"Emma Zunz" revisited.

(01-MAR-07) The Romanic Review

29/12/08 20:08

"Emma Zunz" revisited.

Source:
The Romanic Review
Publication Date: 01-MAR-07
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. (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
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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 licito inferir que para Joyce, todos los dias fueron de algun
modo secreto el dia irreparable del Juicio; todos los sitios, el
Infierno o el Purgatorio. (Ficcionario, 177)

Emma assumes Mr. Maier, her father Emanuel Zunz, committed suicide and did not, as Fein/Fain says, die
as the result of an accident. Thus, as a reader--her only source of information is the mute letter--she
unhesitatingly licenses herself to go beyond the literal. In doing so, she becomes the author of an unwritten
but mentally conceived text, an act that recalls Borges's use of the same idea in the first sentence of
"Fragmento sobre Joyce:"
Entre las obras que no he escrito ni escribire (pero que de
manera me justifican, siquiera misteriosa y rudimental) hay
relato de unas ocho o diez paginas cuyo profuso borrador se
"Funes el memorioso" y queen otras versiones mas castigadas
llama "Ireneo Funes." (Ficcionario, 175)

alguna
un
titula
se

Another version of this idea appears in the first sentence of "Tema del traidor y del heroe," from Ficciones
(1944):
Bajo el notorio influjo de Chesterton (discurridor y exornador de
elegantes misterios) y del consejero aulico Leibniz (que invento la
armonia preestablecida), he imaginado este argumento, que escribire
tal vez y que ya de algun modo me justifica, en las tardes
inutiles. (Ficcionario, 195-196)

Having assumed an authorial role as interpreter of the letter, she now takes it upon herself to vindicate her
father--to justify, to use Borges's term, herself--by murdering the man she considers responsible for his
suicide, his former business associate Aaron Loewenthal. Again, in her role as author she devises a literary
plot in which she is the protagonist, requiring her to translate words into action, in the same way the Irish
rebels in "Tema del traidor y del heroe" turn Shakespeare into real life. And just as the traitor-hero Kilpatrick
must sacrifice himself in order to make the drama convincing, Emma must also sacrifice herself.
In the next passage, she remembers her childhood and tries unsuccessfully to recall her mother. Her
relationship with her father eclipses her relationship with her nameless mother. She goes to bed, doesn't
sleep, and contrives her plan. The next day, she returns to work in the textile factory, and here the narrator
supplies important circumstantial information: "Habia en la fabrica rumores de huelga." (71) Emma declares
herself "contra toda violencia." (71) This is what Borges (in his 1932 essay "El arte narrativo y la magia")
calls a "prophetic detail," and he uses it here ironically. Emma, plotting a murder, proclaims her pacific
nature, a red herring typical of detective fiction. After work, Emma and her girlfriends go to a women's
health club, where a staff member forces her to spell out her name because in spoken New World Spanish
"s" and "z" have the same sound. The girls all talk about boys but "nadie espero que Emma hablara. En abril
cumpliria diecinueve anos, pero los hombres le inspiraban, aun, un temor casi patologico." (71) Two words
stand out in this sentence: "aun" and "casi." It is as if the narrator were suggesting it would be normal for
girls or adolescents to fear men, but that by the age of 19 such fears should have been overcome. The idea
that her fear of men is "casi patologico," also calls attention to itself, as if there were degrees of
pathological. It would seem that Emma feels horror in the presence of men--excluding her father--and had,
from childhood until her nineteenth year. This sentence, fraught with ambiguity, is extremely important
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because it marks Emma as virtually abnormal because she regards men as dangerous beings to be feared.
She makes an appointment with Mr. Loewenthal, using the strike as a pretext: She claims to have
information he can use. She then checks the shipping news, goes to the red-light district of Buenos Aires
(Paseo de Julio), and finds the man of her nightmares: "quiza mas bajo que ella y grosero, para que la
pureza del horror no fuera mitigada." Another paradoxical sentence: The man with whom Emma must have
sexual relations is an instrument, an element in her plot, but she insists on his being physically repulsive in
order to obviate any vestige of sexual pleasure and to maximize her self-abasement. The passage links
Emma's horror of men with sexuality.
From this point on, the story takes on a dreamlike quality. Borges talks about Emma's sexual initiation as a
hellish experience, that "un atributo de lo infernal es la irrealidad," an idea he would repeat in his "Anotacion
al 23 de agosto de 1944" essay on the liberation of Paris from the forces of Nazi Germany. In that note, he
ponders the confused ideology of Argentines who support Hitler but who cheer when Paris becomes free. He
wonders:
Ademas, ?no ha razonado Freud y no ha presentido Walt Whitman
que los hombres gozan de poca informacion acerca de los
moviles profundos de su conducta?... Noches despues, un libro
y un recuerdo me iluminaron. El libro fue el Man and Superman,
de Shaw; el pasaje a que me refiero es aquel del sueno metafisico
de John Tanner, donde se afirma que el horror al Infierno es su
irrealidad. (Ficcionario, 199)

