“Emma Zunz” Revisited

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 brujula," 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 jardin 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 Kistal (2) 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 brujula" 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 sehor Maier habia ingerido por error una fuerte dosis de veronal y habia fallecido el tres del corriente en el hospital de Bage." (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 brujula," 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 invencion de Morel, with its hilarious attacks on Dostoevski, Proust, and Joss 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 frio, de temor; luego, quiso ya estar en el dia siguiente. Acto continuo comprendio que esa voluntad era inutil porque la muerte de su padre era lo unico que habia sucedido en el mundo, y seguiria sucediendo sin fin. …