"EMMA ZUNZ" REVISITED

Romanic Review, Mar-May 2007 by MacAdam, Alfred

Every critic who writes about "Emma Zunz"1 points out that Emma is one of Borges's rare female protagonists; that hers is a detective story but lacks a detective, and that, despite the fact that Emma's crime is resolved, the story is unfathomable. Rarely mentioned is that "Emma Zunz" reworks one of Borges's favorite story models, a narrative whose the protagonist invents a plot in which he or she has not only a principal but often a tragic role. That plot reduces a life of infinite possibilities to a straight line leading to disaster.

This process is enacted in "La muerte y la brújula," in which Erik Lonnrot, an overly inventive detective, constructs a rabbinical solution to the murder of a rabbi, enabling his antagonist, Red Scharlach, to ensnare him in his own plot-a clever rewriting of Lonnrot's interpretation. In "El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan," Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy working for the Germans during World War I, must tell the Germans to attack a city named Albert. To do so, he murders a man with the same name, is arrested, and has his name linked with his victim's in the news. Prior to their decision to transform life into plot, these characters, like Emma Zunz, lead lives composed of random events beyond their control. By imposing a plot on their lives, they act the role of fate with regard to their own existence and ironically turn into fictions within fictions.

Also typical of Borges (and re-enacted in "Emma Zunz") is the plot's need for blood. This sacrifice in "Emma Zunz" is double and reminds us how the artist must sacrifice life for the sake of art: Murder and suicide are images of each other. The ultimate literary source for Borges's master plot, as Efrain Kistal2 has suggested, is Guillaume Apollinaire's tale "El marinero de Amsterdam," which Borges and Bioy Casares translated and included in their 1943 anthology Los mejores cuentos policiales. (The story disappears from subsequent editions of the collection, as if Borges wished to cover his tracks, though in his 1946 essay "La paradoja de Apollinaire" we see he still respects the avant-garde poet while disdaining the avant-garde.)

"Emma Zunz," like "La muerte y la brújula" is nominally a story of revenge: On January 14, 1922, Emma Zunz, who lives in Buenos Aires, receives a letter from Brazil informing her that her father, referred to as Mr. Maier, died from taking an overdose of Veronal, the commercial name for barbital, a sleep-inducing drug. The ambiguous name of the letter's author is either Fein or Fain, as if the narrator, momentarily assuming the role of reporter, had only heard a version of it: If he had seen the letter, he would know if it was signed Fein or Fain. Despite this curious ploy, the narrator is able to paraphrase the letter, in which Fein/Fain informs Emma that, "el señor Maier había ingerido por error una fuerte dosis de veronal y había fallecido el tres del corriente en el hospital de Bagé." (69) In spoken Spanish, there would be no difference between Fein and Fain, just as there is no difference between Ginzburg and Ginsburg in "La muerte y la brújula," so the reader is alerted to the problematic existence of homophones-words that sound alike but which are visually different. We are advised to distrust what we hear, though this caution soon extends to all sensory perception, especially vision.

Borges, especially after his 1940 introduction to Adolfo Bioy Casares's novella La invención de Morel, with its hilarious attacks on Dostoevski, Proust, and José Ortega y Gasset, was a declared enemy of literary realism, psychologically true-to-life characters, and the novel. But in "Emma Zunz," his narrator meticulously enumerates, in novelistic fashion, Emma's sensations on reading the letter from Fein/Fain:

malestar en el vientre y en las rodillas; luego de ciega culpa, de irrealidad, de frío, de temor; luego, quiso ya estar en el día siguiente. Acto continuo comprendió que esa voluntad era inútil porque la muerte de su padre era lo único que había sucedido en el mundo, y seguiría sucediendo sin fin. (69)

We instantly notice that father and daughter share the same monogram. By positing this variation on the homophonic Fein/Fain/Ginsburg/Ginzburg echoing, Borges links Emma and Emanuel in ways that transcend the merely biological. He also reminds us that by excising Borges's middle name his initials would be identical to those of his own father. (Borges himself notes the possibility that he was confused with his father in the 1970 autobiographical note he published in The New Yorker: He said the translation he made as a boy of Oscar Wilde's "Happy Prince" was only published in a Buenos Aires newspaper because he signed it "Jorge Borges," and the editors thought it was the work of his father.)

For Emma, Emanuel Zunz's death has cosmic proportions, and the terms Borges uses to describe it are strikingly like those in his "Fragmento sobre Joyce," which appeared in Sur in February 1941:

es lícito inferir que para Joyce, todos los días fueron de algún modo secreto el día irreparable del Juicio; todos los sitios, el Infierno o el Purgatorio. (Ficcionario, 177)