The repetition of the idea that hell's horror derives from its unreality links the 1944 text with "Emma Zunz,"
but the casual but uncharacteristically accepting reference to Sigmund Freud might constitute yet another
link between the two.
The sailor leads Emma on a complex path:
El hombre la condujo a una puerta y despues a un vestibulo (en
el que habia una vidriera con losanges identicos a los de la casa
en Lanus) y despues a un pasillo y despues a una puerta que se
cerro. (62)

This cinematic passage begins with a door that opens and ends with a door that closes, reflecting the
moment of praxis, when Emma's mental plot becomes reality. But even here memory intervenes to confuse
things: The diamond-shaped panels of colored glass (identical to those in "La muerte y la brujula") remind
her of her childhood home, in a much better neighborhood than the one in which she currently resides. At
this point, Borges or his narrator speaks in the first person:
?En aquel tiempo fuera del tiempo, en aquel desorden perplejo
de sensaciones inconexas y atroces, penso Emma Zunz una sola
vez en el muerto que motivaba el sacrificio? Yo tengo para mi
que penso una vez y que en ese momento peligro su desesperado
proposito. (62)

Why he should choose this moment to speak in the first-person and why he chooses a complicated
construction like "yo tengo para mi" rather than something simple, such as "yo creo," is mysterious, though
the expression manages to get two references to the first person into the sentence, emphasizing his
presence and the idea that Emma is sacrificing herself.
During coitus, the dutiful daughter does think of her father, but in a way that, as Borges suggests, shakes
her entire plan to its foundation: "Penso (no pudo no pensar) que su padre le habia hecho a su madre la
cosa horrible que a ella ahora le hacian." (73) Penetration here is doubly horrible: horrible in the present and
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horrible in the past when Emanuel Zunz did the same thing to the mother Emma can barely remember. At
the same time, the horror acquires an unforeseen complexity: We cannot know if Emma feels only a female
fear of violation or if she is also experiencing its mirror image, the masculine fear of castration.
In disgust, she tears up the money the sailor leaves but instantly repudiates that wasteful act. It is
comparable, the narrator says, to throwing away good bread, adding, in what appears to be free indirect
discourse, "un acto de soberbia yen aquel dia ..." (63), as if pride could have no room in a drama of
abnegation. Then she puts the rest of the plot into effect; she keeps her appointment with Loewenthal, but
instead of killing him to avenge her father, she seems to kill him for herself: "No podia no matarlo, despues
de esa minuciosa deshonra." (64) She never gets to make the speech she planned to make to Loewenthal,
because he dies too quickly. By the same token, he never gets to ask her why she shot him. The conclusion:
"Verdadero era el tono de Emma Zunz, verdadero el pudor, verdadero el odio. Verdadero tambien era el
ultraje que habia padecido; solo eran falsas las circunstancias, la hora y uno o dos nombres propios." (6566)
Which is to say, she turns her life and the life of the entire human universe into a fiction comparable to the
invasion of reality by Tlon, a fiction so plausible that the police will accept it as fact. But to satisfy her need
for revenge, Emma must become a character in a story, just as Lonnrot becomes a character in a story he
invents but which Dandy Red Scharlach usurps. But we are left with an Oedipal problem: Does Emma become
her mother when in bed with the sailor? Is Aaron Loewenthal her father? Does he rape her as it were by
proxy, that is, in the same way he supposedly (we only have the version Emanuel passed on to his
daughter) killed her father, through artifice rather than violence? We note the disgust with sexuality that
pervades the tale--Emma has no boyfriends, her father had done that despicable thing to her mother--and
wonder what Borges is up to.
The problem is surplus. To avenge her father's death, Emma Zunz invents a story, or a plot for a story. She
kills the man who caused her father's suicide and gets away with murder by claiming the man raped her. To
prove this, she sacrifices her virginity. Her plan works. But there is something unaccounted for: the narrator
says she is afraid of men. We don't know why, but to become the character she must be in the plot she
devises, she must engage in sexual activity. During the act, she realizes, as we saw, that her father had
done to her mother what the sailor was doing to her now. So when she kills her boss, she may actually be
killing her father, with whom she has consummated metaphorical incest. But this part of the story, the
supplement, or surplus, remains unresolved.
This is the same sort of surplus that manifests itself in Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue."
Auguste Dupin solves the mystery by identifying the murderer as an orangutan, but his solution leaves an
even greater mystery behind it: Why should a masculine monkey with a straight razor attack two women,
mother and daughter? The story is one thing, but the metaphors it unleashes are another. To control the
surplus Borges produces we must return to the first sentence of "Emma Zunz":
El catorce de enero de 1922, Emma Zunz, al volver de la fabrica
de tejidos Tarbuch y Loewenthal, hallo en el fondo del zaguan
una carta, fechada en el Brasil, por la que supo que su padre habia
muerto. (69)

