The Circular Ruins

Jorge Luís Borges’s short story “The Circular Ruins” was originally written in 1939 and was first published under the title “Las ruinas circulares” in the Argentinian literary journal Sur in 1940. By the time “The Circular Ruins” was finally translated into English for American audiences in 1962, Borges was on his way to international renown. In 1961, he was awarded the Prix Formentor (an elite international award), and he traveled to the US to become a well-respected guest lecturer at universities, including a stint at Harvard University.

There are several translations of “The Circular Ruins,” and there is much debate on the most linguistically accurate interpretation of Borges’s work. This guide uses Andrew Hurley’s translation as published in The Penguin Group’s Collected Ficciones, which can be found online here.

The story opens with a gray, solemn man arriving via canoe on an unidentified island under the cover of night. He crawls up the muddy banks, driven to reach a circular enclosure of ancient ruins that house a statue so decayed that it is impossible to tell what it represents: either a stone tiger or a horse. These ruins were part of a temple that had been destroyed by fire, long abandoned and left for the jungle to consume. The man falls asleep at the base of the statue.

The stranger awakes to sunlight and notices that his wounds from his journey have healed, which does not surprise him. He immediately closes his eyes again and sleeps, but not because he is tired. He forces himself to sleep because he feels obligated to dream. The stranger awakes again at midnight and sees that villagers must have crept up to his prone body while he slept and left food and water—either out of fear of his magic or some desire to solicit his protection. This unnerves the man, so he retreats to a niche in the ruin’s walls for shelter.

The man goes back to his forced meditations, obsessed with the quest to dream a man into being. His whole purpose is turned toward imagining this perfect man now that he has found the ruins that suit his needs so well. The villagers continue to bring him fruit and rice, and the strange man sleeps.

Although his dreams are chaotic at first, eventually his mind settles on a vision that offers some structure: He is in the center of an amphitheater, surrounded by an infinite number of pupils. He lectures them on subjects like “anatomy, cosmography, and magic” and leads discussions hoping to find one student worthy of becoming real (216-17).

After 10 nights of these dreams, the stranger realizes that he needs to choose a student who shows a willingness to occasionally oppose his teachings, as that shows a certain consciousness that the others lack. He dismisses all his students except for one, who possesses this discerning trait and looks like the stranger himself. Their lessons continue, and the pupil makes astounding progress.

Then, catastrophe occurs. One afternoon, the stranger emerges from a dreamless sleep, and he is struck by insomnia. As hard as he tries, he cannot enter his meditative state, let alone regain his visions or recall his pupils. Through his frustration, he comes to the realization that he had been performing his quest all wrong: by starting to create the hardest part of a man—his consciousness—first. Relieved, the dreamer resolves to spend a month recovering his health, which has suffered during the intense course of his meditations. Then, on the night when the moon is full, the dreamer purifies himself, prays, says a magic name, and easily falls asleep.

Over the course of two weeks, the dreamer meticulously designs a perfect heart, conceptualized and created with love. He rests for a night and then begins designing the rest of the being’s organs. After a year, he has finished most of the internal organs and moved onto the skeleton and eyelids. He dreams up each individual hair for the man, who continues to exist without consciousness.

When the dreamer is almost done, he despairs, worried that his creation will be only partially formed. He prays to every god that he knows, and in his desperation, he prays to the statue of the indiscernible beast that he lay beneath on his first night. That evening, he dreams that the statue is alive and is more than just a horse or a tiger: It is a god of many forms. The god reveals that it is known as Fire, and it can magically animate the dreamer’s creation so that everyone but him and the dreamer will see it as a regular man. Fire instructs the dreamer to educate the creation in all the necessary rites and then send him to another ruined temple downstream so that Fire will have worshippers again. In the dreamer’s dream, his creation awakes.

Over the next two years, the dreamer—now referred to as the sorcerer—carries out Fire’s orders. The sorcerer is happy and looks forward to sleeping so that he can spend time with his creation, who he thinks of as a son. Secretly, the sorcerer dreads the day when they have to be parted.

After experiments in which the sorcerer sends his son on increasingly distant adventures, he realizes that his creation is ready to be born. He kisses his son, erases all memories of his apprenticeship (so that he will think himself real), and sends him to the temple ruins downstream.

Without his creation to occupy himself or his time, the sorcerer falls into a hallucinatory state. He no longer dreams, and his waking moments seem pale and unreal. It is as if he fuels his son’s existence at the expense of his own.

After an undeterminable amount of time, the sorcerer is awoken by two oarsmen in the middle of the night. They tell him about a man who performs magic in a temple to the north, walking on fire without getting burnt. The sorcerer, who knows that they are referring to his phantom son, is suddenly terrified that his creation will realize he is not a man.

The sorcerer does not suffer this fear for long. A fire sweeps across the island, just as it did centuries ago, and flames besiege the temple. He walks into the fire willingly, finally accepting his death. However, the flames do not burn him, and with a flood of different emotions, the sorcerer realizes that he is also an illusion and that someone else must be dreaming him.