a word he cannot (or could not previously) conceive, that corresponds to a feeling he has: weariness at the endless multiplicity of his world and his own solitariness. He yearns for reduction—a return to the simple innocence of the un-self-conscious world: the Garden of Eden, or, further, immersion back into the god-head itself.


Though he is “ready” for his redeemer, Asterion has no idea of what form it might take. This shapeless readiness without pre-figuration is an essential element of redemption. He gives himself to Theseus, and we cannot know if he was wrong. Did Theseus slay the minotaur or did the minotaur find redemption in Theseus?