Two elements stand out here: chronological precision and references to literary creation. Nineteen twenty
two is the year of Proust's death and the year Joyce publishes Ulysses, though this association would seem
to be arbitrary. Nor is it especially memorable in either Borges's life or Argentine history. The "buch" (book)
in Tarbuch and the etymological relationship linking "tejidos" and "textos" hint about what Emma will later
do, that is, weave a fiction to get revenge.
Her plot moves forward inexorably, but the story is charged with elements that retard progress. Most obvious
among them is repetition, beginning with the name of the man who writes from Brazil: Fein/Fain. We now
connect that repetition with Emma Zunz's own name. In addition to replicating her father's initials, her name
contains two other repetitions the double m in Emma and the two z's in Zunz. (3) By the end of the story's
third paragraph, the repetitions have proliferated in alarming fashion: In Brazil, Emma's father, Emanuel
Zunz, used the name Manuel Maier; his adversary's name is Aaron; the stained-glass lozenge-shaped
windows from Emma's childhood home reappear in the place where she fornicates with the sailor.

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The repetitions fall into two general categories: symmetries (two z's, two m's) and visual phenomena. Emma
sounds the same with one m or two; Fein/Fain; one of the a's in Aaron is superfluous; z and s in Spanish
American Spanish are identical. Even the photograph in Emma's room of the actor Milton Sills is a
combination of Manuel and Zunz, bringing together the father's assumed and real names. The symmetries
reflect the symmetry Emma sees between the site of her sexual initiation and her childhood home, though
the combination of Ma and Ma in Manuel Maier would produce, as Herbert Morris has cogently pointed out,
"mama," the mother Emma either represses or whose place she metaphorically occupies. The visual
symmetries are perceptible only for the reader, a phenomenon that emphasizes the notion of textuality, of
writing, though we readers must remind ourselves that we are seeing things that are simultaneously present
and absent.
The scene where Emma prostitutes herself is notable for the sheer number of repetitions it contains. Borges
depicts it as a martyrdom with, inevitably, masochistic elements: Emma chooses the hideous sailor as
carefully as she would if she were choosing a handsome, desirable sailor. This anonymous Virgil leads her
through a labyrinth, but the narrator limits his comments to how we react to trauma:
Los hechos graves estan fuera del tiempo, ya porque en ellos el
pasado inmediato queda como tronchado del porvenir, ya porque
no parecen consecutivas las partes que los forman. (62)

