A ‘time-bound’ reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Secret Miracle’[1] and Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Bet’[2]
One is a writer in prison, the other is a reader in prison. One is waiting for death, the other for freedom.
Borges’ character is a writer/prisoner awaiting his impending death by gunshot with a desire to finish his play before dying, so that he could justify, give meaning to his Life. With a desire to do this, he prays, and God stops time for him: the physical world stops exactly the moment the soldiers are about to shoot. He, thereafter, re-writes, edits, changes the story, characters, condenses the play, to his satisfaction, only to be killed as he is searching for the right epithet. His altered play observes the unity of time, place and action. His life, however, in the hands of he who ‘art the centuries and time itself’, doesn’t believe in these unities. Quite ironically, God provides the writer to observe his literary unities of time while dismantling, fragmenting the same in real time.
Chekhov’s character is a reader/prisoner awaiting his impending freedom once he completes fifteen years of his voluntary imprisonment. Unlike Borges’ character, he doesn’t have to pray to God to grant him time: the physical world has already stopped for him. Or, to put it differently, he has voluntarily stopped it for himself. While in prison, he acquires a love for Reading - the classics, history books, adventure stories, religious books etc. His imagination, as the responsible reader of these books, leads him to places - places even unknown to the free minds out there in the world, including the banker himself with whom he has betted in the first place. But after reading almost the entire literature of the World, he develops a disdain for everything – including, quite ironically, money itself. Thereafter, he leaves the confinement of the prison before the stipulated time, hence deliberately breaking the contract. In the face of death, the reader at the end of the story even disparages the books he holds in such high regard.
In both the stories Time is the real protagonist. In Borges’ story, time is halted so that the character can finish his book and thereby give himself the illusion of living beyond the confines of time by carving a piece of Art from this mundane, unartful life. In Chekhov’s story, the prolonged time’s quality is further enriched by the efforts of the reader dabbling into the reservoir of knowledge, thus freeing himself from the confines of the prison-world by indulging in the perusal of literary works. Chekhov predominantly wrote in the realist genre. Borges abhorred social realism. The same trope of Time is being commented upon from two perspectives; one takes recourse to fantasy, the other tries to be as realist as possible. The outcomes vary exceptionally. Despite the differences, it is interesting to note how certain basic themes including, for example, the validity of Art, Time, Individual freedom, God, personal choices, find a common ground in their writings, especially in these two stories. Both the reader and the writer in prison, in times of crises, find recourse in Literature, or, to put it in a larger context, take refuge in ‘the prison-house of language’ itself.
[1] Translated by Andrew Hurley.
[2] Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
