What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.
In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.
When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.
Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India.
The story, while short, is anything but simple. Dewey recalls an insurrection that occurred in British India without indicating specific geography, saying that the words “Amritsar and Oudh,” hold little meaning to the ears in Buenos Aires. To quell the mutiny, a Scotsman who “bore a tradition of violence,” was sent; his name was David Alexander Glencairn, hailing from a “noble clan.” Through rule of might, he eventually succeeds in quelling the enmity between the Sikhs and the Muslims. After years of supposed peace, Glencairn disappears, rumors of his murder and torture ensuing; this sets Dewey on an obsessive journey through India to find him. Borges uses Dewey’s strange desire for answers to show how disappearance tantalizes the psyche like a hit of dopamine, even when the person is of no close tie to us. On his journey to find Glencairn, Dewey pronounces time and again the complexity of such a task. He insists that everyone he spoke to performed feigned ignorance; as a tactic practiced against colonial rule, silence had its measures of power. In this, Borges brings up the binary between native and colonizer through the act of disappearance.
In Define and Rule: The Native as Political Identity, Ugandan anthropologist Mahmoud Mamdani tells us that the theory of “nativism” appeared after multiple mutinies in colonial India. A jurist, Sir Henry James, upon reexamining British rule in the country, had argued that “geography defines the native,” positing British universalism against local custom; he began a campaign of studying colonial subjects through folk and tradition (though, as Mamdani argues, he focused solely on the coastal elite, which was not reflective of India as a whole). This binary between native and civilization lies heavy over the tale, as the narrator often ties the locals to geography, vastness, and chatter, and British rule to governance and jurisdiction. Near the end of the story, Dewey finds himself in an old and mystical home where, at his feet, lay an “old man squatted on the threshold.” When Dewey asks the old man about Glencairn, the man instead recounts another disappearance—that of a judge, Nicholson, who had signed a contract with evil, enforcing rule of law with sheer violence. The grievances he caused led to, “students of the Koran, doctors of law, Sikhs who bear the name of lions. . . and Hindus who worship a multitude of gods,” to unite and kidnap him. He was put on trial, and a madman from the commoners was selected to judge him—symbolic of a collapse in the binary between the native and universalism, and a mockery of British rule of law. Nineteen days later, a dagger was drawn against Nicholson’s throat. Hearing the story, Dewey sees people multiplying across the courtyard, offering prayers, upon which he goes to the backyard and finds a naked man crowned with flowers, and the mutilated body of Glencairn in the stables. Borges uses the identical fate of Nicholson and Glencairn to indicate that both disappeared judges are one, and that this enchanted house dealt their fates. He also uses the judge as a metaphor for British colonialism, a system that was out of touch with its surroundings, but enforced its presence through violence. Borges plays with disappearance to assert that this is a story of injustice. Rather than about the fate of Glencairn and Nicholson, it concerns the disappeared colonial subjects and those who stayed behind, acting out their grievance in rebellion.
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The second story, “Queenie,” by Canadian Nobel Laureate Alice Munro, deploys disappearance to begin a conversation about gaslighting and the pain of gender conformity. Munro’s direct prose begins this story with the eponymous protagonist, who asks her stepsister Chrissy to stop calling her Queenie because, “Stan doesn’t like it.” We later find out that Stan is Mr. Vorguilla, a former neighbor, decrepit old man, and piano teacher—who eloped with Queenie a week after his ailing wife passed away. Much of what we know about Queenie, whose name is actually Lina, comes to us from the lament-heavy voice of Chrissy. She tells us that Queenie looked as if “she didn’t have to take a back seat to anybody,” and that despite her captivating beauty, she was humble. To her family and the neighborhood, the roles she occupied as a caretaker and as a daughter seemed to suffice. Hence, it came as a shock one day when she vanished and left a note that simply said: “I am going to marry Mr. Vorguilla. Yours truly, Queenie.”
To the reader, Queenie’s behavior might seem bizarre—though I believe it makes perfect sense. Waking up day after day to the rhythm and grind of her robotic life and the never-ending care expected of her, why not wake up and run? Queenie did not just disappear; she chose to end her current way of living and take a chance with a new one.
