The House of Asterion - a short story by Jorge Luis Borges
This brief short story is a retelling of the ancient myth of the Minotaur. But it’s only gradually that some readers (like me) will understand that the narrator is no other than the Minotaur and his house no other than the famous labyrinth in Crete. Because what we encounter in this version is a lonely creature, not an evil monster. By placing the narrative in the perspective of the monster, Borges manages to portray it in a way that we can totally empathize with him, making his loneliness truly heartbreaking, desperate, almost self-destructive.
What a tragic fate to be so unique in the world, when that uniqueness is not celebrated but despised by everyone around. In a sense, we are all utterly unique and different from others. But then most of the things and creatures in this world can also find some other creature that looks more or less like them. There is plenty of similarity and vague repetition in the universe, which gives us a sense of order and the feeling of living in a cosmos. But monsters are one of a kind, an exception, an oddity. They are hybrids: they mix what we thought was rigidly separated in different classes, crossing boundaries, hindering easy categorization. Their bodies an aberrant assemblage of heterogeneous parts. Human and bull. Human, serpent and bird. Human, bird, dog and lion. Monsters mess with order and give us a taste of chaos, thus awakening some of our deepest fears.
The Minotaur’s house is as unique and monstrous as his body. He seems proud that there is no other labyrinth like his in the world. But, though unique, what the labyrinth contains within itself is endless repetition. Repetition of galleries, doors, corridors, courtyards… to the extent that any place in it is like whatever other place in it. What a paradox that such a unique creature should live in a house that constantly mirrors itself and celebrates repetition! And it's also a paradox that the creature who embodies chaos should live in a house that takes order to such an excess. However, when order and regularity are so exacerbated, couldn’t they also become their own form of chaos? One can feel how maddening it is for the Minotaur to spend his days alone in the maze. His existence is most of the time meaningless, without purpose. In some really moving passages, he describes how he runs through the galleries until he feels dizzy, how he lets himself fall from roofs until he is bloody, just to do something, just to make the hours pass. And he leaves the dead bodies of the young Athenians where they have fallen, without devouring them, as a way to introduce some difference in the identical spaces of his house. It is plausible to say that he wouldn’t even kill them if he didn’t feel compelled to do so as part of a kind of sacrificial ceremony, perhaps one of the only meaningful things in his life.
In this version, he is not a prisoner of the labyrinth. People and animals could get in if they wanted to and he knows the way out. In fact, he reached the streets and the sea once, but had to go back in because people were scared of him and he was scared of people, with their faces “discolored and flat as the palm of one’s hand”. (This last remark leads us to think that, when seen through a non-human perspective, we humans are also monsters, only that we grew used to our own monstrosity and can only see creatures with different bodies as such.) So the cause of his isolation is fear. The Minotaur is only trapped in his bodily difference, and unlike the uniqueness of his grandfather, Helios, the sun, the Minotaur's uniqueness cannot be revered as divine, but only feared and despised.
The Minotaur by George Frederick Watts, 1885. This is the painting that inspired Borges.
As a lonely creature, he had to come up with devices to make his long days and nights inside the labyrinth tolerable. In the absence of any real other, he relates to imaginary others and populates his solitude with ghosts. He has this little game in which he crouches around a corner and pretends he is being followed, just like little kids do when they hide so that someone comes and finds them with surprise. But no one comes to find the Minotaur while he is hidden. Other times he imagines that another Minotaur comes to visit, he shows him his house and they laugh together. In the end, the imaginary other adopts the form of his redeemer, his saviour, someone who will be born in the future and lead him out of his pain. Like most people, in the end the Minotaur resorts to hope and just waits.
Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like?, I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?
At this point of the story, many readers have surely identified who the narrator is and how the story ends, so Borges leaves a blank space for them to fill the last events by themselves. Also because the narrator is now dead. The only “redemption” the Minotaur could find was death in the hands of Theseus, the Greek hero. With their actions, heroes of all time are supposed to eradicate the existence of chaos in the world and restore the order that had been threatened. But we now know that the chaos the Minotaur embodied was not necessarily evil. Through the device of the first person, we got to know his innermost feelings and sad life. And so in this retelling of the myth the role of the hero is questioned. And so much more when we learn in the last lines that the Minotaur wasn’t killed through the bravery and strength of Theseus, but because the monster almost let himself be killed… out of sadness? In this context, the act of Theseus stands as an act of humanity’s cowardice and cruelty more than anything else.
Who have been the monsters and who have been the heroes all this time? This little short story leaves us with those questions.
But there is something more. There is something about the link between loneliness and labyrinth that is very powerful. To reach other people, the Minotaur has to go through the passageways of the labyrinth, and for others to reach him, they also have to navigate its intricate galleries. Borges imagines a world in which self and other are separated but also connected by the perplexing space of a maze; its characters condemned to look for one another through its complex architecture, always with the risk of getting lost, always with the risk of remaining alone and trapped in themselves.
The Labyrinth
Zeus could never untangle the nets
of stone that surround me. I have forgotten
the men I once was; I follow the hateful
path of monotonous walls
which is my destiny. Straight galleries
which curve in secret circles
as the years wear on. Parapets
cracked by the usury of so many days.
In the pale dust I have deciphered
tracks that I fear. The air has brought to me
in the concave afternoons a braying
or the echo of a braying, desolate voice.
I know that in the shadow lurks the Other, whose lot
is to fatigue the long solitudes
that weave and unweave this Hades
and to unnerve my blood and devour my death.
We two look for each other. I wish that
this were the last day of the waiting.
—Jorge Luis Borges (translated by David Bowles, October 2003)
A pride flag for reclaiming the word Lesbo. Often directed at sapphics and lesbians. [id.: 3 horizontal stripes of foggy pink, lavender indigo, and dark orange/orangy black. ends id.]
For students of the African diaspora, recovery of history remains a central preoccupation. But recovering histories of slaves and freedpersons also poses a formidable feat. 'Africans'—an invention of the West—became 'slaves' and 'blacks' after they were rendered into commodities and removed from the land of their origins. They subsequently entered the absolutist archive as objects largely divorced from the material and ideological world of any past but that to which their owners ascribed. Can the recovery of history avert the impact of colonial rule on the formation of an archive? **Can historians produce an unmediated past capable of restoring subjects, agency, and narratives when absolutism constructed these very categories? I argue that it is impossible to recover an authentic and unmediated past since the fragments on which historians must rely emanated in regulation.** The genealogy whereby 'Africans' became 'slaves' and 'blacks' serves as a powerful reminder that the history of the enslaved and their descendants—free and enslaved—cannot be disengaged from the dominant historical process. As Franz Fanon, the theorist of black existentialism, observed, 'the black soul is a white man's artifact.' Though commenting on the late modern experience, Fanon understood that discerning a pure 'experience' represented a quixotic quest akin to the act of authentic recovery—arguably social history's defining mission. [Para.] **At best, we can hope to contextualize the African past by delineating how, when, and why specific categories emerged.** Given, as we shall see, the contingent nature of defining 'black' (*negro*), 'black creole' (*negro criollo*), and 'mulatto' (*mulatto*), among other terms, social labels never acquired fixed meanings. The instability informing the classification process serves to question the existence of distinct African, slave, and black identities. Efforts to harness the surviving fragments in order to produce a history of the African diaspora requires careful attention to the overlapping ensemble of texts, traditions, and regulatory practices that constitute a discursive domain, that field of meaning through which specific terms, symbols, and behavior take on and impose significance.
Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Indiana, 2003), 5-6 (emphases mine, highlighting crucial issues for all the disciplines engaged with difference, including literary studies).
