Borges and Cortázar: The Fantastic Movement
Borges and Cortázar are part of a literary movement of fantastic literature of the twentieth century. They differ in the ways of representation they use, but both share the ability to distort and mix reality and fantasy. They present the dimensions of man and create uncertainty about reality. Both authors present to the reader several ways to interpret the events, meanings, and end of their works. Borges and Cortázar hint the existence of a world parallel to reality, which affects the known world.
Cortázar’s story, the night face about a man who, after being hospitalized, dreams that he is persecuted and arrested by Aztecs for a human sacrifice. Among the short times between which he is awake and dreaming, the man discovers that he does not know what his reality is but that if one of the two dies he will also die. In the phrase ‘The night Boca’, he installs a semantic ambiguity. The title can be interpreted as the vulnerability of one when it is sleeping or the manner that the dead are built.
Borges’ story, circular ruins, tries a man in some ruins wants to create a human to be his son’s son through his dream. Man tries to create it but fails a few times. After purifying himself in the waters of the river and worshiping the planetary gods, man falls asleep and dreams of a heart. A lot of time passes and the man creates his son, in detail, part of the. Finally his son is complete, but he does not speak and does not join; He only dreams. Man always fears that his son finds out that it is a projection of his dreams. When time passes and finds out that there is a man who can walk in fire, he thinks he is his son son.
He walks in the fire thinking that he is about to die to prevent his son from being ashamed, but he realizes that he is also a projection of someone’s dreams. Borges builds symbolic narratives that seek to sustain reality. Therefore, the limits between reality and fiction are blurred. We do not know the name of the protagonist or his physicist, we only know that he is old. Space and time are also vague, the narrator informs us that the protagonist left a unanimous night we do not know when, and it is not known where the space that he describes is. Like the other story, here we have an open end that can be interpreted in multiple ways.
The narrator is omniscient equal to that of the other story, but throughout the story we observe samples of subjective tone since he makes some comments in parentheses. He gives us his opinion about the task that the protagonist is exercising. This can be considered a characteristic of the fantastic story.
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