Chrissy did not hear of Queenie for a long time, until when, heading to Toronto to look for a job, her father informs her that Queenie lives in the city. When they reunite, Chrissy is struck by Queenie’s new look—“Cleopatra lines drawn heavily around her,” and “ears with gold hoops swinging from them.” Chrissy is fixated with Queenie’s appearance and, with her description focused on adornment, we assume she is chastising Queenie for “dolling” herself up for Mr. Vorguilla, ironically boxing Queenie into her looks just as the men in her life have. Throughout the story, Queenie drops hints on how she unmade her past world and re-made herself for her husband, as if in a display of independence.
For much of the story, Queenie exists in Chrissy’s head more so than she does in her actions. Chrissie laments the lost time, but can never seem to muster the courage to ask: why did you leave? And why did you choose such a bleak man? The story climaxes in a kitchen scene, when Mr. Vorguilla asks Queenie to bring out a decadent chocolate cake she had made. She tells him to let it sit, but he continues to insist. Queenie then looks everywhere, with a manic energy, as if looking for a piece of her life. Chrissy, forever an observer, watches as Mr. Vorguilla hurls one accusation after another, while Queenie responds with a barrage of denials, until her voice shrinks away. Here, we bear witness to Queenie’s life upend again in a most jarring sense, as a person from her past and a person from her present watch. Mr. Vorguilla is the classic archetype of the manipulative man; this is not about the cake, but his jealousy and paranoia of Queenie leaving.
Queenie eventually runs away again—this time for good. She leaves Mr. Vorguilla, who spends the rest of his years sending Christmas cards to Chrissy, in hopes of receiving news about his former wife. Chrissy, however, never again hears of where Queenie could have gone. She tells us how she might have run into Queenie time and again—at a crowded airport wearing a sarong “and a flow-trimmed straw hat”, at a crosswalk leading a bunch of nursery school kids. The last time Queenie seems to appear is in a supermarket, pushing an empty cart with a forlorn look, worn down by life—but Chrissy finds herself unable to confront her. Later, in the car, Chrissy regrets her actions, running back to the mall only to wander the aisles, the subject of her pursuit nowhere in sight. The aisles, in which the two women seem to be “just missing each other,” speak of vanishing and reappearing, of two stepsisters haunted by one another’s former lives. For Chrissy, it was perhaps harder for her to realize the disappearance was a doubling; Queenie had disappeared from her life, but she had disappeared from Queenie’s.
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The last story, Iranian author Danial Haghighi’s “Misery,” is one replete with anxiety. It opens with a downcast protagonist, Shahram, who tells us, “I don’t know when exactly my fantasies and my opium habit converged.” From there, we enter the frenzied journey of a dealer and the life of a couple on the verge. Fariba, his wife, was the prize jewel of the neighborhood with, “tan skin. . . long dark curls. . . and legs like the stem of an orchid,” but similar to Queenie, poverty dictates her choices. She works as a prostitute and Shahram goes along, knowing he is unable to provide for the both of them, though the longing for her while she is in the arms of other men drives him mad.
The first disappearance in this story occurs in Shahram—not physically, but spiritually, into the world of opium. He becomes an addict, wrapped “in the spiderweb” of his own misery, until an herbalist’s cures lead him away from opium to working as a pimp—but even this does not suffice to provide, and he falls behind on his bills. One day, the landlord, taking advantage of the unpaid rent, makes advances towards Fariba. Though she has no issue with sex work, it has to be on her own terms, and when the landlord forces himself on to her, she kills him with a pair of scissors. When Shahram arrives, blaming her for this new horror fallen upon them, Fariba responds calmly, “After all these weeks you’re here to tell me I ruined everything?” She acknowledges, for the first time, the world that has grown between them as a couple, and how only a tragic incident has led to their re-convergence.
“Misery” shares the dramedy of time with Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” with characters jumping between past, present, and future. After the murder, Fariba finds herself in jail, and though she seems high-spirited—putting make-up on and talking about living in Europe someday—a larger disappearance haunts her: that of her impending execution. Shahram is crushed, but Fariba, with her innate confidence, tells him that during their last visit, she wants him to impregnate her. “Don’t smoke till then. Don’t do anything,” she instructs. Fariba’s logic is that they would not execute a pregnant woman.
