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Reading as Transformational Journey From Homer to Borges



Author(s)

Robin McAllister

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2015.06.001

Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, USA

The transformational journey archetype begins long before literature in rites of initiation when a child undergoes a journey full of tests and temptations, perilous encounters in an underworld, and visions that transform the child into a member of a tribe. Before this archetype is translated by the written word into literature, the telling of the story is not just the account of something that happened long ago in the past, but an actual reenactment of the events for the audience. The journey archetype appears in the earliest example of literature, Homer’s Odyssey, where Homer makes the readers both an observer and participant in the transformation. The journey does not always, as in rites of initiation, involve a child and occur only once in life. Instead, the journey may begin in death and trauma and involve a person who must resume that journey over again as an adult. Such is the fate of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid whose transformative journey begins with the burning towers of Troy. In these two early epics the heroes suffer the loss of an older world and must resume their pursuit of new identities in a new world after descending to a land of death or underworld to consult ancestor figures who prepare them for the transition to a new life, identity, and destiny. The reader of these works participates in the journeys the heroes undertake and learns to renew contact with the sources of life and consciousness in myth, magic, and vision. Dante’s journey through the Inferno to his vision of God in Paradiso is a culmination of this transformative experience and vision, whose intent is to transform us as well through imaginative and intellectual participation in the journey. In Jorge Luis Borges’s parody of Dante in his story, “El Aleph”, Borges goes beyond Dante in making the reader, not only a participant in the journey and vision, but a “writer” whom Borges evokes to transform the impossible vision of the Aleph into an illusion of reality. Unlike Dante’s positive transformational vision of the universe as a harmonious cosmos embraced within the vision of God as if it were a book uniting its multiple pages in one binding, the vision of the Aleph confronts the protagonist and readers with a universe that is random and chaotic, a vision that is disillusioning rather than transformational.

transformational journey, reading, rite of initiation, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Borges