Our memory, says Borges, is disrupted: On one side are things we remember in consecutive order; on the
other, the traumatic event, which constitutes its own, often jumbled, time. Emma enters a labyrinth where
she metaphorically dies. The Minotaur--bull and man, so doubly masculine and doubly dangerous-penetrates her, enabling her to realize that it was this act that engendered her. So through metamorphosis
she becomes her mother, while the sailor becomes her father: She participates in her degradation and in her
procreation all at the same time.
Emma's plot must end with the death of Aaron Loewenthal. To kill him, she must use his pistol, which she
knows he keeps in a desk drawer. It is impossible not to connect this scene with Mae West's famous sexual
quip: "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" The revolver is the lethal weapon all
men keep hidden until the moment they use it: the phallus. Emma, not only a woman devoid of phallus, but
a woman metaphorically castrated by having been penetrated by the sailor's phallus, must steal Loewenthal's
pistol. To make her version of events plausible to the police she would also have to deal with Loewenthal's
penis, either revealing it or sullying it with the mixed body fluids she bears within her.
Again, the visual repetitions in the names point to the treacherous nature of visual evidence, and Borges
carefully shows how Emma creates a tableau which will visually confirm to the police what she tells them in
her narrative:
Desordeno el divan, desabrocho el saco del cadaver, le quito los
quevedos salpicados y los dejo sobre el fichero. (65)

The unbuttoning constitutes a metaphor for undressing. The bizarre but careful placement of Loewenthal's
blood-spattered glasses, which the narrator curiously refers to as "quevedos" to call attention to them, on
the file cabinet evokes Oedipus's piercing his eyeballs with the pin of Jocasta's broach: This is a castration.
But what we or the police see is and is not there at the same time--the disheveled clothing, the eyeglasses
are merely what they are. Like Emanuel: the Word made flesh, the Son whose physical body suffers and dies
but who is himself eternal.
Emma kills Aaron Loewenthal, the man Emanuel Zunz said was really guilty of the crime imputed to him ("su
padre, la ultima noche, le habia jurado que el ladron era Loewenthal" 60). Emma, conceivably, kills
Loewenthal by applying the Old Testament maxim "an eye for an eye," though there are no overt religious
references in the story, and this opens the way for Emma's multiple metamorphoses: When she kills
Loewenthal, who is she? The dutiful daughter? The dutiful wife? Or the dutiful son? When Emma inserts
herself in a plot, she becomes a character--the flesh becomes words--and this act costs her her life:
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Ante Aaron Loewenthal, mils que la urgencia de vengar a su padre,

Emma sintio la de castigar el ultraje padecido por ello. (64)

The neutral pronoun ello includes Loewenthal's supposed betrayal, her father's supposed suicide, and her
very real sexual martyrdom.
Emma's most mysterious role is that of avenging son. Again, as a woman and as a defiled woman, Emma is
doubly castrated if we take her as a phantom masculine figure. Thus, when she steals Loewenthal's pistol
she castrates him (confirming the role of the bloody glasses) in turn and turns his weapon against him in a
bizarre form of sexual penetration. But that borrowed phallus automatically reminds us of Emanuel Zunz,
who penetrated his nameless wife in order to engender his daughter, who associates sex with violence. What
greater justice could Emma achieve than overcoming her double castration--her loss (we rightly or wrongly
assume) of virginity and her loss of her female identity--by assuming the role of avenging son and killing the
man guilty of all those crimes?
The final mystery of "Emma Zunz" is: Is this really a "Jewish" story? Why are all the characters Jews? Is
Borges using a Jewish cast of characters in 1948 for political purposes? Edna Aisenberg relates "Emma Zunz"
to Borges's interest in esoteric Judaism and links the names in the story to Jewish tradition:
Emma is a shortened, fragmentary form of her father's name,
Emanuel, which not insignificantly is Hebrew for "God is with us."
The daughter, in other words, is a part of the father, a father who
carries the name of the (Jewish) divinity. Their adversary, the
miserly Loewenthal, is named Aaron, as was the high priest who
constructed the Golden Calf, symbol of money worship and of the
kind of sinfulness that brings grief into the world. The concealed
archetypal strata which such clues betoken are, like the
Kabbalists' hidden layers of Scripture, available only to those
with special insight or specialized knowledge--not mystics, but
educated, practiced readers who can penetrate the hieroglyphic
character of the text. (Aizenberg, 96)

