26 pages • 52 minutes read
The Circular Ruins
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Background
Literary Context: “The Circular Ruins” as a Response to Modernist Literature
Artists feel strongly about their methods and will sometimes engage in heated debate about how things should be done. When Borges was rising in prominence among literary circles in the 1920s, it was common to engage in discussions about writing style and how to best achieve greatness in their art form.
At the time, much of popular Spanish literature adhered to a Modernist perspective. Modernists were inspired by the age’s preoccupation with machines—spurred by the Industrial Revolution—and so expressed a conscious break from recognized literary norms. Modernist literature was usually characterized by an emphasis on individualism and experimentation with form, absurdity, and symbolism. Modernist writers often employed a narrative device known as stream of consciousness, which reflects how a character thinks regardless of inconsistencies or how chaotic the thought process might be. This technique seeks to emulate the uninterrupted flow of thoughts as they occur in a character’s mind. Sentences may be fragmented, lacking conventional punctuation, and transition seamlessly from one thought to the next.
Borges was adamantly opposed to Modernist literature, even though he employed some of their methods at times. Along with other prominent Spanish writers, Borges became a founding member of the Ultraist movement in 1918 while he was living in Madrid. The Ultraists proposed a new aesthetic, partially influenced by the Symbolist movement, which embraced more philosophical or supernatural elements minus the ornate embellishments preferred by the scientifically inclined Modernists. This style can be seen throughout “The Circular Ruins,” particularly when referring to magical occurrences in a casual manner. For example, when the stranger wakes up on his first day at the temple, he sees “without astonishment” that his many wounds have healed. The miracle of his recovery is shrugged off without a second thought or even a cursory explanation; it just is. This is a hallmark of the magical realism that Borges and other Latin American authors employed more widely in the 1960s.
The Ultraists preferred the reduction of lyrical descriptions for a simpler, purer use of metaphor. In “The Circular Ruins,” for example, Borges describes the temple’s statue as “not the dread-inspiring hybrid form of horse and tiger it had been. It [is], instead, those two vehement creatures plus bull, rose, and tempest, too—and all that, simultaneously” (221). By synthesizing two or more images into one, the metaphor is extended to suggest multiple things at once, making the image a powerful one.
Psychological Context: The Influence of the Study of Psychoanalysis
Borges was a consummate scholar, fascinated by all kinds of intellectual pursuits. He was particularly interested in the contradictory viewpoints popularized by the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Freud published his book The Interpretations of Dreams in 1899—about 30 years before Borges wrote “The Circular Ruins”—but his ideas about dreams and what they represent were popular topics of conversation in intellectual society. Freud proposed that dreams were unconscious fantasies of wish fulfillment and often rooted in sexual repression. Borges, who frequently thought about dreams and what they represented, believed that Freud was wrong and preferred Jung’s philosophy, stating, “I’ve always been a great reader of Jung. I read Jung the same way as, let’s say, I might read Pliny or Frazer’s Golden Bough; I read it as a kind of mythology, or as a kind of museum or encyclopedia of curious lores” (Burgin, Richard. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi, 1998).
Borges was living in Geneva, Switzerland, during World War I, while Carl Jung was corresponding with his mentor Freud and publishing his own theories about psychoanalysis. Jung argued that dream symbols were much broader and less focused on sexual urges. He suggested that to interpret dream symbols required intimate knowledge of the dreamer, as the symbols’ meanings were reliant upon the dreamer’s own experiences and views.
Although “The Circular Ruins” represents Borges’s own unique philosophy about dreams and their meanings, it also conveys Jung’s influence and an overt rejection of Freud’s theories. The story centers on someone who is dreaming, but there are no sexual overtones or symbols present in the text. On the contrary, the dreamer and his son are presented as almost totally sexless. Although there are allusions to love, it is an expression of emotion, not a sexual urge:
he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. […] He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and then the entire heart, inside and out. And his inspection made him proud (220).
Instead, “The Circular Ruins” can be read along Jungian lines. For example, the figure of Fire appears in multiple forms that would each represent something different, depending on the dreamer. Fire manifests itself depending on how it is perceived because everyone’s experience of fire differs on a fundamental level.
Additionally, Jung proposed that humanity shares a collective unconscious, or a part of the mind that contains memories and impulses of which the individual might not be aware. He argued that everyone shares this consciousness, inherited as an almost evolutionary survival method. The fact that Borges’s protagonist is able to perform sacred rites and rituals, and pass that knowledge onto his son, suggests that the character draws on the collective unconscious.
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