Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

two black aces, and whoever receives one of the black aces is in charge of carrying out the sentence, he is the executioner, he has to kill the one who has received the other black ace. He has to kill him so that it seems like an accident. And in the first session the person who dies—or who is condemned to die—is Mr. Malthus. Mr. Malthus has been carried to the table. He is paralytic, he cannot move. But suddenly an almost inhuman sound is heard; the paralytic man stands up, then falls back into his chair. Then they adjourn. They will not see one another until the next meeting. The next day they read that Mr. Malthus, a gentleman held in high esteem by his family, has fallen from a pier in London. And then the adventure begins, which ends with a duel in which Prince Florizel, who has sworn not to turn anyone in, kills the president of the club.
    Then there is another adventure in “The Rajah’s Diamond,” which recounts all the crimes committed for the possession of a diamond. In the last chapter, the prince, who has the diamond, holds a conversation with a detective and asks if he is coming to arrest him. The detective says no, then the prince tells him the story. He tells it to him on a bank of the Thames. Then he says, “When I think of all the blood that has been spilled, all the crimes committed for that rock, I think we should condemn it to death.” Then he quickly pulls it out of his pocket and throws it into the Thames, and it is lost. The detective says, “I am ruined.” The prince answers, “Many men would envy your ruin.” Then the detective says, “I think it is my destiny to be bribed.” “I think so,” says the prince.
    This book, the
New Arabian Nights
, is not only important for the delight it can bring us, but because when one reads it, one understands that somehowChesterton’s entire novelistic oeuvre has come out of it. There we have the seeds of
The Man Who Was Thursday.
2 All of Chesterton’s novels, even if they are more clever than Stevenson’s, have the same atmosphere as Stevenson’s stories. Then Stevenson does other things. By the time he writes his detective novel,
TheWrecker
, there is a totally different atmosphere. Everything takes place first in California, then in the South Seas. Moreover, Stevenson believed that the defect of the genre of detective novels was that no matter how clever, there was something mechanical about them—an absence of life. So, Stevenson says that in his detective novels he makes his characters more realistic than the plot, which is the opposite of what is usually the case in a detective novel.
    Let us now take a look at a subject that always preoccupied Stevenson. There is a very commonly used psychological word, the word “schizophrenia,” which is the idea of a split personality. That word had not been coined at the time, I believe. Now it is used very commonly. Stevenson was very preoccupied with this subject. In the first place, because he was very interested in ethics, and also because in his house was a chest of drawers made by a cabinetmaker in Edinburgh, a respectable and respected craftsman, but at night, on some nights, he would leave his house and become a robber. That subject of a split personality interested Stevenson, and withHenley he wrote a play called
TheDouble Life
. 3
    But Stevenson felt he was not finished with the subject. So he wrote the story“Markheim,” the story of a man who becomes a thief, then a murderer. 4 On Christmas Eve, he enters a pawnshop. Stevenson introduces the pawnbroker as a very disagreeable person, who does not trust Markheim because he suspects that the jewels he wants to sell him were stolen. Night arrives. The pawnbroker says that he has to close early and that Markheim will have to pay him for his time. Markheim tells him that he has not come to sell, he has come to buy something, something that is buried deep in the shop. The other thinks this odd and makes a joke: since Markheim tells him that everything he sells has been inherited from an uncle of his, the pawnbroker says to him, “I assume your uncle has left you money, now you want to spend it.” Markheim accepts the joke, and when they go to the back of the shop, he stabs the pawnbroker and kills him. When Markheim goes from being a thief to a murderer, the world changes for him. He thinks, for example, that natural laws may have been suspended, for he has infringed upon a moral law by committing the crime. And then, in a