The Aleph

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"The Aleph" is a short story by the Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is one of the stories in the book The Aleph, first published in 1949, and revised by the author in 1974.

[edit] Summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In Borges's story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. The story continues the theme of infinity found in several of Borges's other works, such as "The Book of Sand".

As in many of Borges's short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved, named Beatriz Viterbo, and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail.

Later in the story, a business on the same street attempts to tear down Daneri's house in the course of its expansion. Daneri becomes enraged, explaining to Borges that he must keep the house in order to finish his poem, because the cellar contains an Aleph which he is using to write it. Though by now he believes Daneri to be quite insane, Borges consents to come to the house and see the Aleph for himself.

Left alone in the darkness of the cellar, Borges begins to fear that Daneri is conspiring to kill him, and then he sees the Aleph for himself.

"Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained within it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spiderweb at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I'd seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house on Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand...."

Though staggered by the experience of seeing the Aleph, Borges pretends to have seen nothing in order to get revenge on Daneri, whom he hates, by giving him reason to doubt his own sanity.

In a postscript to the story, Borges explains that Daneri's house was ultimately demolished, but that Daneri himself won second place in the Argentine National Prize for Literature. He also states his belief that the Aleph in Daneri's house was not the only one that exists, based on a report he has discovered by a British consul describing the Amr mosque in Cairo, within which there is said to be a stone pillar that contains the entire universe; although this Aleph cannot be seen, it is said that those who put their ear to the pillar can hear it.

[edit] Notes

Aleph or Alef, א, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the number 1 in Hebrew also; its esoteric meaning in Judaic Kabbalah, as denoted in the theological treaty Sefer-ha-Bahir, relates to the origin of the universe, the "primordial one that contains all numbers".

In mathematics, aleph numbers denote the cardinality (or size) of infinite sets. This relates to the theme of infinity present in Borges's story.

In one version of the story of the Golem, from Jewish mythology, writing the letter aleph on the Golem's forehead is what brings it to life.

This story is one of several which display Borges's fascination with Judaism; other such stories include "Death and the Compass", "The Secret Miracle", and his poem "The Golem".

The Aleph is in many ways the opposite of the Zahir, the subject of another Borges short story published along with "The Aleph". Whereas viewing the Aleph causes the observer to see all things, viewing the Zahir causes the observer eventually to see only the Zahir.

The science fiction novel Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson contains a device called an "aleph" that is described as an approximation of the entirety of cyberspace.