In and Out of Time (Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Borges)

Abstract

IN the Western tradition of storytelling, time is as much a mystery as a revelation. Willingly or not, author and reader confront it. It is the writer's, the artist's, and the musician's indispensable abstraction, a recurrent measurement or focal point in their imagination. And the imagination in its basic, creative function manipulates, expands, or (in the Eastern tradition) eliminates time at will. In that enigmatic process human drives that are either difficult or impossible to control-love, hate, dreams, hope, ecstasy, sorrow-become the mind's vital accomplices. Time, in the spirit of Borges, is inevitably our plaything. An exploration of the mysteries of clock, calendar, heritage, and future await the reader in the most revealing episodes of Don Quijote (for example, in the Cave of Montesinos and in the Duke's and Duchess's palace); in the amnesia epidemic and the extended existences of people and things in Cien anos de soledad; in Dostoevsky's deepest thoughts on the perception of death in life in several of his novels; in the ambiguous circumstances of Borges's stories; and in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, a fantasy in which the Time Traveller describes his view of the world in the year 802,701 A.D. Early in Part I of The Idiot, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin comments on the intensity and fullness of time experienced by a condemned man in Lyon who is scheduled to die by the guillotine a few minutes later. In his story milagro secreto, and in characteristically circuitous detail, Jorge Luis Borges creates a representative yet unique protagonist who through his circumstances is analogous to the figure mentioned by Prince Myshkin. Jaromir Hladik is a Jewish writer in Prague who is arrested in his apartment by the German Gestapo on March 19, 1939, and imprisoned. Ten days later, he is executed by a firing squad. Is Borges with Hladik taking up where Dostoevsky left off? Whether or not he had the Russian's text in mind, he clearly shared his curiosity over the mental effects of imminent death and came upon the imaginary event he needed as a literary counteraction to one of the terrifying realities of Nazi power before and during World War II. With Borges's timely encouragement, God grants Hladik's special request: a year's writing time to complete his unfinished play, Los enemigos, before the fusillade that will wipe him out within two minutes of that psychologically agitated yet intellectually serene prayer. Singular as it was, Hladik's experience had important antecedents. Two of them are executions referred to in The Idiot. As is well known, Fyodor Dostoyevsky-then a political dissident in his twenties-was escorted to a scaffold in St. Petersburg for his own execution on December 22, 1849; but the sentence was commuted just before the appointed moment and later reduced to four years in a Siberian prison. So the author knew what he and Prince Myshkin were talking about. His reference to the execution in Lyon reflects his commitment to social justice. Dostoevsky's fascination with individual human depravities did not deter him from denouncing institutionalized capital punishment as the worst of crimes. The Prince declares: To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Judicial murder is immeasurably more horrible than one committed by a robber (23). But judicial murder is also appropriate food for narrative thought (as in three of the best known Hispanic-American novels: Garcia Marquez's El general en su laberinto, Carpentier's El recurso del metodo, and Asturias's El senor Presidente); and, further on in The Idiot, Dostoevsky tells of a case in which a Borgesian kind of motif is clearly discernible. Keeping in mind Jaromir Hladik's postponable death, we hear Myshkin again during his first visit with the Yepanchin family. The episode he recalls this time-that of a 27-year-old prisoner who is reprieved minutes before his scheduled execution-is the author's reliving of his own traumatic experience (and at the same age) in St. …