This allegorical reading of Borges makes Aaron, Moses's elder brother, into a miser like Aaron Loewenthal
because he makes the Golden Calf. But it is the Israelites, while Moses is on Mount Sinai receiving the
Commandments, who ask Aaron to make them an idol they can worship. While the calf is made of gold, it is
not the worship of money that is at stake in the Old Testament. The Golden Calf is nostalgia for a lost past,
prior to the time spent wandering in the desert. Aaron Loewenthal loves money, but to link him with the
Biblical Aaron is to stretch several points. But Aizenberg does not stop there. She acknowledges that while
"Emma Zunz" seems to be a straightforward tale, it:
is, in fact, teeming with other meanings. Chief among them is the
retelling of the kabbalistic myth of the Shekhinah. Emma, her
wronged and exiled father, and the embezzler, Aaron Loewenthal,
reenact the mystical story of God's Daughter--the feminine
hypostasis of the divine--who is separated from her heavenly
progenitor and falls into the unclean physical-sexual world as a
result of sin. Since the Daughter is God the Father's power of
stern judgment, she proceeds to punish the wrongdoer through
destruction and violence, without, however, restoring the
harmony which existed in the happy days before the sin
(Aizenberg, 96).

Aizenberg must again go to great lengths to make "Emma Zunz" fit her model. First, Emma believes her
father's story, but the reader may wonder if it is in fact the case. If Emma does indeed embody divine
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justice, why would she resort to duplicity and self-defilement in order to execute a man she knows to be
guilty? The final ambiguity, the fact that Emma's act does not restore "the harmony which existed in the
happy days before the sin," makes us wonder just what that happiness was. Emma's childhood, when she
lived with her beloved father and the mother she barely remembers? Is it the time she possessed her father
physically while retaining her virginity, a time before she understood the mechanism of sexual reproduction?
In this instance, Emma's murder of Loewenthal ironically recalls Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac: Is her
faith being put to the test? Must she prove herself by killing Loewenthal? This would be Borges at his most
devious (no angel stops the murder), but to follow Aizenberg we must blind ourselves to the bizarre sexual
relationship between the daughter and the father as Borges evokes it in the scene involving Emma and the
sailor
Except for the characters' names, the story contains no references to Jewish matters, not even the flood of
Jewish lore that obfuscates "Death and the Compass." Could it be that Borges is writing a surreptitious
homage to another Jew who provided a code for reading the secret language of the subconscious, Sigmund
Freud? Nothing is impossible.
Barnard College
Bibliography
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Alvarez, Nicolas Emilio. Discurso e historia en la obra narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges: examen de Ficciones y
El Aleph. (1998).
--. "La simplicidad de los hechos: realidad e ironia en Emma Zunz," La Chispa '83: Selected Proceedings.
New Orleans: Tulane University, 1983.
Balderston, Daniel. Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges.
Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993.
Borges, Jorge Luis. El Aleph (1949). Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, 1968. (All quotations of "Emma Zunz"
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Brodzki, Bella, "She Was Unable Not to Think:" Borges's "Emma Zunz" and the Female Subject," Modern
Latin American Fiction, New York: Chelsea House, 1990. Cedola, Estela. Borges o la coincidencia de los
opuestos. (1987.)
Dorfman, Ariel, "Borges and American Violence," Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin
American Fiction, trans. George Shivers. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991.
Duchesne Winter, Juan, "Despues de la perdida de la justicia: una lectura zizekiana de "Emma Zunz,"
Variaciones Borges 10, (2000).
Kristal, Efrain, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, (2002).
Latella, Graciela. Metodologia y teoria semiotica: analisis de "Emma Zunz" de J.L. Borges. (1985).
Ludmer, Josefina, Corpus Delecti: a Manual of Argentine Fiction, trans. Glen S. Close. Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
Morris, Herbert, "What Emma Knew: the Outrage Suffered in Jorge Luis Borges's 'Emma Zunz,'" Indiana
Journal of Hispanic Letters, nos. 10-11 (spring-fall, 1997).
Rodriguez Monegal, Emir. Jorge Luis Borges: a Literary Biography (1978).
Jorge Luis Borges, ficcionario: una antologia de sus textos. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1985.

