Many of the stories in Ficciones utilize alternative or shifting points of view or ask questions about the nature of authorship, ultimately highlighting the subjectivity of each character’s, writer’s, or reader’s perspective. In “The Form of the Sword,” an Irishman tells Borges a story about the time he discovered and attacked a man named John Vincent Moon for betraying his communist republican cause in 1920s Ireland. However, at the end of the story, the man reveals that he himself is Moon, the traitor. He tells Borges that he told the story from his attacker’s perspective so that Borges would truly listen. Moon’s notion that Borges would listen if he told the story from the perspective of a hero rather than his own perspective betrays the fact that a shifted point of view can change the experience of the reader or listener even if the events of the story are the same.
In “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” Borges makes the point that the two seemingly identical texts of Don Quixote (the original version and Menard’s version) are inherently different because each author brings his own context. Thus, different authors imbue identical language with different meanings. These two examples show that not only do different perspectives create separate experiences and interpretations for a reader, but that different authors bring inherently different meanings to the same story or language.
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Perspective, Authorship, and Subjectivity Quotes in Ficciones
The plot is as follows: a man, the incredulous and fugitive student whom we already know, falls among people of the vilest class and adjusts himself to them, in a kind of contest of infamy. All at once, with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand—he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men.
To be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous—and consequently less interesting—than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.
“To think, analyze and invent,” he also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.”
He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.
After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him.
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.
Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, jail.
“I do not belong to Art, but merely to the history of art.”
“You don’t believe me?” He stammered. “Don’t you see the mark of infamy written on my face? I told you the story to way I did so that you would hear it to the end. I informed on the man who took me in: I am Vincent Moon. Despise me.”
For his sake, God projected a secret miracle: German lead would kill him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would elapse between the command to fire and its execution. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.
God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; he chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.
He wiped his bloodstained knife on the turf and walked back toward the knot of houses slowly, without looking back. His righteous task accomplished, he was nobody. More accurately, he became the stranger: he had no further mission on earth, but he had killed a man.