After her proclamation, her husband enters another frenzy of panic; he has not been sexually active in a long time, and now sex has become the extreme manifestation of survival. In this psychosexual saga, Tehran is a vivid background of busy streets lined with pirozhki and chestnut stalls, claustrophobic with underground opium dens. When a half-baked Shahram finally arrives at the prison, Haghighi, following the tradition of Iranian cinematic masters, illustrates a narrow waiting hall, brimming with energy and representative of all forms of Iranian life.
When Shahram, after receiving alms and donations from the old men in the prison, is finally able to make love to Fariba, a brief respite seems to assure that the couple’s fate is not to disappear. One night, however, Shahram gets a call from the prison: Fariba has miscarried. She is then lost to the execution, vanishing from the prison and Shahram’s life. In describing Fariba’s fate in this abrupt manner, Haghighi makes a bold claim: she would rather choose death over a life of squalor, rife with the violence of men.
There is a thread that runs through this triad of stories: all their characters espouse a Proustian melancholy towards lost time. The authors have positioned disappearance to exhibit colonial violence, the psychological toll of silence and rigid gender roles, and the extreme decisions brought forth by poverty. Through their calculated craft, we come to understand disappearance as an immemorial act, expanding and contracting time. Reflecting on the lives of Chrissy, Dewey, and Shahram, we see a contraction between their actual present and their ability to comprehend it as an expansion of the voices inside their heads; a monologue gripped with disappearance creates a time warp—part memories of those they seek, and part anticipation towards the future. In a way, the three of them resemble the Cumaean Sibyl, each stuck in their own cage, emitting bird-like whispers and wishing clarity regarding those who have gone. Sigmund Freud once commented on individuals stuck in acts of repetition and redundant cycles, diagnosing them with a “daemonic character.” Chrissy, Dewey, and Shahram all have this sort of demonic impulse, their times warped within an obsession with the other. This is, however, not the same for those who vanished in the stories. Queenie understood when her time was up—whether with her family or with Mr. Vorguilla—and knew when to stop and leave. Glencairn and Fariba were both dealt a fate of death, a finality that ended their “physical” time on earth, yet created a metaphysical obsession amongst others.
In the past two years, many of my own stories were set during a vanished world, in which much of life—from organisms to intimacy—faded: a manifestation of COVID-19’s impact, and our alarmist media landscape in which the threat of disappearance looms large. Reflecting along the three stories of Borges, Munro, and Haghighi, a question rose to the surface: was I the one who vanished—into the annals of my own mind?
In Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel, there appears a haunting line: “The two impulses cannot be separated. The desire to have a life and the desire to disappear from it. The world is unlivable and yet we live in it every day.” Disappearance is couched between the impulse to live and the latent desire to leave, yet it is tied to desire—itself trapped in the liminal space between having and not-having. We have all made decisions in relation to such acts, but as literature shows us, these are acts as old as time. The people who stayed behind, as Borges would put it, were all “squatted on the threshold,” spinning narratives about those who left. Queenie’s fate occurred through suburban ruptures, the shopping aisle symbolic of her prison and her multiple exits as a form of disquiet. Her leaving brought to the surface the fragility of her family structure and the level of denial in the people around her. Glencairn, I believe, never disappeared, for he represented a system and a set of ethics much larger than his physical embodiment. Fariba’s fate was perhaps the most jarring, for it involved two disappearances, that of her unwanted child and her own life through the state—though she continued to linger as a specter over Shahram. Borges, Haghighi, and Munro help us understand that disappearance is not a clean act, never a complete erasure. What remains after is memories, trinkets, tales, and obsessions. It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them. The three stories teach us the fullness of absence and how it creates a new world unto which we can project our fantasies and desires. The question, then, is: if those who we longed for and obsessed over returned, will the present suffice?
MK Harb (@grungyflaneur) is a writer from Beirut, currently serving as editor-at-large for Lebanon at Asymptote. He received his Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2018. His fiction and nonfiction writing appears in Art Review Asia, Asymptote, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Jadaliyya, The Bombay Review, The Times Literary Supplement and The White Review.
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