Brief thoughts on The Smoker, Atonement, and Borges.

The Smoker...well, as I stated in class, I found the characters to be a bit OVER developed. It was almost as if there was too much continuity; a little inconsistency would have made the characters seem more well-rounded. And I think that applies to all of the characters, major and minor. (For instance- when Rhonda Phelps blurts out "He's a Machiavellian bastard,"- how pretentious does that seem? I mean, yes. I GOT it that she was exceptionally bright, but honestly.)

(Side note: Am I being too informal with this? I'll stop, just in case.)

Also, the fact that Nicole was almost twenty was just too (to use your term, Chia) convenient. As if the author wanted to write something controversial and different, but just couldn't force himself to go all the way. Because of that one detail, the story lost some of its credibility and meaning to me. It would have been much more effective if she had been 17 or 18, or if he had been 47 instead of 31. I was a little suprised when the idea of the story being a dream sequence was brought up; it never occurred to me while reading it, but I think its a very interesting proposal. The absurdness of the whole situation, the fact that you could detect a not-so-hidden desire for Nicole from the beginning, even Paulette's repetitiveness, all could go in support of that theory. Though, personally, if anything I think it's more based on what the author may have desired at one point in his life, rather than the character.
In regards to the title, which seemed sort of out-of-place, the connection I came up with was that when Nicole's family selected Douglas to marry her, he felt the same sort of honor and privilege he had felt when he was picked by the Smokers to box as an adolescent. Maybe he wasn't even aware of the connection, (although, I don't know why else he would have brouth the story of the Friday Night Smokers up) but there was a definite corrolation between the two events, the two feelings. (And, additionally, I though the choice by Schickler to make the name of the school St. Agnes was interesting, seeing as she's the patron saint of engaged couples.)

And now we come to Atonement. I enjoyed the story tremendously, and it was easy to lose myself in the book- a very quick read. Still, I wouldn't exactly add Ian McEwan to my list of favorite authors. He's more of a novelist than a story teller. As in, I got the impression that he created stories and contexts in order to write a novel, as opposed to someone who writes a novel in order to create stories and contexts. If that made any sense.

More on Atonement later.
(Brevity has never been a strong point of mine. Nor has formality.)

For my Lit X paper, I have started reading Ficciones by Jorge Louis Borges. And I'll admit straight out- I'm more than confused. I understand the words he's saying, I'm enjoying what he's telling me, but I'm not GETTING it. For example, the first story in Ficciones is called "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Now, from what I understand, it is a story (if it can accurately be called a story, because it reads like non-fiction, except for the fact that the book he's discussing isn't real) about a man (who I assume is Borges himself) who comes across an encyclopedia of a completely fictional place. A whole world, in fact. A completely fantastic world that was created by a league of specialists- the biggest organized literary construction known to man. Now, the story never goes into the fictional world, it's just Borges explaining what he read in the encyclopedia.
His other stories are very similar. It's him (for I don't know what else to call the narrator) telling the reader about the extensive works of mysterious literature he's come across. Just plot summaries, really.
Not that the stories (within the story) themselves don't have their fair share of interesting, mystical, and even endearing qualities. Tlon, for instance, has such idiosyncrasies as having a school that "has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon." Undeniably, this detail has significant metaphorical meaning. I'm just having trouble processing the delivery.
Another aspect of the imaginary world which I particularly enjoyed was the different dialects in the southern and northern hemispheres of the planet. In the south, they speak only in verbs and adverbs. So "the moon rose over the sea" would be expressed as "upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling" And in the northern hemisphere, they speak in adjectives.
"One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky"
The literary brilliance of such ideas are irrefutably poetic, interesting, and meaningful, but I would much prefer to read the stories that he's talking about rather than his description of an encyclopedic article of the fiction.
I guess that's the significance of Borges- to create fantastic worlds (with surprising brevity, which I myself can't seem to grasp the concept of) within the heavy constraints of realism.

One quotation about the literature or Tlon especially intrigued me- "They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature."
So, in turn, does that make Borges' fantastic literature (for that's his genre) a branch of metaphysics? Or does Borges himself consider it to be?