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"Emma Zunz" revisited. (01-MAR-07) The Romanic Review

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Sarlo, Beatriz, "El saber del cuerpo: a proposito de 'Emma Zunz,'" Variaciones Borges 7 (1999).
Williamson, Edwin. Borges: a Life. New York: Viking, 2004.
Woodall, James. Borges. a Life. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Woscoboinik, Julio. El alma de "El Aleph:" nuevos aportes a la indgacion psicoanalitica de la obra de Jorge
Luis Borges. (1996).
(1.) Jorge Luis Borges, "Emma Zunz," Sur, September, 1948. (included in El Aleph, 1949). My former
student, Professor Patrick Greene of Auburn University, stimulated my return to "Emma Zunz" over the
course of writing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on the relationship between Peron and the
writings of Borges and Julio Cortazar. While he and I disagree on many points, Professor Greene's assertions
made me see Borges's story in a new way.
(2.) Efrain Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (2002): "The connections between Apollinaire's
"The Sailor of Amsterdam" and "Emma Zunz" are evident in both obvious and subtle ways. There are a
number of turns of phrases employed by Borges in his translation that do not appear in the [sic] Apollinaire's
original that reappear in "Emma Zunz." Thus, instead of translating the French "tira" (he shot), Borges uses
the more colloquial expression "hacer fuego" (fire), which is also the expression he uses when Emma shoots
Loewenthal, her employer and victim. As in Apollinaire's story the murder weapon is in a desk drawer, which
a murderer picks up as the victim of the crime stares intently at his killer. The most telling connection
between the plots of the two stories is summarized in the final lines of "Emma Zunz," in which the narrator
indicates that the story is incredible but basically true, that only the circumstances are false, as were a
couple of proper names. In Apollinaire's story the police assume that the sailor is both a willing murderer
and suicide victim when actually he killed in a situation of duress and was killed in turn. In "Emma Zunz"
Emma is assumed to have killed in response to an alleged rape that did not take place. In each story a key
character disappears from the purview of the authorities investigating the crime: In "The Sailor of
Amsterdam" it is the lover of the murdered woman, and in "Emma Zunz" it is the sailor with whom Emma
had sexual relations. Borges's "Emma Zunz" has levels of psychological insight unavailable in either
Apollinaire's original or Borges's translation. Nevertheless, "The Sailor of Amsterdam" offered Borges a means
he used to tell the anecdote that Cecilia Ingenieros might have provided him, even as Borges's "Emma Zunz"
is more emphatic than Apollinaire's story concerning the tales ultimately inexplicable nature" (112-113).
(3.) Edwin Williamson, in his Borges: a Life, carries the interpretation of these repetitions even further:
"Emma Zunz" was to be one of the key stories in his career. He claimed he had been given the plot by
Cecilia Ingenieros ... The misogynist thrust of the story is unmistakable. Emma wants to avenge her father,
who committed suicide after having been falsely accused of embezzlement. She hatches a plot to kill his
former business partner, Loewenthal, the man responsible for his disgrace. ... Borges drew attention to the
name of the protagonist: "Emma with m's and Zunz with two z's, I was trying to get an ugly and at the
same time a colorless name. ... [T]he name seems so meaningless, so insignificant." (Borges in Richard
Burgin's Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969] 41). And yet,
as he would have known, the name is so heavily charged with meaning that it reverberates like a magic
charm. Emma is an abbreviated female form of her father's name, Emmanuel, which in Hebrew signifies the
"savior." Beginning and ending vowels, Emma has an open, expansive quality, but Zunz is a thoroughly
introverted word--the internal u and n are inverted mirror images of each other, and they are further boxed
in by the two z's, which themselves are shaped like capital N's turned on their side. It is as if the fullness of
Emmanuelle had been truncated to Emma by its juxtaposition with Zunz, and in that conjunction of a and z
we again come across introversion--the a, which is the last letter of Emma, is also the first letter of the
alphabet, but it is blocked by the z, which is the initial letter of Zunz, while being, of course, the final letter
of the alphabet. 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. In purely graphic terms, the name Emma Zunz functions as an ideogram of the kind of solipsistic
labyrinth in which Borges imagined himself to be trapped, for all the elements end up turning in 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. (Williamson, 303-304)

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