Mercurialgem’s Reviews > Borges: A Life > Status Update

...."you have wasted the years and they have wasted you,/ and still you have not written the poem." As he was to tell an interviewer, he reproached himself for having squandered his talents: "I have received the gift of unhappiness this evening, and even this has not been sufficient to make me a great poet." pg. 319

the cycle of desire & frustration that characterize this tale of pointless revenge is encapsulated in the bilingual pun latent in name Recabarren. Recabar - "to ask for, to demand, to insist on," but in "Recabarren" the word recabar is fused with the Eng word "barren," so the name itself suggests that all our efforts to assert a unique, authentic self are futile: we must be resigned to open-endedness & irresolution

In purely graphic terms, the name Emma Zunz fuctions as an ideogram of the kind of solipsistic labyrinth in which Borges imagined himself to be trapped, for all the elements end up turning on themselves, pointing to nothing but reflections or distortions of each other, so that if there is a promise of salvation in the first name Emma, the second, Zunz, stops it dead.

The overall effect is of a confusion of beginnings and endings, of openings and closures, from which there is no issue other than in the blank space in the middle that divides one name from the other.